Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The real world no longer matters, what matters is the performance on stage. Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd.

In the present era, all the world is a stage and everything is a performance on that stage: welcome to the Theater of the Absurd, a Hollywood set fabricated of cardboard and plaster made to look like gold leaf and marble columns, where the contraptions and ropes that do the magic are hidden behind purple velvet drapery.

Every detail has been designed to create the illusion of permanence and power to rivet our attention and distract us from noticing that behind this faux fabrication, the world is on fire.

Since the entire point of the theatrics is to cloak the decay of the status quo from serving shared interests to a craven scramble of self-enrichment, no expense is spared in the theatrics, for as the gulf between the reality of who's getting richer and who's losing ground and what the performers claim--this is the best of all possible worlds because of technology and Progress--widens, it becomes necessary to pour more resources into the performances, lest the losers catch on that the performance is the con that keeps the self-serving status quo from being revealed as an extractive, exploitive arrangement favoring the few.

As the audience is no longer entranced by mere performance, the theatrics must be ramped up to absurd heights. Leaders shout continually through the megaphone of social media, every pronouncement is exaggerated to self-parody, jokers prance around as Wall Street jugglers perform tricks, and faux trials run continuously in the background, exiling star performers as part of the enthralling theatrics.

The audience soon habituates to the exaggerations, and so the absurdity is notched higher. Every outrage is played out on stage, and soon the audience is no longer outraged by anything, for every aspect of the performance is now accepted as "normal." In this jaded state, the audience becomes restive and starts booing the performers.

The Theater of the Absurd resorts to throwing money into the audience, creating frenzies as all those losing ground stampede to collect the coins as their last best change of getting rich enough to avoid the fires burning behind the stage.

While the money is being thrown into the increasingly agitated mob, audience members are invited onto the stage to perform their own theatrics. This taste of fame is electrifying, and soon the stage is a seething mass of onlookers seeking their moment in the spotlight, leaders claiming divine inspiration, and a crush of jugglers, clowns, and jokers pressing forward and being pushed off stage in the melee.

Since the performance is now the key to the survival of the status quo arrangement, nobody's paying attention to the fires burning behind the stage set. The real world no longer matters, what matters is the performance on stage. Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd, where the performance is more real than the world burning behind the flimsy simulations and facsimiles of permanence and power.