As the Roman Empire sank into the mire, leaving behind magnificent ruins and a landscape filled with peasants who would one day lift themslves up from degradation to create pizza, their theater went to hell. The diction remained classy, but the staging began to include amputations and actual murders on stage.

Which brings me to reality TV. Reality, Hah! These puerile exercises are actually as tightly choreographed as a performance of “Swan Lake” by the Bolshoi Ballet. Contestants on “The Great Race” are instructed to slow down if they get too far ahead, thus cramping the time available for messages from the sponsor. The idiots on “Survivor” are NOT eating snake heads in a sauce made of rat poop; their meals are actually catered by La Grenouille and then skillfully disguised.

The question then naturally arises: why are we watching this crap?

Aristotle has a coherent theory of theater. In his view, watching other people experience strong emotions would produce an emotional catharsis. (Wonderful word. In modern parlance, a cathartic is a laxative; apparently, to Aristotle, theater is Ex-Lax. But I digress.) You could watch Oedipus pluck out his eyes, feel icky, get over it, and then go out to dinner, relieving you of the necessity of plucking out your OWN eyes. But what does anyone get out of watching “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” other than a surfeit of views of chubby cleavage?

You actually do get something beyond the soft porn titillation; you get an overwhleming feeling that “I’m a lot smarter than these bozos.”

Of course, you’re wrong. You’re watching this drivel, instead of going out to build a skyscraper, design a spaceship, shoot a moose, do something, dammit! You’re a lot stupider than they are! But because you don’t realize it, you bask in delusions of adequacy.

And the bar keeps getting lower. As the drivel creation machines grind on, the intellectual level of reality  TV approaches that of an earthworm, so that soon there will not be a single inhabitant of the planet who cannot say to him/herself “There are lots of people stupider than me.”

This is wonderful.

A great sage (me) once said that “The secret of success is low expectations.” We are fast approaching a time when vainglory will become acceptable not for the few, but for all. Noone will be criticized for anything.  Inferiority complexes will vanish. Depression will evaporate like the morning dew.

And nobody will ever again be forced to spend winter vacation reading “War and Peace.”