In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career
There has been a transition from culture being produced by members of one's community/village/family to culture being produced by professionals for money.
Stories and songs of the past were just as unbalanced and insane as stories and songs of the present. (Both in terms of being fantastical and showing only one side of complex emotional situations.) People grounded in the reality of making living things grow, keeping animals alive, and fixing their own houses and equipment most often understood those stories for what they were. What magic such people believed in was often closely tied to feelings of belonging and community. Gatherings of people often have such magic feelings, but this is quite a real phenomena of human social organization.
Now, there is less of such intense community, and we are bombarded by more commercially produced culture than we could possibly consume, made by people who often live lives of exaggerated imbalance, enabled by what our ancestors would have considered the phenomenal wealth of modern resources. What's more, so much of what we're given as non-fiction also fits into this model by varying degrees.
When Rome's military went from citizen soldiers to full time specialist professionals, the misalignment of incentives between the specialists and the citizens was the subtle, long term root of many problems. I think there is such a misalignment with how human civilizations in general produce culture.
I think this phenomenon may be a "Great Filter" answer to the Fermi paradox. We might not only be swallowed up by Virtual Reality, but also by the purely mental constructs of our own fantastical narratives, as we abandon more and more of the creature connections with nature which keep us grounded in reality.
>culture being produced by professionals for money. //
There are a couple of other steps beyond the actors/producers usually, particularly for mass media -- there are the owners, or funders who ultimately choose what becomes mainstream; and there's the use of psychological manipulation (advertising, marketing) to direct them to "want" (or accept) what is offered.
There has to be accounting for vagaries and fashions of the time but with those constraints those deciding the parameters for which productions are funded wield immense power.
>There has been a transition from culture being produced by members of one's community/village/family to culture being produced by professionals for money.
I have certainly seen this shift in culture creation to professionals within Christian communities in the US. The modern megachurches (2000+ attendees) are rather different culturally from the small community churches of the past (~150-200 members). The shift has coincided with increased political polarization (e.g., Jerry Falwell and his relatively early megachurch) and personal isolation.
The reference is to Plato's allegory of the cave. Prisoners are chained so they are facing the back wall of a cave. Puppeteers project a play of shadows onto this wall and the prisoners, knowing no better, take this show for reality, when in fact, reality lies outside the cave. The OP was comparing the shadow-players to the professional cultural generators.
I'm kind of confused here- you mentioned Plato, but wasn't Plato a professional culture generator?
Note, I didn't say that everything professional culture generators produced was fundamentally wrong and poisonous and would instantly result in your mental and spiritual death.
There has been a transition from culture being produced by members of one's community/village/family to culture being produced by professionals for money.
Stories and songs of the past were just as unbalanced and insane as stories and songs of the present. (Both in terms of being fantastical and showing only one side of complex emotional situations.) People grounded in the reality of making living things grow, keeping animals alive, and fixing their own houses and equipment most often understood those stories for what they were. What magic such people believed in was often closely tied to feelings of belonging and community. Gatherings of people often have such magic feelings, but this is quite a real phenomena of human social organization.
Now, there is less of such intense community, and we are bombarded by more commercially produced culture than we could possibly consume, made by people who often live lives of exaggerated imbalance, enabled by what our ancestors would have considered the phenomenal wealth of modern resources. What's more, so much of what we're given as non-fiction also fits into this model by varying degrees.
When Rome's military went from citizen soldiers to full time specialist professionals, the misalignment of incentives between the specialists and the citizens was the subtle, long term root of many problems. I think there is such a misalignment with how human civilizations in general produce culture.
I think this phenomenon may be a "Great Filter" answer to the Fermi paradox. We might not only be swallowed up by Virtual Reality, but also by the purely mental constructs of our own fantastical narratives, as we abandon more and more of the creature connections with nature which keep us grounded in reality.
(Plato. Cave. Shadows.)