"The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama"
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Bond is smuggling a provocation inside what sounds like a tidy observation: drama isn’t just a genre we consume, it’s the operating system we think in. Calling the mind a “dramatic structure” reframes cognition as conflict, motive, reversal, stakes. We don’t merely process facts; we cast ourselves and others into roles, build narratives of guilt and innocence, scan for villains, crave catharsis. That’s a playwright’s anthropology, but also a warning about how easily meaning becomes plot.
The second clause sharpens the blade. “Absolutely saturated” isn’t neutral; it’s an indictment of a culture marinated in crisis and spectacle. Bond came up in the Britain of postwar austerity, Cold War anxiety, and later media escalation, writing plays that treated violence and social order not as personal defects but as institutional products. In that context, “drama” is not glamorous; it’s the everyday theatrics of power: courts, classrooms, tabloids, Parliament, the living room TV. Society scripts us, then punishes us for playing the parts it wrote.
The subtext is a challenge to naturalized brutality. If the mind is structured dramatically, then political life can hijack that structure, feeding us narratives that make coercion feel inevitable, even satisfying. Bond’s work consistently tries to break that spell: to show how “plots” justify harm, how spectatorship can become complicity, and how real moral clarity often begins when you refuse the easy story.
The second clause sharpens the blade. “Absolutely saturated” isn’t neutral; it’s an indictment of a culture marinated in crisis and spectacle. Bond came up in the Britain of postwar austerity, Cold War anxiety, and later media escalation, writing plays that treated violence and social order not as personal defects but as institutional products. In that context, “drama” is not glamorous; it’s the everyday theatrics of power: courts, classrooms, tabloids, Parliament, the living room TV. Society scripts us, then punishes us for playing the parts it wrote.
The subtext is a challenge to naturalized brutality. If the mind is structured dramatically, then political life can hijack that structure, feeding us narratives that make coercion feel inevitable, even satisfying. Bond’s work consistently tries to break that spell: to show how “plots” justify harm, how spectatorship can become complicity, and how real moral clarity often begins when you refuse the easy story.
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| Topic | Deep |
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