Happiness comes from serving our highest ideals with all our mind and all our strength. For most of us, work is tedious and repetitive, and uses only a tiny fraction of our intellectual capacity. Factory jobs are deliberately designed to be mindless, and therefore encourage mindlessness. Of course some factories produce things human beings actually need. But most of them produce toys, for both children and adults, which can provide only a trivial substitute for the happiness we have lost along with the meaningful work that makes genuine happiness possible.
The motion picture industry employs more than half a million people in the United States. Those I know who work in the industry have described it to me as a factory. Here are half a million bright and creative minds who might have produced half a million brilliant works of art if they were able to put all their mind and all their strength into their work. But instead they work in a factory where they use only a tiny fraction of their talent.
In the old world an artisan could put his whole soul into his work and create something that embodied his talents and virtues. But in the brave new world where all commodities are mass produced, and art too has become a commodity, all but a very few must settle for a trivial role, mass producing an idea not their own, an idea they may not even wholeheartedly believe in.
Our art has become trivialized because it must appeal to the most common virtues, and not the exceptional virtues each one of us possesses. I can't help but wonder what would happen if each one of the thousands of minds who work on a feature film were to devote itself to expressing its own unique talents, to appealing to those who appreciate those unique talents, no matter how few in number. Then, instead of one corporate work of art in which the individuality of the vast majority of its creators has been utterly effaced, we would have thousands of works of art in which the talent of individual artists was expressed.
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