Life & Wisdom Quote by George Gilder

Gilder’s line is a scalpels-out diagnosis of mass media, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. He refuses the easy moralism that blames “the people” for trash TV. The problem, he argues, isn’t individual coarseness; it’s statistical sameness. Television, built to aggregate millions into one audience, optimizes for the lowest-friction common denominator. Prurient interests are the one reliable overlap in a population otherwise divided by taste, education, class, religion, and region. “Civilized concerns” - art, ideas, civic priorities - don’t fail because they’re less worthy, but because they’re less synchronized.

The subtext is a critique of broadcast-era economics: advertisers buy reach, networks chase scale, and scale rewards content that travels without translation. Sex, scandal, humiliation, fear: these are plug-and-play across demographic boundaries. Nuance isn’t. So vulgarity isn’t merely a lapse in standards; it’s an equilibrium outcome of a system designed to minimize audience loss. Gilder’s phrasing “sharply differentiated” also hints at a darker irony: the very things that could elevate public life are precisely the things that fragment it. The medium doesn’t just reflect culture; it actively selects for what culture shares most cheaply.

Contextually, Gilder comes out of late-20th-century debates about television’s flattening effects and the culture war over “standards.” His twist is to frame vulgarity not as a moral failing but as an engineering choice: when the product is consensus, the output becomes appetite.