The "Mass Media" Virus - Quareness Series (31st "Lecture").

 

“In order to gain control of consciousness, we must learn how to moderate the biases built into the machinery of the brain. We allow a whole series of illusions to stand between ourselves and reality…. These distortions are comforting, yet they need to be seen through for the self to be truly liberated… to come ever closer to getting a glimpse of the universal order, and of our part in it.” - The Evolving Self (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

 

Most in the "developed world" are now living in a society built on debt and mental slavery, sorta like back to the future feudal style. Any real democracy has largely disappeared (if it has ever made it much beyond infancy) in the perhaps inevitable takeover by elites serving our existing elitist world power structure. Sadly the same fate (and for the same reasons) awaits the "undeveloped world" if the currently deployed path to "progress" continues, driven as it is by the "useful" propaganda of the prospect of "democracy" which of course is very differently understood by the "haves" and the "have nots". However, as the saying goes...a door never closes but another one opens. As we now see all over, trust (the real basis of any civilised society) has been systematically abused and "devalued" by those who deem themselves fit to control and govern. But it seems more and more people are waking up to the fact that we are reaching a fork in the road of human evolution which urgently requires open and transparent and inclusive debate on our options.

“There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.” (John Dewey).

Today most of the wealth in the USA is held by just 0.1% of the population and most of that wealth in itself is held by the "top" 0.01%. This translates into about 400 people having as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population. And it's in that cohort of mega wealthy folks that we find many of the very limited number of persons who have unprecedented control of the much of the whole world's wealth and resources, and who do not seem inclined to really share it with the rest of us. With modern technology and just a fraction of that staggering amount of wealth, human society could evolve to the transforming benefit of everyone on the planet.

 

When technological advancement, production, distribution and wealth increases you'd imagine everyone’s life would get much easier. With the cost of production dropping dramatically and the soaring efficiency of distribution you'd think that housing, food, health and education costs would plummet. Wrong - most basic necessities throughout the world are now less affordable and harder to obtain than before, and people are forced to take on increasing levels of debt to keep up. As once pointed out by some wise person - “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.” - The Art of War (Sun Tzu in 246 BC).

It has been said that the mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass oppression humanity has ever known. And this is not at all an unreasonable conspiracy theory given that since the early 1900’s a well documented massive propaganda system has been in place for example in the US - see the material on Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, George Creel, etc. in my earlier 17th Lecture "This PR Racket".

 

Few of us grasp how mentally conditioned we all are with intensive "domination" administered on a daily basis from the cradle to the grave. Repetitive messages fill our environment - “It’s what advertisers have known all along: if we just keep the exposure rate up, people will be influenced.” (Phil Merikle).
“We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion humanity has ever experienced.”

(John Dewey again).

 

"When a message appears all around you, you tend to accept it and take it for granted. You find yourself surrounded by it and your subconscious mind absorbs and becomes immersed in the climate of repetitive ideas." - Managing the Human Climate (Philip Lesley).

It's no accident that for many (most?) of us this is the origin of our opinions and perspectives (indeed our very thoughts) and that the mainstream mass media has become the software on which our minds run....our operating system running so to speak as an extension of our nervous system. Such repetitive mainstream propaganda creates a belief system, popular reference points, symbols, archetypes, mental patterns, and a cloned mindset. And groupthink tends to be a highly contagious infectious disease. The result is entrapment in false mass media created illusions which support shortsighted and short term corporate interests and where people become isolated and detached from the wider reality.

“The majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak.” (Eduardo Galeano) and “The new antidote to willfulness is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honor, and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction." (Harold Lasswell back in 1927).

Any thought critical of the established power structure or which is outside the spectrum of opinion supportive of the status quo tends to be left out of the debate, and thus outside of mainstream public consciousness i.e. censorship by omission.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…. That gives people the sense that there’s freethinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” (Noam Chomsky in explaining how propaganda and social control posing as freedom and democracy works).

"They set the terms of debate, to determine the kinds of questions that will dominate public consciousness, people’s thoughts. They set the political agenda in ways that are favorable to shortsighted corporate interests. The debate is never about the curtailment of the manipulative power of entrenched global corporations." (Alex Carey).

 

It’s hard to break free, when you are always told you are free.

“The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that they are a victim. To them, the walls of their prison are invisible, and they believe they are free.” - Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). The old restraints (chains and walls) have widely morphed into TVs and radios.

“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to dictatorships.” (William Blum).

And in the land of propaganda democracy becomes tyranny, an “enlightened despotism” with people toiling away on mentally conditioned plantations.
Incidently “conspiracy theory” is the lazy label oft deployed these days to trigger hasty dismissal of an "awkward" message without giving thought to its content and substance.

 

“Selection, education, and specific indoctrination of technical and administrative cadres are carried out first in metropolitan educational and research factories and their branches in dependent societies, under the wing of the superficially independent foundations which sustain the international projects of ‘technical aid,’ and then within the personnel policy of the transnational corporations that raise people from the local environments to responsible managerial and technical functions in their internationally located branches, or that in other ways subordinate and direct the ‘modernized’ industrial entrepreneurs, agrarian ‘reformers,’ functionaries, and leading intellectuals from the ministries and banks, universities, and public information, cultural, and scientific institutions.The essential effect of this great factory for the almost assembly line production of dependent and emasculated ‘technocratic elites’ is that the material position, status, and professional success of the members of these groups imperatively depends on their conformity to the ideology of dependence and the interiorization of the intellectual, political, and ideological characteristics of this social type programmed in metropolitan laboratories for the technological, social, and cultural transformation of 'developing countries'....The ideology of total repression unites with the ideology of technological and cultural dependency and assimilation; in this union repression gains strength as the condition of the entire dependent economic growth, technological progress, and ‘modernization of society,’ as a circle of insurmountable dependency on the import of prefabricated knowledge and technical and consumerist models is closed up by the ambitions of the protagonists of authoritarian rule.” - The Genesis of the Technocratic Elite (Zoran Vidakovic).

 

It seems if you are good at propagating the message of tyrants, you can become rich and famous - the goal of too many self-obsessed ego-driven careerists.

"The simple fact of applying certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will make many hypocrites, it will also make many converts." (W.E.H.Lecky).

Our modern day "aristocracy" rules through a system of enlightened despotism wherein the rest of us are actively discouraged from being freethinking participatory citizens involved in the decision-making processes that guide our lives and mentally conditioned to be mere spectators, mindless reactionary consumers and debt and wage slaves.

“Propaganda is today a greater danger to mankind than any of the other more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race…. Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but also democratic behavior – the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist…. Propaganda destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society…. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself – of the style of democratic life, understanding of others… he is a ‘totalitarian man with democratic convictions,’ but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexives. The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely ‘the sacred formulas of democracy’ while acting like a storm trooper.” - Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (Jacques Ellul).

Ellul went on to say “The conflicting propaganda of opposing parties is essentially what leads to political abstention. But this is not the abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of resignation, the external symptom of a series of inhibitions. Such a man has not decided to abstain; under diverse pressures, subjected to shocks and distortions, he can no longer (even if he wanted to) perform a political act. What is even more serious is that this inhibition not only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender…. At the same time, this crystallization closes his mind to all new ideas. The individual now has a set of prejudices and beliefs…. His entire personality now revolves around those elements. Every new idea will therefore be troublesome to his entire being.”

“For what is communicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.” - Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Guy DeBord summing up the primary function of the mainstream media).

“Governmental propaganda suggests that public opinion demand this or that decision; it provokes the will of a people, who spontaneously say nothing. But, once evoked, formed, and crystallized on a point, that will becomes the people’s will. The government really acts on its own, it just gives the impression of obeying public opinion, after having first built that public opinion. The point is to make the masses demand of the government what the government has already decided to do." They “amputate the argument” and replace it with “engineered consensus.” (Jacques Ellul again).

“They operate actually to confirm the citizen’s false sense of security in totaling up ‘what the majority think’… The false sense of the public’s being ‘boss’ that they encourage operates to narcotize public awareness of the seriousness of problems and of the drastic social changes many contemporary situations require.” - Democracy In Reverse (Robert Lynd).

 

“An individual may be moved to action through repetition, as, for in advertising; but his action is made more certain if he is made to realize that thousands, even millions, of others are thinking and feeling as he himself does. Herein lies the importance of the contemporary communication network; it not only carries its symbols to the individual, it also impresses upon him a sense of numbers.” (Malcolm Willey in 1935).

“Newspapers have transformed… unified in space and diversified in time the conversations of individuals, even those who do not read papers but who, talking to those who do, are forced to follow the groove of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues.”

(Gabriel Tarde in 1901).

“....it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.” - Free Thought and Official Propaganda (Bertrand Russell).

“That this simple regime of thought-control should prove to have been so triumphant, with so little public resistance, must be put down to its persistent, repetitive orchestration.” - In Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (Alex Carey).
 

“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it… Sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. I’m trying to free your mind… But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” – The Matrix.

 

“To prevent its annihilation, the ego forces us to be constantly on the watch for anything that might threaten the symbols on which it relies for identity. Our view of the world becomes polarized into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – things that support the image, and those that threaten it.” - The Evolving Self (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi again).

 

With this media created cultural programming, that perceived as unfamiliar is seen as odd, evil and damaging to our mental construct, thought patterns, and fabricated self-image. We have a strong tendency to look out for that which confirms our pre-existing beliefs while ignoring that which goes against them - the confirmation bias in action.

"If people are offered a fact which goes against their instincts or their cultural programming, they will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, they are offered something which falls in accordance to their cultural programming, in accordance to their conditioning, they will accept it, even on the slightest evidence." (Bertrand Russel again).

An essential prerequisite to freedom is the ability to see past all of your own culturally programmed biases.

“To take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one’s analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise…. As long as some specialized class is in position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves, but the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must – namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive…. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.” (Noam Chomsky again).

Once again Jacques Ellul said "Only when he realizes his delusion will he experience the beginning of genuine freedom – in the act of realization itself – be it only from the effort to stand back and look squarely at the phenomenon and reduce it to raw fact.”

Nowadays more and more people are using the Internet to discover what the corporate mainstream media is not telling. As a result a growing mass of informed citizens are now beginning to transcend conditioned consciousness and expand their awareness on a scale unprecedented in human history.

“We are developing a social conscience, and situations which would have been accepted a generation ago as a matter of course are felt as an intolerable scandal.” (William Adam Brown).

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage…. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.” (John Dewey arís).

 

All will pass (as the Bible says) and it's inevitable that our current control system and its mainstream mass media propagandist will too.

“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” (George Orwell).

“All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.” (Strobe Talbott).

With today's almost instantaneous worldwide communication and advanced technology, our "obsolete" economic, political and social systems are visibly evolving new inclusive forms of participation quite separate from the existing (possibly unreformable) power structures. People are starting to throw off their mental shackles and the mass media virus. And what emerges may be a new age of enlightenment within which most (all?) people can outgrow our current modes of control/governance and at last realise their full  potential. The emerging signs are of another world happening courtesy of the "Second Coming" as the midwife of a transformed post 2012 humanity?

 
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
June 2013.

A  "New World Order" of a different hue may be on the cards.