A paper for humanities 100
2002-10-13 ::: 8:50 p.m.

During the movie, The Gladiator, Proximo told Maximus something along the lines of, “please the crowd, and you will be as big as Cesar.” The idea of mob rules was very prevalent in that era in time, which got me to thinking. Are we as a modern society any different? Are we not a mob rule type society? “Mob rule,” you say? “How barbaric. Are you suggesting we are just a bunch of barbarians?” Well, not quite, but things are not as advanced as they seem. Granted, we have our little electronic gadgets and computers and Internet that sets us apart from past eons of human social evolution, but how far apart does that set us?

I look at the way our society is set up and see that we still do operate under a class system, we do have our arenas of “gladiators” and our actors and plays, and we do still have a supreme ruler of sorts. Our “modern” society is still governed largely by a class system, no matter where you look around the globe. The rich are important, pompous, well educated, well off, while the poor still are treated as such and seen as merely second-class citizens. It’s not so noticeable in this splendid nation, but it is still there. It’s just well hidden. And our entertainment, is it not pretty much the same as that of our long past ancestors? What does it consist of? Our actors, our plays, and our sports; our gladiators. When you turn on the television, what does it mainly consist of? It’s either sitcoms, a simple form of a play, or sports. We are practically governed by our pleasure. On to our head of state. While the president is nothing like a Cesar, he most definitely is as well known. Our government is rather different from those of our ancient ancestors, but it still has many similarities, mostly to the Roman system. The Senate is still a large part of our government, as well as the House of Representatives, the President, and the judicial branch. There is still the power held by the few over the many.

And about our warring and whatnot. The Romans were a very powerful military force, much like we are. They would conquer other civilizations and take them as slaves and assimilate them into their culture. While we have “progressed” since then, are we that much different? We are quite the imperial force. We don’t quite divide and conquer; we certainly make changes when we do defeat our enemy. When we don’t’ like a certain form of government, one we find to be unacceptable by our standards, we go in, defeat the “offenders” and change them for the “good.” We enforce our ideals of a perfect ruling class, democracy, and make sure that that civilization, now called nations, will no longer pose a threat to us. I find our imperialism to be equal to that of the Romans in that we pretty much assimilate the other culture to mirror ours in as many ways as possible so that we can build up alliances and become an even strong nation-state. Quite interesting, all this, if you ask me…

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