>>2333You're missing his point, or at least my point that I've grafted onto his words: society needs exactly the kind of bread and circus you direct your ire towards, not your hippie-dippy, anarchist healing-circles.
Society, as I see it, needs these immense outventings of energy, lest the energy accumulate. You think, spontaneously, the decentralized masses would conjure their own great works. I think you're right, but it would organically come to take a centralized form more akin to Egyptian or Roman public works.
The problem with the bread and circus today is precisely that it takes form at the individual level. This is because not only does the individual sometimes "fall through the cracks" as it were of these diversions of energy, (in my view this, in part, accounts for the "lone gunman phenomenon") but the community, or nation, also fails to divert its accumulations.
Just to put it simply, we need bread and circus (communal projects of waste) that is undertaken on the national, or in our times international, level to ensure we can exist in a society that doesn't self-immolate.
This post was mostly informed by The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille.