by L. Wolfe
Part 1
Hey buddy, I'm talking to you. Yes, you, the guy sitting in front of the
television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can hear what I am saying.
Now, try to concentrate on what I am going to say. I want to talk to you about
your favorite pastime. No, it's not baseball or football, although it does have
something to do with your interest in spectator sports. I'm talking about what
you were just doing: watching television.
Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in front of the television
set? According to the latest studies, the average American now spends between
five and six hours a day watching television. Let's put that in perspective ─
that is more time than you spend doing anything else but sleeping or working, if
you are lucky enough to still have a job. That's more time than you spend
eating, more time than you spend with your wife alone, more time than with the
kids.
It's even worse with your children. According to these same studies, young
children below school age watch more than eight hours each day. School age
children watch a little under eight hours a day. In 1980, the average
20-year-old had watched the equivalent of 14 months of television in his or her
brief lifetime. That's 14 months, 24 hours a day. More recent figures show that
the numbers have climbed ─ the 20-year-old has spent closer to two full years of
his or her life in front of the television set.
At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing phenomena. It seems
that we Americans are getting progressively more stupid. They note a decline in
reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less
and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they
have at any time since research began to study such things. As for writing
skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple
sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're
getting worse.
It's the change ─ the constant trendline downward ─ that interests these
researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our
population to the amount of television they watch. Interestingly, the studies
found that it doesn't matter what people watch, whether it's "The Simpsons" or
"McNeil/Lehrer," or "Murphy Brown" or "Nightline" ─ the more television you
watch, the less literate, the more stupid you are.
The growth in television watching had surprised some of the researchers. a
decade ago, they were predicting that television watching would level off and
might actually decline. It had reached an absolute saturation point. They were
right for so-called network television; figures show a steady drop-off of
viewers. But that drop is more than made up for by the growth of cable
television, with its smorgasbord of channels, one for almost every perversion.
Especially in urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired to more than
100 different channels that provide them with all news, like CNN, all movies,
all comedy, all sports, all weather, all financial news and a liberal dose of
straight pornography.
The researchers had also failed to predict the market penetration of first beta
and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible to watch one thing and
record another for later viewing. They also offered access to movies not
available on networks or even cable channels as well as home videos, recorded on
your own little camcorder. The proliferation of home video equipment has
involved families in video-related activities which are not even considered in
the cumulative totals for time Americans spend watching television.
You might not actually realize how much you are watching television. But think
for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television on, if it isn't on
already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing at what is on the screen,
catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a show. You eat with it on, maybe in
the background, listening for a score or something that happens to a character
in a show you follow. When something you are interested in, a show or basketball
game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So your attention to what
is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no point when you are home, and
inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't that right?
The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched television,
according to the intensity of their viewing. But the point is still made: you
compulsively turn the television on and spend a good portion of your waking
hours glued to the tube. And the studies also showed that many people can't
sleep without the television turned on!
Brainwashing
Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television is bad for your
health. They put stories like that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes to
stare at the screen, they say. Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want
to make another point. We've already shown that you are addicted to the tube,
watching it between six and eight hour a day. But it is an addiction that
brainwashes you.
There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's called 'hard' brainwashing
is the type you're most familiar with. You've got a pretty good image of it from
some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy, an American patriot,
drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle,
get him to renounce his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a
personality change, signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare.
This brainwashing is called 'hard' because its methods are overt. The controlled
environment is obvious to the victim; so is the terror. The victim is
overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force, and a feeling of intense
isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength is sapped, and slowly he
embraces his torturers. It is Man's moral strength that informs and orders His
power of reason; without it, the mind becomes little more than a recording
machine waiting for imprints.
No one is saying that you have been a victim of 'hard' brainwashing. But you
have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those people in the movies. The
blank stare? Did you ever look at what you look like while watching television?
If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw
slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank stare of a television
zombie.
This is 'soft ' brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about
their lives unaware of what is being done to them.
Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis
for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you. It works on a principle of
'tension and release'. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing
the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from
the tension. As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the
'only' choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will
nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable
choices.
Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such
choice-making is not a "rational" experience. It does not involve the use of
Man's creative mental powers; instead Man is conditioned, like an animal, to
respond to the tension, by seeking release.
The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation of both
the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are controlled, then the
range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is induced to walk down one of
several pathways acceptable for his controllers.
The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment 'social turbulence'. The
last decades have been full of such social turbulence ─ economic collapse,
regional wars, population disasters, and ecological and biological catastrophes.
Social turbulence creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their
bearings. Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following
paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no
time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems.
Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices.
It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple answers.
Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality,
is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence.
Eight hours a day, every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.
If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have made recently
that was not in some way influenced by something that you have seen on
television. I bet you can't think of one. That's how controlled you are.
Who's Doing It
But don't take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to a man from a think tank
called the Futures Group in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more than 20 years
of his life manipulating the minds of the leaders of our society. Listen to what
he said:
"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him
to. Just let me control television. Americans are wired into their television
sets. Over the last 30 years, they have come to look at their television sets
and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and it
becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts the images,
people start changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of
their television. Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has become
part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to you, but your
mind is being shaped and molded."
"Your mind is being shaped and molded." If that doesn't sound like brainwashing,
I don't know what is. Becker speaks with the elan of a network of brainwashers
who have been programming your lives, especially since the advent of television
as a "mass medium" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This network numbers
several tens of thousands worldwide. Occasionally, one appears on the nightly
news to tell you what 'you' are thinking, by reporting the latest "opinion
polls." But for the most part, they work behind the scenes, speaking to
themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution.
And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are united by a
common world view and common method. It is the world view of a small elite,
whose financial and political power rests in institutions that pass this power
on from generation to generation. They view the common folk like yourself as
little better than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a
semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle
them to rule.
One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of populations is located
in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute for Human
Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the "mother" for much
of this extended network, of which Becker is a member. They are the specialists
in 'both' hard and soft brainwashing.
The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the British Royal
household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar outfits in the United
States and elsewhere, are determined that you should be a television addict,
sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing from the "tube". That is how they
control you.
Like his fellow brainwashers, Becker prides himself in knowing the minds of his
victims. He calls them "saps." Man, he told an interviewer, should be called
"homo the sap."
"Soft" brainwashing by television works through the power of suggestion.
Television watching creates a state of drugged-like oblivion to outside reality.
The mind, its perceptions dulled by habituated viewing, is ready to accept any
new illusion of reality as presented on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like
stupor of television watching, is prepared to accept that the images that
television 'suggests' as reality 'are', in fact, reality. It will then struggle
to form-fit a contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker
claims.
Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years,
confirms this. The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer in this
state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: "Television as a media consists of
a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding
this essential nature of the medium itself are:
The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the habituation of
response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are effectively
dominated by the signal, the screen.
The left cortical hemisphere ─ the center of visual and analytical calculating
processes ─ is effectively reduced in its functioning to tracking changing
images on the screen.
Therefore, provided the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to reflect on what
he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware, but unaware of
his awareness... "In other words, television can be seen partly as the
technological analogue of the hypnotist."
The key to making the brainwashing work is the 'repetition of suggestion' over
time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a day, there is plenty of
time for such repeated suggestion.
Some Examples
Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about 20 years
ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the day. Think about
those same issues today. notice how you seemed to change 'your' mind about them,
to become more tolerant of things you opposed vehemently before. It's your
television watching that changed your mind, or to use Becker's terms, "shaped
your perceptions."
Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is now called
environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be protected on an
equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against the basic concept of
Christian civilization that Man is a higher species than, and distinct from, the
animals, and that it is Man, by virtue of his being made in the image of the
living God, whose life is sacred. That was 20 years ago. But now, many people,
maybe even you, seem to think otherwise. There are even laws that say so.
This contrary, anti-human view of Man being no more than equal to animals and
plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of television.
Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television shows, into televised
movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up steam. Environmental
spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow of television. Those who
opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable way. It was done over time, with
repetition. If you weren't completely won over, you were made tolerant of the
views of environmental lunatics whose statements were morally and scientifically
unsound.
Let's take a more recent example ─ the war against Iraq. That was a war made for
television. In fact, it was a war 'organized' through television. Think back a
year. How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and
children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on the
other. The images repeated in newscasts, backed up by scenes of alleged
atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself ─ the video-game like images of
"smart" weapons killing Iraqi targets.
Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf,
conducting a final press briefing that was consciously orchestrated to resemble
the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory.
Those were the images that overwhelmed our population. Only now, months later,
do we find out that the images had nothing to do with reality. The Iraqi
"atrocities" in Kuwait and elsewhere were exaggerated. Our "smart" weapons, like
the famous Patriot anti-missile system, didn't really work. Oh, and the casualty
figures ─ it seems that we murdered far more women and children than we did
soldiers. Hardly a "glorious victory." But while it might have made a difference
if people knew this while the war was being planned or in progress, polls show
that Americans no longer find the war or any stories about it "interesting."
Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get most of their
values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might counteract the
influence of the infernal box, but they could not overcome it. How could they,
if they themselves have been brainwashed by the same box and if their children
spend more time with it than them? Studies show that most of television
programming is geared to a less than 5th grade comprehension level. parents,
like you, are themselves being remade in the infantile images of the television
screen. All of society becomes more infantile, more easily controllable.
As Emery explains:
"We are proposing that television as a simple constant and repetitive and
ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central nervous system of
Man."
Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American's ability to
think:
"Americans don't really think ─ they have opinions and feelings. Television
creates the opinion and then validates it."
Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans what to
think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable to the
oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable channels. It
tells people what has been said and what is "important." Everything else is
filtered out. You are told who can win and who can't. And few people have the
urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas
and look for a high quality of leadership.
Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as choosing a
box of laundry detergent ─ a set of possibilities, whose limits are determined,
by the images on the screen. You are given the appearance of freedom of choice,
but you have neither freedom nor real choice. That is how the brainwashing
works.
"Are they brainwashed by the tube," said Becker to the interviewer. "It is
really more than that. I think that people have lost the ability to relate the
images of their own lives without television intervening to tell them what it
means. That is what we really mean when we say that we have a wired society."
Turn It Off!
That was ten years ago. It has gotten far worse since then. In this article, we
will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on Earth and how television is
being used to get us there; we will discuss television programming, revealing
how it has helped produce what is called a "paradigm" shift in values, creating
an immoral society; we will explain how the news is presented and how its
presentation has been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the
mass entertainment media, showing who controls it and how; we will also deal
with America's addiction to spectator sports and show how that too has helped
make you passive and stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if
we can't break our addiction to the tube.
Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has said that America needs a
year of "cold turkey" from television if we are to survive as a nation. so,
after what I just told you, what do you say, my friend? Do you want to stay
stupid and let your country go to hell in a handbasket? Why don't you just walk
over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely off. Go on, you can do
it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little better already? You've just
taken the first step in deprogramming yourself. It wasn't that hard, was it? Try
to keep it off. Now that will be a bit harder.
The Fascist Consent of Man
The Nazi state was created by the same oligarchical financial and political
interests who today control what we call the mass media and television. Forget
about whatever stories you've seen on television about how Hitler came to power
─ his path to power was cleared by the same oligarchs who employ the
brainwashers that program you through television. Over a period of years,
following the First World War, Germany was brutalized by the economic policy of
this international elite. Hitler's Nazis were funded and promoted as a political
option, and then steered into power in 1932-33.
Once in power, the Nazis maintained their hold through the use of terror as part
of mass brainwashing. In many ways, it were proper to view the Nazi period as an
'experiment ' in methods of mass brainwashing and social control. At the root of
this experiment was the desire to create a New World Order based on reversing a
fundamental premise of Judeo-Christian civilization - that Man is created as a
higher and distinct species from animals, created in the image of the living God
and by divine grace, and imparted the divine spark of reason. This is what makes
Man human -- His divinely given power of reason. This view of Man, the view of
the Renaissance, holds that all men are created 'equal' in the eyes of the
Creator. Society, organized according to such principles, must enable Man to
seek the Truth as His highest goal, and thereby 'perfect ' His existence and
that of future generations, in accordance with Natural Law.
Such a worldview cannot allow for the existence of an oligarchy who views
itself, by birthright and worldly power, as more equal than other men. Such
oligarchs, and creatures like their coterie of brainwashers, hold a contrary
worldview: Man is an animal, a degraded beast, whose worst impulses must be
repressed by the state. Laws are created to 'control' these human animals and to
allow for the continued existence of the social order. Men, in turn, make a
'social contract' to allow themselves to be governed by such laws, which are
mutable, since they are government by neither Natural Law nor truth. This is the
view of the so-called Enlightenment, and in its extreme form, the fascist state.
The question of the concept of Man ─ as a creative, reasoning human being made
in the image of the living God, or as a degraded beast, an animal - defines all
other cultural questions. It is the moral ─ or immoral - underpinning of all
societies. For mass brainwashing to work, it must attack the Renaissance view of
Man, for no person with such a self-conception can be brainwashed. Large numbers
of people must be induced to give up beliefs that are the heritage of
Judeo-Christian civilization. To do that, religious institutions, such as the
Christian Churches, which defend the sanctity of human life, must be undermined
and ultimately destroyed. This explains the peculiar fascination of all
brainwashers with Gnostic heresy, Satanism, or what they call "the varieties of
religious experience."
Such concepts as the sanctity and dignity of human life and the perfectibility
of Man, and the principle of the progress of human knowledge, the ideas of the
Renaissance, have been transmitted from generation to generation. They are
deeply imbedded in the human personality, and are the invariant axioms of our
culture. To remove them requires the equivalent of psychological shock therapy.
When they are removed, we remove what makes Man human, what separates him from
the beast ─ 'We have made Man bestial'.
Freudian Mass Brainwashing
The Nazi experiment was aimed at doing just that. How did it work? Well now
we'll say something that might shock some people ─ Nazi Germany was an
experiment in 'Freudian mass psychology'.
That is not to say that Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, was
himself a Nazi; he wasn't a practicing one. But he 'shared' the belief of the
Nazis and their sponsors that Man was an animal, first and foremost. In several
locations, Freud makes the case that it is the primitive animal characteristics
of Man that are at the center of His emotional life. His life is a conflict
between an animal seeking 'pleasure' and gratification, and a reality that says
that this cannot always be so; thought emerges as the individual tries to
balance between the pleasure and reality principles.
Freud saw his work as a continuation of that of Charles Darwin, who had "removed
Man from his throne at the center of the universe," and placed him squarely in
the animal kingdom. Darwin saw nothing unique in Man, nothing that gave him the
right to dominion over the Earth, other than sheer power to dominate other
species. All that made Man what He truly was, was not the work of a God, but of
profane, clashing and blind forces, claimed Darwin. Freud emphatically agreed
with the work of "the great Darwin."
This belief that Man is nothing more than a degraded beast is at the core of the
Freudian system. It is fundamental to Freud's ordering of mental states that he
must deny the perfectibility of Man, that there can be no absolute truths; that
Man can never overcome His flaws. Psychoanalysis doesn't cure so much as it
"enlightens," as it makes an individual aware of his flaws and neuroses, to
learn to live with them, and therefore cope with their debilitating symptomatic
effects.
For Freud, Man is in a constant state of war with Himself, with an infantile
"it" (the id), at war with "a little me" or "I" (the ego); this "I" is only
slightly less animalistic than the total animal, the "it." Society exerts
control over this degraded beast, this animal, through the "over I," erroneously
referred to in English as the "superego." The "over I," which Freud identifies
as moral conscience, bids only that the "it" and the "I" control themselves in
the form of a social contract with the rest of society.
Freud states that the "over I" often gets in the way of the legitimate needs of
the "I" and the "it." It therefore becomes the source of neurosis, through
repression of especially the sexual needs of the "id" and the "I." What Freud
calls the moral conscience of society is a source of pain, not pleasure, for the
individual.
The sources of human creativity, what distinguishes Man from the animal, for
Freud comes from 'sublimated' sexual drives of the "it" and the "I" ─ The most
creative people are either practicing or latent homosexuals. This absurd theory
Freud attempted to "prove" in his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci,
generalizing later to say that all people who follow what they perceive to be
moral conscience, are driven toward neurosis. There is no paradise beyond an
earthly paradise, Freud says, and all who believe otherwise suffer from a
delusional fantasy.
Freud's hatred of all religion, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, is
central to his system. Religion is the great illusion that his psychology must
strive to remove from Man, since religion tells Man that He is more than a
beast, and that He lives for a higher purpose than the socially regulated
seeking of pleasure.
Man is not made in the image of the living God, says Freud; Man has made God in
'His' image, for the purpose of easing the pain of His existence. Deriding the
great thinkers of the past, he says their defense of religious doctrine is
infantile folly:
"We shall tell ourselves that it were very nice if there were a God who created
the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order to
the universe and an afterlife; but it is a striking fact that this is exactly as
we are bound to wish it to be. And it were more remarkable still if our
wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving these
difficult riddles of the universe ....
"...Yet you defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes
discredited -- and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world
collapses. There is nothing left for you but despair of everything, of
civilization, of the future of Mankind. From that bondage, I am, we are free.
Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can
bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions".
The Freudian system is thus a perfect tool for brainwashing, since it negates
the moral underpinnings of our civilization, telling us that they are an
infantile illusion. Without that moral underpinning, Man has no moorings and is
susceptible to the brainwashers' "suggestion." All Freudian psychology is a form
of brainwashing to one extent or another, because to agree with its premises,
one must agree that Man is a beast who must deny the existence of universal law
and God, the Creator.
Freudian psychology, as preached by either Freud and his followers, or by
neo-Freudians like Carl Jung, became the rage in the 1920s. It was promoted in
the popular culture through the mass media of its day, in both newspaper and
magazine articles. Its morally insane system of "id," "ego," and "superego"
became part of the popular culture, as did its belief that creativity stems from
sexual drives.
Mass Psychology
In 1921, before the Nazis had themselves been promoted into a mass phenomenon,
Freud published one of the seminal works in his system, "Mass Psychology and the
Analysis of the I". Like the works of Fred Emery quoted earlier, and other
brainwashers, this work is at once an analysis of a social phenomenon, and at
the same time a "cookbook" on how, through mass psychology, to create such a
phenomenon ─ in this case, a mass fascist movement.
Freud uses as a starting point the work of the French psychologist Gustav LeBon,
his infamous "The Psychology of the Crowd". It is LeBon's main thesis that as
part of a mass or crowd, Man regresses to a 'primitive' mental state. A person
who may be otherwise highly cultured and moral is capable of acting like a
barbarian, is prone to acts of unspeakable violence and inhumanity, and loses
his critical faculties in a large mass of people.
People in a crowd lose their inhibitions and moral standards, and become highly
emotional, says LeBon. This emotionalism, this irrationality, lends itself to
the power of 'suggestion', through which the behavior of an individual can be
determined by his perceptions and the actions of others around him.
LeBon describes this as a return to Man's primitive nature. Like Freud, at the
center of his belief is the assertion that Man is merely a higher animal, whose
animal traits are controlled by social norms and the structure of society. Place
this animal in a mass of similar animals, and his human identity is crushed --
He ceases to think as a human and becomes caught up in instinctive animal-like
activity. Man, says LeBon, has returned to his animal roots.
But while He has become at once more primitive, more animal-like and infantile,
mass Man, the man in the crowd, also has a heightened sense of power, while his
individual responsibility for action ─ a key factor in all moral judgment --
diminishes.
Sound familiar? LeBon is describing the behavior of all masses of people
organized around emotionalism and infantile activities, such as the crowds at
large spectator sporting events, at large rock concerts, and at mass
demonstrations. It is the psychology of the unthinking 'mob'. The masters of
people like LeBon, the people who control the brainwashers that program
television, have for centuries known that masses in mobs are easily manipulated.
From the days of ancient Rome, to the mobs of the French Revolution and the
Terror, the oligarchs have used 'agents provocateurs' and money to have such
mobs do their bidding.
LeBon says that individuals in a mass seem to behave as if they are in a state
of hypnosis. But that is where his observations stop. Freud takes it a step
further. The most effectively controlled masses are those which are led, by a
leader. It is the leader who places the mass under an effective hypnotic spell.
Masses of people, Freud says, can be deliberately induced to give up their moral
conscience ─ the values that underpin all moral judgment. Deep within Man's
unconscious, is His animal nature. Those urges are repressed by His conscience,
which is in turn molded by society. Freud calls this the "I ideal" (the ego
ideal), which he later develops into the concept of the "over I" (the superego).
The mass itself creates the preconditions for the silencing of the voice of
individual conscience; that voice silenced, all that violates the standards of
conscience, all the evil in Man, can appear, without restraint.
Freud is wrong that Man is first and foremost an animal and that all that
society does is to repress His instinctual animal behavior. He has laid the
basis for a regressive, evil psychology, that can make Man 'more' of an animal
-- and hence more easily manipulated by a small ruling elite of oligarchs.
"In my innnermost depth, I am really convinced that my dear fellow human beings
─ with few exceptions ─ are rabble," Freud wrote to a colleague in 1929.
If you deny, as Freud does, that Man's true identity lies not in his individual
mortal self, but in the moral acts of that individual, through his powers of
creative reason, that live beyond his life on Earth, then you take away Man's
soul; then Man is 'reduced' to the animal-like, to be controlled by the power
and repressive actions of an oligarchical-controlled state.
"It is just as impossible to do without control of the masses by a minority as
it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization," Freud writes in
his 1927 attack on religion, "The Future of an Illusion". "For the masses are
lazy and unintelligent."
Freud, before Hitler and his sponsors published 'Mein Kampf', described the
concept of the "Fuauhrerprinzip", the leadership principle around which the Nazi
state was organized. In his "Mass Psychology", Freud argues that any mass, be it
a nation, or a randomly created group, must have a leader, someone who gives it
its 'I ideal' or values. The leader 'becomes' the individual member's common 'I
ideal' and takes over all his critical faculties, just as the hypnotized
individual surrenders his self-determination to the hypnotizer. It is the
leader, says Freud, who provides the common bond for a mass of people; their
common attachment to the leader enables each member to identify with the other,
giving form and direction to the mass.
Freud says that the leader holds an attachment to his followers through what he
calls the 'aim inhibited libido' -- a sexual attraction that is repressed or
desexualized. In order for this to function, however, the leader must remain
aloof, with no emotional attachments to anybody, so as create an almost god-like
or mystical quality. The leader must appear to be above the mass, yet part of
it; "he loves no one but himself or other people in so far as they can serve his
needs," writes Freud. In that way, the leader "loves everyone."
Man is most like an animal when He is young. The infantile mind, while still
different from the animal in its creative capacities, thinks more instinctively,
is more reactive, and is more prone to suggestion. Freud's "Fuauhrer" becomes a
vehicle to make the masses more infantile; they are thus more easily controlled
and manipulated. "They are rendered defenseless against mass brainwashing."
Think about what we have described about the leader. Now think about what you
know about the Nazi state and its Fuauhrer. Even the movie images have told you
that Hitler organized his followers and the mass of Germans 'almost exactly as
Freud had described', with results Freud "predicted."
Was the Fuauhrer a Freudian? It is known that Hitler read LeBon; it cannot be
established that he read Freud, especially "Mass Psychology". But it is clear
that those who put Hitler in power and those who steered his movement read
Freud, as did most of the ruling elite of the day. It was they who were
promoting the Freudian craze and its propagation throughout the world.
Some neo-Freudians did become overt supporters of the Nazis. Of them all, the
most important was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who had broken with Freud
over the latter's refusal to see value in gnostic mysticism and what he called
Freud's fixation on the sexual drive, the libido, as the root of all neuroses.
Ultimately, Jung came to see in Hitler and the Hitlerian state the proof of his
theories.
And, more, Jung saw in Hitler the apotheosis of Jung's own search for a kind of
pagan "communion" with the Beyond, a search that began in 1915, with Jung's
colossal nervous breakdown.
There is a strong connection between Jung's psychoanalytic theories, which form
one of the conceptual bases of "New Age" ideology today, and his Nazism -- or,
more precisely, his fascination with Hitler. For Jung was obsessed by the notion
that the deepest reality, the greatest truth, lay buried in the unconscious,
mystical, psychotic aspects of Man's mind, as opposed to the outward, rational,
scientific (Judeo-Christian) view of the world. That was the basis for Jung's
decades-long pilgrimage through himself, beginning with his nervous collapse, to
find stranger and more distant "truths."
And that was the basis for his attitude toward Hitler. Hitler was the prototype
of Jungian Man, who surrendered His reason to His unconscious, who welcomed
divine madness as Jung himself advised.
Thus, in 1934, Jung was writing of the "formidable phenomenon of National
Socialism," which the world beheld "wide-eyed with astonishment." Hitler, he
wrote, had "literally set all Germany on its feet." He saw this as the rebirth
of the ancient Germanic god Wotan, celebrating his resurrection in an age when
the Christian God had proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal
slaughter.
"As an autonomous archetype, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a
people and thereby reveals his own nature," Jung raved in trying to explain the
"formidable phenomenon" of Hitlerism. This god of wind and rain had transformed
Germany, this wind that "bestoweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth... [it] seizes
everything in its path and overthrows all that is not firmly rooted. When the
wind blows, it shakes everything without or within."
Earlier, in an essay written in 1932 (but only printed in 1934), Jung had
celebrated the "leader [Fuehrer] personality" as against the "ever-secondary,
lazy masses, who cannot take the least move in the absence of a demagogue." When
he printed the essay in 1934, he specified in a footnote: "Since this sentence
was first written, Germany, too, has found its Fuehrer."
In 1933, about three months after Hitler came to power, Jung, a Swiss national,
became a minor official of the Nazi state. Shortly after Hitler was named
chancellor of Germany, Ernst Kretschmer had resigned as president of the German
General Society for Psychotherapy. His successor was Jung, and Jung's second in
command at the society was Dr. M. H. Goering, cousin to Hermann Goering.
Was Jung simply taking the post (as he later claimed) in order to save the
delicate plant of psychotherapy from utter extinction by the Nazis? Hardly. His
first editorial in "Zentralblatt", the journal of the society, declared, "In the
interest of science, we can no longer ignore the palpable differences, long
known to persons of insight, between the Germanic and Jewish psychologies.
Psychology, more than any other science, contains a personal factor, ignorance
of which falsifies the results of theory and practice."
The next year, in 1934 in "Zentralblatt", he published a programmatic
denunciation of 'subversive' Semitism. To the Aryan unconscious (the collective,
or racial, unconscious of the German people, as he phrased it), Jung attributed
"the potential energy and creative seeds of a future still awaiting fulfillment,
... [of] the still youthful Germanic peoples."
All this was written in the first two years of the Nazi regime. Perhaps Jung had
not yet understood the nature of the beast, of the regime he served?
Not true. In 1938, fully five years after Hitler's accession to power, Jung was
able to write with wild enthusiasm of Hitler as a "visionary," an historical
phenomenon belonging to the type of the "truly inspired shaman or medicine man,"
the loudspeaker of the German soul, whose power was "magical rather than
political," a "spiritual vessel."
In his interview with American newspaperman H. R. Knickerbocker in October 1938,
a month after Hitler had extorted from the West the Munich Pact, Jung said that
"Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man.... The
outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was
especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the
Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.... He is the
loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they
can be heard by the German's conscious ear. He is the first man to tell every
German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about
German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one
characteristic which colors every German soul is the typically German
inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is
always a bit late to the feast. Hitler's power is not political, it is magic."
Hitler's secret was that he allowed himself to be moved by his own unconscious,
said Jung. He was like a man who listens intently to whispered suggestions from
a mysterious voice and "then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally
our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too
much cerebrum, to obey it -- but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is
always led." This, of course, is the significance of Hitler's own, oft-quoted
remark, "I go the way Providence dictates with the confidence of a sleepwalker."
Jung predicted to Knickerbocker that England and France would not honor their
Munich guarantees to the Czechs, since no nation keeps its word. Then why,
Knickerbocker asked, expect Hitler to keep his word? Hitler was different, Jung
insisted. "Because Hitler is the nation." This was exactly what Nazi Deputy
Fuehrer Rudolf Hess used to scream at the Nazi Nuremberg rallies.
And still, after the war began, Jung remained an enthusiast. As France
surrendered to Germany in June 1940 -- the date, the summer solstice, did not
pass unnoticed by Jung and other Nazi mystics -- Jung cried ecstatically, "It is
the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!"
Even much later in the war, when Jung had come to realize that his future
required him to dissociate himself from Hitler's particular brand of magic, Jung
was still certain that Hitler represented Germany in the profoundest possible,
mythic and mystical way. In answer to queries from American agents as to whether
Hitler could be overthrown internal to Germany, Jung shook his head impatiently.
Never could Hitler be overthrown by other Germans; he was Germany. He was the
"collective [racial] unconscious of the German people."
Mass Media
The Nazis and their organized supporters represented only a 'minority' of the
German population, even when in power. What about the rest of the people, whom
our television documentaries called the "good Germans," who acquiesced to the
Hitler state? How were they made to go along?
That was accomplished through mass terrorization, through both the actual use of
jackboot terror and the 'implied threat' to use it. It is very possible that the
same powers which placed Hitler in power could have done so, by a 'putsch',
without a popular election victory. I say that they 'chose' not to do it that
way, because the psychological considerations that were required in order for
the Hitler state to take hold, demanded that the initial choice of the Nazis
appear to be a free one. This heightened the anxiety of the "good Germans,"
since they appeared to have brought the terrible state of affairs on themselves.
As many Freudians and neo-Freudians who have analyzed the Nazi experiment have
remarked, this led the majority of Germans to doubt their own judgment, making
them more susceptible to brainwashing.
The structure of the Nazi Party and the Fuehrer state provided organized
vehicles for Freudian mass brainwashing. But the principle vehicle was 'mass
media'. In fact, the Nazis more or less invented 'mass media' -- the means for
the universal or near universal dissemination of "information" simultaneously,
in this case controlled through the state.
There were three basic institutions of mass media.
The 'print media', which featured the coordinated control of information
disseminated through the press. All information was created and passed through
the Information Ministry, under Josef Goebbels. The coverage was orchestrated so
as not to appear to be identical, with various papers given particular aspects
of a story. But the point is that all the news was managed from the top,
including even foreign coverage of German events. Nearly every German could be
reached with the message desired in this fashion.
'Film' became a universal mass medium as well, with cinemas established in every
town, with feature films that carried brainwashing images of Nazi culture. Such
films were often carefully crafted to have the greatest psychological effect,
with the Leni Riefenstahl epics such as "Triumph of Will" being the most
notorious. Those films and newsreels were carefully produced, and allowed
audiences to become participants in the mass experience of rallies and other
events. They provided a bond, as we have described, between the leader and
masses and the individual in the mass and his neighbor in other parts of
Germany. They provided a universal brainwashing experience, and were consciously
produced to create such a desired effect. Audiences in cinemas routinely joined
in Nazi anthems and salutes, at the instigation of the images on the screen. In
addition, the films provided the 'feinbild' or the pictures of the enemies
against which the Nazis were to deploy their mobs. As more than one brainwasher
has commented, the Germans were the first to be subjected to the overt use of
film for propaganda and the experiment was an enormous "success."
But the most universal of the mass media was 'radio'. As soon as they came to
power, the Nazis ordered the production and mass dissemination of cheap radio
receivers. By the end of their first year in power, nearly every German
household had one. In addition, loudspeakers, hooked to radio receivers and
amplifiers, were installed in town squares and other locations throughout
Germany.
For the first time in history, an event could be heard by nearly every person in
a single country, as it was happening. This is the mass audience that
foreshadows our television experience. The concept behind it was the same as we
have described in discussing Freud's "Mass Psychology" -- individuals
participating in the mass phenomena are susceptible to suggestion, to losing
their moral conscience -- they become overwhelmed by the mass experience.
Coming across the radio, into millions of homes and thousands of plazas, is the
voice of one man, the Fuehrer. That fact -- that all or nearly all Germans were
hearing his voice at the same moment -- gave an enhanced power to the message;
it created an air of "all powerfulness." Many commentators have remarked about
the hypnotic quality of Hitler's voice, how it seemed to mesmerize his audience,
whether live or on radio or seen in the film. The neo-Freudians would remark
that it was not only the quality of the voice, but the sense on the part of the
listener of being part of a mass experience, that contributed to this effect.
Careful Orchestration
Hitler's speeches were some of the first mass media events in history. They were
as carefully prepared and orchestrated as any modern television event. They are
comparable to the kind of preparation and buildup, given a media extravaganza
such as the Superbowl. In fact, one might say that such people who prepared such
mass media events learned their lessons from the Nazis, as we shall later
explain.
The speeches were preceded by widespread advertising in the print media and
radio, with a buildup of anticipation and excitement. As the moment of the
speech approached, the announcers described the frenzy and excitement of the
crowd. Hitler's entrance into the hall was carefully described, also to build
tension and excitement. When the speech began, Hitler usually spoke in low and
mellow tones, easing his audience into his message. His sentences were simple
and usually short. Words were carefully chosen, so as not to be beyond the
simplest of listeners. His tone and excitement in voice rose as the speech
progressed, eventually shouting his message to his audience. It ended with the
crowd roaring its approval, all of which was broadcast without comment. As the
Fuehrer left the hall, the commentator would carefully describe the scene, with
the emphasis on what the crowd was doing.
But it did not come naturally for Hitler. He carefully rehearsed everything,
down to the most minute gestures and eye movements, using photographs to modify
his style for maximum effect. Like a television star, he went over details of
the staging of his entrances, the location of the podium, the lighting, etc.
with his "stage managers" such as Goebbels.
When brainwashers spoke to Germans after the war, as part of efforts to
"psychoanalyze" the Nazi experience, they found few remembered any specific
content in Hitler's speeches. Almost all could remember being part of the
experience, if they were in attendance, and most remembered the "excitement" in
listening to them on the radio. The words "hypnotic" and "mesmerizing" were the
most used to describe the Fuehrer's voice. Even some people who professed to
have disagreed with the Nazis grudgingly claimed that Hitler was a "a
spellbinding speaker."
The brainwashers concluded from all this that 'mass media' events had caused
people to "suspend their belief in reality", that they had in fact been willing
to accept uncritically things being said, which they might have rejected, if
they had heard them in another context.
Ironically, the Nazis were working on the next level of mass media technology ─
television ─ when the war broke out. Had the war and its production demands not
intervened, it is fairly certain that by no later than the mid-1940s every
German would have had a television set!
The 'mass media' hold of Hitler on the population continued through the end of
the war; other Nazi leaders, Goebbels in particular, were said to have had a
similar effect. But no one could overwhelm reality like the Fuehrer, or, rather,
'the Fuehrer's mass media events'. Only as the Nazi state collapsed in military
defeat and chaos, did this process break down.
A Society Driven Insane
This is a picture of a society, driven 'deliberately insane'. It is all the more
cruel for this was done to a great people, chosen as victims because they were
great and the carriers of the traditions of the Renaissance through such giants
as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller, List, and von Humboldt. An evil science,
Freudian social psychology, was deployed against them, by a sick oligarchy.
During the war, Bruno Bettelheim, a neo-Freudian, published a psychological
analysis of the Nazi period at the behest of the network of brainwashers
associated with the Tavistock Institute. Himself a concentration camp inmate in
1938-39, Bettelheim describes how under extreme doubt and terror, the individual
will regress to an increasingly more infantile state. In that condition, the
inmates of the camps started to mirror the personalities and mannerisms of their
oppressors, the SS guards. In a widely circulated version of that work, "The
Informed Heart", he indicates that life outside the concentration camps mirrored
the psychological disintegration taking place inside -- All German citizens were
becoming more infantile, less able to act as reasoning adults.
"While the good child may be seen and not heard," writes Bettelheim, "the 'good
German' had to be unseen and also dumb... It is one thing to behave like a child
because one is a child: dependent, lacking in foresight and understanding, taken
care of by bigger, older, and wiser adults, forced by them to behave, but
occasionally able to defy them and get away with it. Most important of all,
feeling certain that in time, as one would reach adulthood oneself, all this
would be righted. It is quite another thing to be an adult and have to force
oneself to assume childish behavior, and for all time to come...
"It was not just coercion by others into helpless dependency," continues
Bettelheim. "It was also the clean splitting of the personality. Man's anxiety,
His wish to protect life, forced Him to relinquish what was ultimately His best
chance of survival -- His ability to react and make appropriate decisions. But
giving this up, He was no longer a man, but a child. Knowing that for survival,
He should decide and act, and trying to survive by not reacting -- these in
their combination overpowered the individual to such a degree that he was
eventually shorn of all self-respect and all feelings of independence."
In this way, the multi-level experiment in Freudian mass brainwashing worked its
evil on the German population. In the end, the Nazis, themselves a group of
gnostic psychotics, went predictably out of control and the experiment had to be
destroyed. In the interim, the Freudian mobs unleashed by the process had
destroyed much of Europe. And when it was over, those who had imposed this
horror in the world, attempted through mass media to blame their 'victims' for
the crimes committed. The Germans, whom the oligarchy, through their Nazi tools,
had tortured in mass brainwashing, were told that they were 'collectively
guilty' for all that had happened. The oligarchy tried a handful of the
psychotic Nazis, and in so doing, put the whole German nation, one of the
greatest peoples on the earth, wrongly in dock at Nuremberg. And while they
intoned that it must "never happen again," they and their brainwashers were
already studying where the experiment had gone wrong. They were preparing to do
far worse, using a newly developed tool ─ television ─ as their more advanced
mass brainwashing mechanism to organize a new form of fascist state without the
Nazi superstructure.
We'll pick up this thread of a fascist state without the Nazi superstructure in
the next part of this article, and show you the kind of society that your
brainwashers plan for you. But for the moment, I want you to think back to the
two images with which we started this section -- the Nazi state, and in
particular, the Nazi rallies, with the frenzied crowds, cheering their Fuehrer,
and the millions more listening, glued to their radios. Now reflect on what we
have told you about this, how they were really carefully stage-managed "mass
media events".
Now think about the "Desert Storm" rallies, and the similarities between the two
events -- at their roots both are "organized, mass media brainwashing events".
Do you realize that you have been manipulated? You don't, do you? That is how
well the more than 40-year brainwashing of the American population by television
has worked.
I am indebted to Molly Hammett Kronberg for the section on Jungian psychology
and Hitler, and for discussion on the Nazi movement overall.
The Clockwork Orange Society
I'm back again. I won't even ask you this time whether the television set is
turned off. By now, I hope, you realize that it is impossible to think about any
important subject as long as it is on. But in case 'someone else' has turned the
set on, I'll give you a chance to either turn it off or to go to another room
before we begin.
The people who had put the Nazis in power never gave up on the idea of mass
psychological brainwashing as a means to maintain the power of the oligarchical
elite. They only grudgingly acknowledged that the Nazi model of social control,
with its requirement for total regimentation, could not have universal
application. The question confronting the brainwashers at such places as the
Tavistock Institute outside London was how to create a Nazi state in the United
States without its now socially unacceptable state terror apparatus.
Americans returned home from fighting a war in which they had defeated a
monstrous evil at great human sacrifice. Those involved in the war effort were
thus focused on the 'higher purpose' in life, the kind of moral outlook that
leads an individual to be willing to sacrifice his life, if necessary, to make
the world a better place to live in for someone who might come after him, while
giving renewed meaning to the achievements of past generations. The war effort
led to a burst of 'cultural optimism' in the population, that made it seem that
we could do great things for all Mankind.
Now, look around at this miserable nation of ours. It is hard to believe that it
is the same place as 40 or 50 years ago. For most people, there is little or no
purpose to life, except to survive to the next day. Our people have a
deep-seated 'cultural pessimism', and are cynical about nearly everything.
Now, think hard -- over the last 40 years, while our moral outlook has
collapsed, what became a constant, ever-present part of your life. That's right,
'television', that box in your living room. That realization is necessary to
understand what I am about to tell you.
The New 'Leader'
The evil Sigmund Freud, in his work "Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I",
said that an individual's moral inhibitions and outlook can be broken down as
part of a mass or crowd. According to Freud, people in crowds or masses behave
as if they are hypnotized ─ A person becomes more infantile, and hence more like
an animal under such circumstances, and loses the power to reason critically. By
using the power of mass suggestion, a new outlook, based on different ideals,
can then be substituted for values a person had previously held.
Freud says that each mass has a leader, who serves the function of hypnotist. It
is to the leader that the individuals in the crowd surrender their ideals, and
it is from the leader that they receive their new values. It is at the will and
word of the leader, that the mass or mob can be deployed.
Freud claimed that the leader principle worked as a brainwashing tool because of
some innate need of Man to be led; this merely betrayed his own oligarchical
outlook. He believed that Man was merely a two-legged animal, whose basic
animalism could be induced to come to the fore in mass situations.
Freud is wrong -- Man is not an animal. However, he can, under conditions of
mass psychosis, through brainwashing techniques of the type described, be made
to 'act as if he were an animal'. The key to mass brainwashing is to create the
kinds of "organized, controlled environments" in which "tension" and "stress"
can be applied to break down morally informed judgment, thereby making an
individual more susceptible to "suggestion". Such 'controlled environments' are
organized so as to appeal to base emotionalism, sensuality, and even eroticism ─
"feelings" that make Man "one with animals" ─ and not to Man's higher reasoning
capabilities, which truly distinguished him from the beast. It is this fact, and
not merely the size of an event, that makes the brainwashing possible.
For the brainwashers, what was required for a new system of mass social control
was a means to organize a "mass appeal to emotionalism". The more overpowering
and all encompassing that appeal, the better. The more infantile the population
could be made, the less would be their resistance to suggestion and
manipulation.
In television, they found the tool to make that constant appeal to infantilism,
organized on a mass basis. It had the potential to reach into 'every' home, to
reach 'every' citizen with a set of messages and suggestions. It also had the
ability, through the control and dissemination of information, to create large
"controlled environments" by creating your perceptions of events. Television is
the new "leader," the technological equivalent of Hitler.
Writing in 1972 with Eric Trist, formerly of the Wharton School and now of the
University of Toronto and the leading Tavistock brainwasher in the United
States, Fred Emery says:
"We are suggesting that television evokes a basic assumption of 'dependency'. It
must evoke (this) because it is essentially an emotional and irrational
activity.... Television is the non-stop leader who provides nourishment and
protection."
Emery and Trist report that the population has never been told this about
television, and writing for a handful of fellow brainwashers, they are now about
to let this secret out: "... that the questioning and confrontation of
television has been put aside in order to maintain its role as the 'leader' in
the dependent mode."
They note that 'all' television has a dissociative effect on mental
capabilities, making people less able to think rationally. Harkening back to the
studies of the Hitler experiment, they find that this confirms the thesis that
"the leader should be 'mad' or a 'genius,' yet all the same people feel
compelled to believe that he is a dependable leader."
Emery and Trist, after looking at over 20 years of television brainwashing,
comment; "In other words, television can be partly seen as a technological
analyst of the hypnotist."
The more you watch, the more susceptible you become to suggestions from your
'leader', the television. "... It turns you off to reality and time," Emery and
Trist write, commenting that comprehension of time relationships and reality are
required for an individual to take reasoned and purposeful action.
In looking at the effects of habituated television watching, Emery and Trist
cite studies proving that it does neurological damage:
"Our thesis is that television produces a quality and quantity of habituation
that approximates the destruction of critical anatomical structures."
They report, however, that the damage is not irreversible. The neurological
problems can be cleared up within a few days of halting the six to eight hours
of daily viewing. The effects on the ability to reason and on moral value
structures are far more difficult to "clear up":
"Man can (therefore) be seduced from purposeful functioning in such a way that
he is unable to become aware of his deficit."
Social Turbulence
Now, we are ready to look at what the brainwashers and the oligarchs who have
deployed them have in store for you.
Many neo-Freudians have criticized Freud for presenting too biologically
oriented a system. They say that Freud failed to understand how much of a role
the 'social environment' plays in shaping the personality of the individual. A
new social psychology must place an emphasis on the role of tension-filled
environments in shaping the personality or the "ego," producing regression to
more infantile, or "id-like" personalities.
According to the view of personality held by Tavistock's Emery and Trist, the
'social environment' is either 'stable', at which point, people are more or less
able to "cope" with what is happening to them, or it is 'turbulent', at which
point people either take actions to relieve the tension, or they adapt to accept
the tension-filled environment. If the 'turbulence' does not cease, or if it
intensifies, then, at a certain point, people cease being able to adapt in a
positive way. At that point, Emery and Trist say, people become 'maladaptive' --
they choose a response to tension that degrades their lives. They start to
"repress reality", denying its existence, and constructing increasingly more
infantile fantasies that enable them to cope. All the while, their lives are
becoming increasingly worse, when measured by value structures of a short time
before. To avoid this contradiction, people, under conditions of "increasing
social turbulence", change their values, yielding to new 'degraded' values,
values that are less human and more animal-like.
Sound like a bunch of gobbledegook? Well, in a certain sense it is ─ Morally
reasoning individuals, cultured by 2,000 years of Christian civilization, do not
think in such ways. They would reject barbaric choices, the so-called critical
choices, where none are good. They would seek Truth, and by seeking Truth, find
ways out of the brainwashers' mind trap.
Forty years ago, our responses to problems, and our moral outlook were
different. You would have probably rejected the kinds of critical choices you
are offered today. But that was 'before television'. Forty years of television
have eroded your ability to make moral choices, and have steered you into
critical choices. You have followed your 'leader', television, down a path to
Hell.
Looking into Hell
Twenty years ago, the brainwashers, Emery and Trist, laid out some scenarios for
the future based on a "permanent condition of social turbulence". There might be
brief periods of respite, but, according to them, the world would become
increasingly more chaotic and violent.
In the hands of those with the power to make policy -- to create the 'social
turbulence' -- what they have written is a cookbook recipe for a desired
"future." It is proper to look at what they produced, back in 1972, as the
psychological warfare underpinning, the mass brainwashing concept, behind the
political doctrines of such institutions as the Council on Foreign Relations and
the Trilateral Commission. It is for such people that they were written.
Their forecast ─ a period of continuous turbulence, especially economic
turbulence leading to economic decline -- had its political corollary in the
CFR's "Project 1980s" reports drafted in the mid-1970s. There, we find reference
to plans for the "controlled disintegration" of the American economy.
In 1972, twenty years of television-watching in the United States and most of
the West had left populations with three basic 'maladaptive' scenarios for
dealing with the tension.
one scenario is called 'superficiality'. It is a form of psychological retreat,
an attempt to simplify choices. Tension, say Emery and Trist, makes Man desire
to break free of the emotional values formerly placed on choices. A person
reduces the "value of his intentions, lowering the emotional investment in the
ends being pursued, whether they be personally or socially shared ends... This
strategy can only be pursued by denying the deeper roots of Humanity that
bind...people together on a personal level by denying their individual psyche."
Emery and Trist, writing in the Vietnam era, point to the drug-soaked rebellion
of the "flower children" against society as an example of how this scenario
functions. Fighting an increasingly senseless and brutal war, the older
generation begins to ultimately accept the moral decadence of the drug culture
of its children, rather than seek conflict. Society as a whole accepts a "lower
moral standard", posited as a higher value.
Citing the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, popularized by the
1960s counterculture, Emery and Trist say that under such conditions choice
becomes meaningless. What is important is "the moment," and "the momentary
experience becomes all," they state.
Quoting from Marcuse in his "One Dimensional Man", Emery and Trist say that
modern society is thus confronted with "the rational character of its
irrationality."
The organized societal response to this process is best identified by Aldous
Huxley's "Brave New World", the drug-controlled society, in which there are 'no'
individual moral choices. They identify the 1960s counterculture as "pioneers"
for this scenario.
The second scenario involves the 'segmentation' of society into smaller parts,
of a size that one might be more easily able to cope. "There is an enhancement
of in-group and out-group prejudices as people seek to simplify their choices,"
say Emery and Trist. "The natural line of social divisions have emerged to
become barricades."
In this scenario, it is every group ─ ethnic, racial, sexual ─ against the
other. Nations break apart into regional groups, and those smaller areas in turn
fissure into even smaller areas, along ethnic or other lines. It is an
incredibly violent scenario, but a violence associated with a purposefulness of
sorts, in individual defense of each ethnic or other group.
The organized social response to such a psychological and political
disintegration is the Orwellian fascist state, modeled on George Orwell's book
"1984". In the book, individuals turn to "Big Brother" to regulate their lives
and conflicts among various castes within society. A continuous conflict among
three superpowers, writes Orwell, is "waged by each ruling group against its own
subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of
territory, but to keep the structure of society intact..."
While noting that the Orwellian scenario is not acceptable in its fully
regimented form, any more than Nazism could now be replicated in its exact form,
Emery and Trist state that there are nonetheless obvious parallels in the "Cold
War" to the Orwellian "war of each against all". They comment elsewhere that,
should the Cold War collapse, the ability to control a segmentation scenario on
a societal scale would also collapse.
The third scenario is the most intense, involving a withdrawal and retreat into
a "private world and a withdrawal from social bonds that might entail being
drawn into the affairs of others." Emery and Trist caution that 'dissociation'
is not the more assertive statement of "me first," of personal selfishness that
became the hallmark of the 1970s and 1980s. Fearing the terror that surrounds
him, the individual seeks to avoid all forms of danger entirely. Individuals
seek 'invisibility', in order to fade into their environments; they see nothing
and no one, so that no one might see them.
The brainwashers remark that 'dissociation' has always been a response of sorts
to living in a city. People tend to "look the other way," at some of what is
going on, just as the person who rides the subway tries to "remain invisible"
although in a crowd.
Here we can see how Freud and others' predictions about the behavior of crowds
or masses of people is specific to only certain types of specially organized
experiences -- ones in which the mass is organized around appeals to
emotionalism, that lead to the regression of the individual to an infantile
state of mind, to an animal-like "freedom" of hedonistic expression. Emery and
Trist describe a level of 'dissociation' so great that the individual is reduced
to an animal. He withdraws from the terror around him, and like an animal
"playing possum," tries to hide.
With individuals withdrawn into their fantasies, their minds numbed and
brainwashed by their televisions, the brainwashers "predict" that men will be
willing to accept "the perverse inhumanity of man to man that characterized
Nazism" -- not 'the structure' of the Nazi state, but the 'moral outlook of Nazi
society'.
Ultimately, the majority of people withdraw so far that they don't even bother
to go to their sporting events or rock concerts -- "they have such experiences
mediated through television". It is the television that "gives them solace,"
write the brainwashers.
To survive, such individuals require the comfort of a 'new' religion. The old
religious forms, especially Western Christianity, demand that Man be responsible
for his fellow humans. The new religious forms will be a form a 'mystical
anarchism', a religious experience much likened to satanic practice of the Nazis
and the views of Carl Jung. Again, it is to be television that provides the
"social glue" that binds the minds of the population to their new religious
forms. It is television as the leader, in this case, the "anti-Christ".
A Clockwork Orange
The organized social response to 'dissociation', say Emery and Trist, is a
society described in the pages of Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange".
In the book, Burgess depicts a society gone controllably mad. A majority of
people are engaged in useless "schooling," a few engaged in mind-destroying
trivial labors, and somewhere, there are people running all this as if it were
an insane zoo.
Senseless violence is everywhere in the streets, committed by gangs of youth who
lust for blood. In a typical 'Clockwork Orange' street scene, a gang of drugged,
outlandishly dressed teenagers viciously beats an old man. He had it coming,
said one of the gang members; everyone knows that if you go into certain parts
of town, you will be beaten and raped.
There is no politics to any of it ─ Burgess made sure that his "hero," Alex,
repeatedly makes clear that he is 'apolitical'. Alex speaks a language invented
by the linguist Burgess, appropriate to his infantilism; It is never translated
─ the reader is forced to "learn" what it means by description or "word
pictures."
Burgess provides no explanation about how society got this way; there is no war
or other social calamity referred to. "That's just the way things are," one
character says.
"A Clockwork Orange" portrays a society dominated by infantile animal-like rage.
The 'dissociated' adults cannot exert moral authority over their children,
because they are too involved with their own infantile fantasies, brought to
them through their television sets. Even as they watch the reports of the daily
mayhem, they convince themselves that it isn't "their kids" who are doing this.
For Emery and Trist, Burgess's 'Clockwork Orange' vision "is" the Nazi state
without the superstructure. It is organized disorder, without moral control.
It is the force of the mass communications media, the 'power of television',
however, that is driving us toward the 'Clockwork Orange society'. As we have
explained in previous sections, television, when watched in habituated, long
viewing induces 'dissociation'. It also provides the tension and images of
violence required in order to create the form of social organization in "A
Clockwork Orange". Under its ever-present eye, the "leader", television,
transforms children into beasts like Alex and parents into impotent caretakers
of beasts.
Over time, one state of mental and social disintegration can transform itself
into another. Given the power of television over society, all states will tend
to become more 'dissociative', more like "A Clockwork Orange". As the Futures
Group brainwasher Hal Becker put it back in 1981, "Orwell made a big mistake in
his "1984". Big Brother doesn't need to watch you, as long as you watch it."
Next, I will explain how the programs you watch on television have been crafted
to brainwash you.
The Programming of America by Television
Reflect on the following for a moment -- Suppose someone told you that they
wanted you to take a large dose of a mind-deadening drug, and that after you
took the drug, they were then going to suggest that you do things that without
taking the drug you would probably never conceive of doing. And, they also told
you that "you would not be held accountable for what you did, that you would
have no conscious memory of what took place". Would you take it?
Definitely not, you say, no way.
Yet, for more than 40 years, the majority of Americans, like yourself, have been
taking a daily dose of a mind-deadening drug, one of the most powerful ever
invented -- "television". With your mind in a deadened state, things have been
suggested to you that, were you alert and reasoning, you would have rejected.
And, 'over time', under the continual dosage of this drug, you have followed the
suggestions, changing the way you think about yourself and the world around you.
And, you never knew that this was happening and you may even yet, despite ail
the things we have already shown you, have trouble believing it. That is how
complete this brainwashing process is, how strong is its power over you.
People like Sigmund Freud, his direct followers in the psychoanalytic movement,
and the neo-Freudians that split from him, as well as all 'social
psychologists', deny the existence of the universal truth that Man is made in
the living image of God, and is therefore distinct from the animal. They deny
that Man has been endowed by his Creator with the Divine Spark of reason, and
that by the gift of reason, Man can 'consciously' perfect his knowledge. For
them, creativity is fundamentally an unknowable mystical concept, an act linked
to repression of both carnal and sexual desires.
By denying these most fundamental of truths, they deny the existence of any
truth. They seek to impose on Mankind a "paradigm shift that will wipe out 2,000
years of Christian civilization", thereby returning Man to a bestial and
primitive social order.
Using television as their weapon, the brainwashers have launched a 40-year
assault on the universal truths of Western Christian civilization and on the
concept of universal truth itself. In place of morally informed reason, in the
absence of universal truth, they have raised the false god of 'popular opinion'.
As we shall show, they have consciously targeted "the higher moral values" of
society, and even the idea that there could be a set of true moral values,
seeking to substitute 'amorality' as the axiomatic assumption.
Reality as Opinion
Once the concept of universal truth is obliterated, reality can be redefined by
internal "perceptions" or "images" of that reality. Those perceptions and images
are then validated by 'popular opinion'. Reality becomes a set of conflicting
opinions validated by a mass consensus.
Freud, in discussing this transformation in his 1921 "Mass Psychology",
identifies the process in masses of people as a loosening of the hold of what he
calls moral or social conscience (the "Over I" or "superego," as it is
mistranslated in English) over a person's more infantile and hence, more
animal-like nature (the I and It, or the "ego" and "id"). To use a term
developed by the neo-Freudians, the individual becomes more "other-directed,"
governed by the perceived opinions of others, and thus, more easily manipulated.
Television brainwashing works through the manipulation of images and perceptions
to cause a 'paradigm shift' in the "public mind." It does this through what the
television people appropriately call 'programming', the content of which is
shaped and fine-tuned by "social analysts."
Let's see how Walter Lippmann, one of the earliest practitioners and theorists
of the mass manipulation of opinion, describes the process. Lippmann, trained by
the British psychological warfare unit at Wellington House during World War I
and a follower of Freud, was to become regarded as the most influential American
social and political commentator of the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1922, following the publication of Freud's "Mass Psychology", Lippmann
authored a handbook on the manipulation of the public mind, titled "Public
Opinion". In its introductory chapter, titled "The World Outside and the
Pictures in Our Heads," he describes the concept of public opinion:
"Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts and there is
nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinion refers are
known only as opinions... The pictures inside the heads of these human beings,
the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and
relationship, are their opinions. Those pictures which are acted on by groups of
people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with
capital letters... The picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings
with the world outside."
While television might shift some opinions relatively quickly, a 'paradigm
shift' involving the 'axiomatic' assumptions that govern all individuals
thinking in a society does not occur overnight; it occurs over a long period of
time, in stages.
Think about a profile of the American population, correlating it to the
cumulative amount of television viewing.
First, you have a generation which was born before the advent of television, the
generation who fought in World War II. They had the strongest set of moral
values, since they were influenced by the war experience and their parents'
strong moral values. They were the most resistant to brainwashing.
Their children, the "baby boomers" of the 1947-55 period, were the special
targets of the brainwash programming, as we shall show. They have been subjected
to television brainwashing all their lives. All succeeding generations have been
totally immersed in the television brainwashing experience.
Thus, you have an older generation which has been watching television since
approximately 1950, and successive generations who have been watching for their
entire lifetimes.
Now, you have parents who were themselves reared by television, raising
children, who were reared by television, who are now starting to have children
themselves -- three successive generations subjected to television brainwashing,
without any conscious memory of anything different.
With this profile in mind, focus on the following: The goal of television
programming is to make each succeeding generation more infantile, more
animal-like, more amoral, thereby 'shifting' the value structure of the whole
society. By the end of the process, the parents of the "baby boomers" have
adopted all the fundamental, infantile assumptions of their children.
The Lost Generational War
The Tavistock brainwashers Fred Emery and Eric Trist, writing nearly 20 years
ago, identify the crucial period in this brainwashing process -- the point at
which the pre-television generation tried to raise their "baby boom" kids,
approximately 1949-69. They note the following scenario. Throughout the period,
children's television watching increased, especially as the number of shows
oriented to them increased. At the same time, adult watching increased.
Children, they say, learned from what they saw their parents doing -- It became
socially approved behavior to watch television.
But then something interesting happened -- The television, itself, took over as
a surrogate parent. Children watched to amuse themselves, and were encouraged by
parents to do so. They became habituated to watching.
The images presented on the screen were more real, more powerful than the
outside world. The messages presented in the shows became more important to the
children than what they were told by their live parents.
Children watched the same shows, often with their friends, and talked about the
shows, socializing the experience. Emery and Trist, citing the work of others,
report that television became the "Pied Piper" for the children, the 'leader'
that they followed.
The whole process created an estrangement between child and parent, although not
necessarily apparent at first, creating a crisis in the fundamental unit of
social reproduction, the family. It was only as these baby boomer children grew
into adolescence in the 1960s that the conflict broke into the open. Write Emery
and Trist:
"a generation of children grow up on a TV diet, and as the more affluent get
sets, then multiple sets, the more likely they are to use it as a substitute for
a presence with their children. The children grow into adolescence, spend less
time viewing, but have a different world view. They challenge the world view of
the parents, face to face..."
In previous generational challenges, Emery and Trist write, the disciplinary
authority of the adult society ultimately won over its young-adult values. But
this time, adult society had lost its ability to discipline; the adults had been
infantilized by their own television watching. The generational war is lost,
Emery and Trist write, as all society plunges to a new, 'lower' infantile level.
The behavior of the children -- the drugs, the sex, the anti-social behavior --
is excused or, to use a brainwasher's word, "rationalized", with the help of the
messages contained in television programming.
Emery and Trist reach a startling conclusion -- The generational war between the
so-called counterculture and the generation that fought World War II will be the
last such sharp confrontation of values. Under the influence of television, each
succeeding generational transfer of power will be smoother. When the adults are
infantile already, it is more easy to accept the infantilism of their youth. The
children, they state, may be violent, insane and anti-social, but no one will
assert that it isn't their right to be so!
To understand better how we got into this mess, we are going to have to go back
to the early period of television in the 1950s, and show how what you watched as
a child helped determine your values as an adult.
As we said, the "baby boom" generation was the first to be reared by the
television set. By 1952, there were already 30 million TV sets in America; by
the end of the decade, the penetration in American homes was near universal.
This provided the basis for mass brainwashing, targeting especially the children
born since 1949.
It is important to understand that the brainwashers think in 'long time spans'.
They know that it is impossible to effect any significant change in social
values over anything but time-frames measured in several generations. Hence, the
messages presented in mass television programming in the 1950s, which were
planned to "play back" one and two decades hence. In the same way, what you and
your children are watching today, will shape the first part of the next
millennium.
While your brainwashers think in "long periods of time", you are being induced
to think in shorter and shorter time-frames. Your attention span is shrinking
almost daily. For example, the average half-hour television show is broken into
at least four segments, with usually the longest running no more than five to
six minutes, with the remaining portions occupied by commercials, theme and
credits. Television news presents items in 30 second bites, with slightly longer
feature pieces. The very nature of the majority of your television viewing makes
it impossible to consider difficult concepts, especially developments over long
periods of time.
Cultural Warfare
Your brainwashers themselves actually fall into two major categories. They both
have the same world view -- the concept of Man as a beast, to be controlled and
manipulated like an animal -- but there is a division of responsibility between
them. There are the people like Emery and Trist and others at places like
Tavistock, who create and analyze mechanisms for brainwashing, who study the
effects of this brainwashing with what are called 'profiles', and who make
recommendations on how to do it better. They work as social psychologists, and
in similar professions.
Then, there are the people who create the "idea content" of the brainwashing.
They operate on the culture or 'paradigm', as we have explained -- the sets of
axioms that govern the way we think. These are the "cultural warfare" experts,
who create the value systems which are, in turn, imposed on the society by the
brainwashing mechanisms, such as television.
In the late 1930s and during the war, operatives of the Frankfurt School were
involved in major studies of mass radio programming, and their ultimate effects
upon the population. Their work, with Tavistock-linked personnel, in what was
known as the Princeton "Radio Project", provided important conceptual material
for later, mass television brainwashing.
One of the key early pioneers in television brainwashing techniques was Theodor
Adorno, a Frankfurt School operative and a former member of the "Radio Project."
Adorno shared the bestial outlook of the neo-Freudians, developing, along with
others associated with the Frankfurt School network, a perverse theory on the
use of mass communications technology for mass brainwashing. Given the
appropriate message content, said Adorno, media such as television and radio,
could be used to make people "forcibly retarded." An adult personality could be
reduced, through interaction with mass media, to a more primitive, childish or
infantile state.
In a 1938 report, Adorno compares the retardation capability of existing media.
Radio has one level of effect, but sound film is an even more powerful
"retardant," Adorno indicates. Television is yet another level more powerful,
said Adorno in 1944:
"Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because
the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will
be quite enormous and promise to intensify the overall impoverishment of
aesthetic matter so drastically...."
In the minds of Adorno and his "fellow travelers," the power to control the new
medium meant the power to determine and control the values of society:
"Television is a medium of undreamed of psychological control," Adorno wrote in
1956.
That same year, Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Television and the Patterns of
Mass Culture" that elaborated on the brainwashing techniques that could be
employed with television. It was intended as a cookbook and discussion guide for
people involved with the programming. For people like ourselves, intended
television brainwash victims, it provides insight into how the messages in the
programming can be "decoded."
Outlining his study, Adorno writes, "We will investigate systematically
socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material on both the
descriptive and psychodynamic levels, in order to analyze their presuppositions,
as well as their total pattern, and to evaluate the effect they are likely to
produce. This procedure may ultimately bring forth a number of recommendations
on how to deal with these stimuli in order to produce the most desirable
effect..."
Adorno states that all television programming contains an 'overt' message as
defined by plot, characters, etc. in the images presented and a 'hidden' message
that is less obvious, and is defined by the larger intent of those presenting
the images. These "hidden messages" are the brainwashing content, while the
"overt" message -- the plot, etc. -- is the "carrier" of that brainwash content.
The "hidden message" operates on the mind so as to cause "value conflict" over a
period of time. As we have stated before, the conflict will not surface
immediately, but occurs over generational time spans. The "hidden message" in a
show may not surface for 10-20 years as a change in attitudes of the majority of
the population, but Adorno asserts that "it will ultimately surface". This is
the concept of 'playback' to which we have referred in other sections of this
report.
Those 'Wholesome' Shows
To make his point, Adorno unmasks the "hidden message" of a number of popular
shows of the early television period.
"Our Miss Brooks", a popular situation comedy (sitcom), pitted a trained
professional, a school teacher, against her boss, the principal. Most of the
humor, according to Adorno, was derived from situations in which the underpaid
teacher tried to hustle a meal from her friends.
Adorno "decodes" the "hidden message" as follows:
"If you are humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and charming as she [Miss
Brooks] is, do not worry about being paid a starvation wage. You can cope with
your frustration in a humorous way and your superior wit and cleverness put you
not only above material privations, but also above the rest of Mankind."
This 'message' will be called forth years hence, as the economy collapses in the
form of a "cynical anti-materialism." It came forth with a vengeance among the
1960s "lost generation," and the first wave of the "counterculture."
Generalizing from this, Adorno points out that it is "social tension and stress"
that call forth the television images of "pyschodynamic stereotypes", the role
models and images from the early television viewing. The more confusing life
becomes, the "more people cling desperately to clichés in order to bring order
to the otherwise un-understandable," Adorno says.
Another "decoding" by Adorno emphasizes this point. Remember the show, "My
Little Margie"? The heroine of this sitcom was a pretty girl who played "merry
pranks" on her father, who is portrayed as well-meaning but stupid.
Adorno says that the "hidden message" is the image of an aggressive female
successfully dominating and manipulating the male father-figure. He "predicts"
that years later, that young girls will increasingly mirror this image of the
"bitch-heroine." Little Margie is the role model image for the feminist movement
of the 1960s and 1970s that took off as the "My Little Margie" viewers grew up.
The messages need not be contained within a single show; they could be
transmitted through a series of images contained as primary or secondary
features within "several shows". For example, Adorno indicates that several
shows featured characters who were artistic, sensitive, and effeminate males.
Such images cohered with Freudian notions that artistic creativity stemmed from
either a repressed or actual homosexual passion. These effeminate, sensitive
males usually come up against the other more aggressive male "macho" images,
such as cowboys, who are uncreative.
Recognizing the psychological power in the "hidden image", Adorno predicts that
the "creative sissy" will find an "important" place in society. Such images are
"playing back" today in the spread of homosexuality throughout society, and in
all creative arts.
Television's Killing of God
One of the fundamental relationships that defines our civilization is that of
Man to God. That relationship is mediated through organized religion. It is
religion that teaches the values and 'axioms' of western Christian civilization,
which creates in the individual the capacity for moral judgment that must inform
our reasoning processes.
As we have explained in another section of this report, the evil Sigmund Freud,
whose mass psychology became the basis for theories of mass brainwashing, hated
all religious belief, precisely because it told Man that He was endowed with
divine powers to perfect His existence. According to Freud, this belief, the
root of our moral conscience, brought Man into conflict with his more infantile
desires, thus causing neuroses.
Freud's system and its variants in social psychology must deny the
perfectibility of the soul, as described by Dante as the passage of Man from the
Inferno, through Purgatory, to Paradise. Man, the two-legged animal, must not
aspire to be any more than He is, a beast, at war with Himself, whose base
emotions must be repressed and controlled.
In the early 1950s, the majority of Americans still actively worshiped God in
churches and synagogues. The practice of religious belief was an "axiomatic
assumption" of American life, even if Americans did not always act according to
those beliefs. Television could not "actively and openly" attack this; to do
that would bring down the wrath of an angry nation on the new medium, and lose
its potential hold over the population.
So the programmers took another tact -- "Television shows made organized
religious belief invisible; made it disappear from the screen". Studies of the
content of television shows in the 1950s show almost no references to
church-going or religious activities.
Think about such shows as "Leave It to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best". Do you
ever remember those families going to church or discussing religious beliefs? Do
you even know what faith those families were? You don't because they never told
you ─ They never discussed such matters.
Most importantly, when these families had problems, did they ever turn to their
church or their religious leaders as resources to help solve them? Never. They
were all worked out within the family -- in the absence of organized religion or
religious beliefs. The family and its values were thus 'secularized', and what
were once called moral and religious values became known as "family values" -- a
secular belief structure that has nothing to do with fundamental values of
western Christian civilization.
This was the "hidden message" of those so-called wholesome family shows of the
1950s, the ones that some Moral Majority-types and people like Tipper Gore now
hold up as examples of a golden era of television!
The 'playback' came in the late 1960s, with the nation convulsed in generational
battles over values, triggered by the Vietnam conflict. Tavistock brainwasher
Fred Emery noted at the time that, unlike previous periods of social chaos, in
the late 1960s no one was turning to organized religion to help find a way out,
to seek more fundamental values that could bind together society and troubled
families alike. Instead, he describes the rise, especially among the
television-weaned baby boomers, of a "mystical anarchism" that rejected all
organized religion as false and "sought a new definition for God." This is the
"New Age," or the "Age of Aquarius," preached by Frankfurt School gurus like
Herbert Marcuse.
More recent surveys taken by Tavistock's population profilers show that fewer
people than ever before say that they hold "strong religious beliefs" of any
kind. A standard answer has a person saying that he was brought up religiously,
"but no longer practices any organized religion."
We're All Animals
Now, let us turn our attention to how the programmers created an identity
between Man and the animal.
One of the earliest forms of children's programming was cartoon shows. Often
those shows had human hosts, such as 'Bozo', or 'Terrytoon Circus's' Claude
Kirshner. But the majority of the content of the half-hour shows was the five to
six minute cartoons. Much was made in those early days about how silly and
innocuous the cartoons were, with some parents' groups complaining that there
should be more "content" in children's programming.
But they weren't innocuous. Almost every cartoon portrayed 'animals' acting as
if they were human beings. Studies of children who had a daily, steady diet of
television cartoons show that the kids lost their ability to see the difference
between most animals and human life ─ instead the animal kingdom appeared to
mirror human society. The children identified with certain animals as "heroes"
and feared others as dangerous "bad guys".
The same kind of cartoon fare had been available to Saturday matinee and other
movie audiences. But children went to the movies at most once or twice a week,
for an hour or two. During the first 10 years of television, children aged 2 to
10 watched more hours of cartoons than they spent doing any other activity. They
received more than an hour and a half a day worth of cartoon brainwashing.
Toward the end of THE decade, the cartoon shows started to mirror adult
television ─ "Yogi Bear" and other Hanna-Barbera features were put in the weekly
series format, to create a regular, habituated audience. As some of the
programmers predicted, this format also drew adult audiences to the cartoon
series.
That Lousy Mouse
The most powerful of the children's shows were produced by Walt Disney Studios,
which had years of experience in producing a mass brainwashing product directed
at children. Walt Disney and his brother Roy were both involved in the
production of propaganda films during World War II, overseen by the
Tavistock-dominated Committee for Morale. His studio was the first to produce
feature-length cartoons that incorporated human and animal characters. Disney
recognized that the cartoon, with its color and larger-than-life imagery, was
the perfect vehicle for carrying "messages" to children. His films, such as
"Sleeping Beauty" and "Snow White", were all aimed at becoming universal
experiences for generations of children and their parents, containing 'moral
messages' that would stay with a child through most of his or her life.
Thus, it was not surprising that the most popular children's show of the first
television decade was the "Mickey Mouse Club", which mixed cartoon, movie and
live interaction between human and animal characters.
The "Mickey Mouse Club" was "an experiment in mass brainwashing of children
through television". Around the show was built an actual club organization,
which by the end of the decade had more members than the Boy Scouts and Girl
Scouts combined. Along with membership came a club magazine and other items
which, in turn, suggested other group activities, which usually meant the
purchase of some Disney-licensed toys and paraphernalia.
Each child at home was "indoctrinated" in a membership ritual, with prompting
from the television, and was urged to sing-along with songs, with words flashed
on the screen, and chant things as instructed by their television group leader.
They did so while wearing their "mouse ears," which were designed to make them
identify with an animal figure, Mickey Mouse.
At the end of each show, there was a sermon by the "group leader," a young adult
male, whose preaching was reinforced by statements from the "live" Mouseketeers
in the studio, each of whom was known only by his or her first name. The sermon
usually spoke of the need to honor parents and other family members, and to do
"good" things for little creatures and other little children. All of this was
done while children at home and on the stage wore their ears and gave their
"club salute."
There had been other children's clubs before, around radio shows such as
"Captain Midnight," and around television figures like Roy Rogers or "Howdy
Doody," but nothing on the scale of Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, and nothing
organized around identification with an animal. American children had been given
a new pagan-like religion, and its god was a mouse!
The parents saw nothing wrong in this. The mouse, through his surrogate, his
human spokesman on the show, Jimmy, supported "American values." Children were
being "taught" to respect their parents, to be "patriotic" and to act
well-behaved. The parents were happy to let a mouse, or rather television,
through a mouse, give those values to a generation of children.
Reflect for a moment on a different time and a different place. There was
another generation of children whose values were given to them in an organized
form from someone other than their parents. The "Hitler Youth" of Nazi Germany.
They too had their rituals, their uniforms and symbols, and their songs. They
too had their leaders, who preached sermons. And they too were "taught" to be
"patriotic" and respect their parents, and to always be polite and well-behaved.
Remember what we said ─ the Nazi state and values without the Nazi baggage.
Mickey Mouse, the Fuhrer? Makes you think for a moment, doesn't it?
Those Murderous Animals
One of the "values" that was inserted into the various serial adventures within
the "Mickey Mouse Club's" format was the need to protect "little creatures" and
"Nature" against greedy man, who would destroy them to make money. Similar
themes were contained in the prime time "Walt Disney Presents" series.
Meanwhile, other more "standard" format shows, such as "Lassie" and "Rin Tin
Tin" created further identification between children and the animals. In these
shows, the animal was the "hero," who often defeated bad people, sometimes
without the help of any human intervention. In each case, the shows featured a
young boy or girl, who was protected by the animal (in the two cases cited,
dogs). As later brainwashers' studies found, this made the images on the screen
easier for the children viewers to identify with.
All of this identification with the animal, and the blurring of the distinction
between what is human and what is animal, "played back" a generation later in
the lunacy of the environmental movement.
Now, it's 1990. Those nice stories about "cute little animals" have turned a bit
gruesome. The average nature show, whether it be on cable, on the networks, or
on public television, shows animals killing each other and copulating. Some of
the Moral Majority-types are a little squeamish about the copulation, but they
apparently find little wrong with the violence.
The new shows have the blessing and the guidance of various psychologists, who
have profiled children's responses to the animal gore and sex. They openly state
that the shows provide lessons for children about "human behavior", since the
animals merely reflect the darker side of Man's own nature. Eli Rubinstein, a
psychologist working on the American Psychological Association's task force on
television and society, claims the violent nature documentaries "puts human
behavior in context". He says that parents should watch such shows with kids so
that they can use them constructively to "reinforce positive human behavior".
Such shows are especially good at explaining to children why it is bad to create
large populations. The children can see that unregulated population growth leads
to death and suffering, these brainwashers say.
Thus, the next generation of children are to be told that they are to mimic
"good" animal behavior and avoid the more nasty stuff. We don't want too many
children, now, do we? And you tolerate this brainwashing and may even
participate in it, as the psychologists "recommend". This is where those
cartoons and Mickey Mouse have led us.
Next time you're around an environmentalist over 35 years of age, ask him if he
still has his "mouse ears."
And Justice For All
Now, let's take a look at another brainwashing message, "justice, as carried out
by law enforcement officers", and see how television handled it. Here we will
see how the hidden message shifts to an increasingly more fascist outlook.
In the first decade of television, the image of law enforcement was conveyed in
both the westerns and the so-called "cops and robbers" shows. Children watched
both, since they were on during prime time and were among the most popular
viewing for families.
Usually, the law enforcement officers were either the heroes, or major secondary
characters, who worked with the heroes in order to solve problems. The sheriff
or the detective or police officer was the "good" guy, who risked his life to
protect citizens from "bad" criminals.
The simple message delivered was "crime doesn't pay." What was crime or criminal
activity? Anything that violated the law. And what determined the law? On what
principles was a society governed by law founded? Certainly not on the concepts
of charity and justice contained in the Bible or on the concepts of Natural Law
embodied in our Constitution. At best, what was shown was that the law was based
on a "social contract" in order to control the worst elements in society. At
worst, it was shown to be based only on retributive justice ─ "an eye for an
eye". As studies of the program content of such shows as "Gunsmoke", "The
Untouchables", or "Dragnet", show often that such "justice" was swift and final
─ More often than not the "bad guy" wound up dead, without any trial.
As television entered its second decade, the brainwashers altered the
programming content. With the baby boomers approaching adolescence, new shows
started portraying the "corruption" in society and the legal system. The series
"The Fugitive," for example, featured as a hero a man wrongly convicted of
murder, running from the law while trying to find the person who framed him.
Each episode showed the corruption in the society around him, including corrupt
lawyers and police officers. Other shows had plot lines with the message that
crime was a "sociological problem", and that "justice could not be found inside
the "system".
Such images, imprinted on the minds of impressionable adolescents and children
growing up, 'played back' during the "revolution" against the social order in
the late 1960s. (In this case they turned out to be all to true though)
More recently, television provided new messages telling viewers that the
"system" had become so corrupt, and that the corruption was everywhere ─ Judges
were crooked, law enforcement officials were crooked, etc. The heroes of shows
are now people who operate outside any law, who bring people to justice one way
or another, Rambo-style. A new fascist vigilantism is being organized by such
shows as "Dark Justice" about a judge, who seeks to destroy people whom he
cannot convict in his courtroom. The brainwashing message is that Constitutional
law is itself a means to protect only the criminals and must be side-stepped in
order to achieve "justice".
This message finds no contradiction in the images from 35 years ago that lie in
the recesses of the minds of the baby boomers. The westerns and "cops and
robbers" shows told you that justice is defined by the "eye for an eye" dictum,
and that most often it was found at the barrel of a gun.
The Sexual Revolution
Finally, let's turn our attention to one of the most discussed questions about
television programming -- the widespread sexual content of shows. A flip through
the dial makes it obvious that there is plenty of every kind of sex one could
imagine on the tube, and what isn't shown explicitly in network prime time, is
implied in dialogue. But it wasn't always that way. Again, we will see how the
images have shifted, to that of an increasingly debased level.
Let's go back to the 1950s again, when the brainwashing of the baby boomers
started. In the early television shows, there was no depiction of any sexual
activity and almost no discussion of the matter. Those early shows supposedly
featured "wholesome" family situations, at least if you believe what some of
today's television's critics now tell us. But the brainwashing message was more
subtle. It didn't rely on visual image or dialogue.
It is important that we make some distinctions about "love" and "sex." The very
fact that people focus on "sex" or "sexual activity" already reflects a
debasement of fundamental human emotions into their most carnal. We must draw a
distinction between what is commonly called "sex" or "love," and the concept of
Christian love, known as 'Agape'. Man, as distinct from the beast, can
experience love, in its most profound sense, as separated from the instinctual
cravings of animals, and to experience such love is joyful.
There is no separation of the mind from such emotion, no split between emotion
and reason, in this most fundamental sense of the concept of love or 'Agape'. It
is this concept of love, as in Man's love of God, that is the fundamental
emotion, that truly makes Man human. To say that all human society is
fundamentally based on Man's love of God and his fellow man is not incorrect.
To reduce love to simple emotion, and to further reduce it to a sexual
attraction, is a degradation of Man. The Freudian paradigm and all its
derivatives deny the existence of a love that is anything different than carnal
or romantic. Any other kind of love is defined as "neurotic", the product of a
denial of man's basic 'animal' instincts. In the Freudian system, 'Agape' has
been replaced by 'eros', whose carnal cravings must determine all human
relationships.
There is no better example of 'Agape' than the love and joy that a parent feels
in seeing his or her child develop into a reasoning human being. The tears of
joy that come to parents' eyes when they see a child understand something for
the first time are indicative of a profound emotional experience. This
'fundamental' emotional experience puts Man in touch with His human identity.
The goal of the brainwashers was to destroy 'Agape', using television as their
weapon. Over a period of several generations, television would steer Man away
from 'Agape', and place Him under the thrall of 'eros'.
As we have stated, the earliest television was in no way sexually explicit or
even implicit. The prevailing morality within the society, although weakened by
hedonistic pursuits, would still not tolerate that. Instead, what was presented
were simple 'romantic' notions or no notions of love at all. Furthermore,
studies done during this early period revealed that early television reinforced
infantile concepts about "boy meets girl" and "infatuation" which, in turn,
reinforced "common knowledge" among children and adolescents about human
relationships. The Frankfurt School crowd realized that by presenting no
'positive' concept of loving, they were helping to "wipe the slate clean",
leaving the door open for more debased images at a later point.
But there was another flank to the attack on 'Agape', one with a more "hidden"
message. Emery and others studying early television found that such shows as
"Father Knows Best", "Ozzie and Harriet", and "Leave It to Beaver", had a
secondary effect on the children viewing them. The fictional parents were
portrayed as "perfect," without flaws.
No real world situations were actually solved so perfectly. Tension was thus
created between the 'image' of the "perfect parents" that appeared on the screen
and the 'real' parents who lived in the children's homes -- The latter could
never measure up to the former.
Meanwhile, the parents, who watched these shows with their children, were being
shown television images of kids who were nothing like the real thing - They were
too "good", too well-behaved, too respectful. When they tried to measure their
own kids against the tube's images of children, they found their own wanting.
The brainwashers noted that this was the first generation whose images of
parents and children were coming into conflict with reality. An obvious
conclusion can be drawn -- the early television programming message 'played
back' in the generational war of the late 1960s, when the tension exploded into
anger and rage.
As the baby boomers reached adolescence, they were bombarded with new, more
degraded images of "love", and "love-making", which were to prepare the way for
the next phases of the "sexual revolution". Only ten years earlier, the images
and situations of "Love, American Style" or "MASH" would have been unthinkable
to put on television.
A new image started to enter the scene ─ the shattering of the nuclear family,
the fundamental unit by which society is reproduced. In the early 1970s, shows
featuring unwed mothers, extramarital affairs, adultery, and people "living
together" out of wedlock were widespread. Sex and sexual references were
everywhere on prime time.
A study was done comparing a week of prime time shows during 1975, 1977 and
1978, which shows how fast this "carnalization of America" was spreading:
"Contextually implied intercourse increased from no weekly occurrences in 1975
to 15 in 1977 and 24 in 1978; sexual innuendoes increased in frequency from
about one reference per hour in 1975 to 7 in 1977 to 11 in 1978. Most
dramatically, verbal references to intercourse increased from 2 occurrences in
1975 to 6 references in 1977 to 53[!] in 1978..."
It isn't just the amount of sex being shown and referred to on television, but
the 'messages' that accompany it. For example, in the early period of
television, which we will define for our purposes as prior to the 1969 season, a
study done by a research team and published in the excellent source book
"Watching America", showed that 38 percent of shows "presented extramarital
affairs as wrong. The proportion dropped to 7 percent after 1970. Before 1970,
none of the shows ever portrayed recreational sex as acceptable without
qualification. In prime time's passionate world of the 1970s and 1980s, 41
percent of the shows viewed portrayed recreational sex as acceptable without
qualification, and 33 percent made no moral judgment."
The same book notes:
"On the TV screen, sex is usually without consequence, without worry and with
rarely a bad experience."
The images of the 1970s are 'playing back' with a vengeance in the 1980s and
1990s. There is an important point to be made here. While changes in values do
not occur overnight, they are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. This has
to do with the cumulative effect of television brainwashing on an increasingly
amoral and immoral population. "As morality collapses and breaks down, there is
less resistance to suggestion in the individual."
The authors of "Watching America" sum up television's view of 'eros', and what
the message is that television delivers to its brainwash victims:
"Today television is both willing to talk about sex and tell the truth about it
as the Hollywood community sees the truth. That truth is roughly, that sex is
important, it needs to be dealt with, in all its diverse expressions, and those
who would suppress it from popular entertainment are doing the mass audience a
disservice. Indeed, the real villains on programs that deal with sexual issues
are...the Moral Majoritarians who would deny romance its natural physical
expression, restrict free expression and much-needed information, or condemn
'deviant' social victims like gays and prostitutes who are no different than the
rest of us, except in one minor regard ─ their sex lives. As for extramarital
sex, it's a fact of life, which popular entertainment would be foolish to ignore
or treat moralistically according to outmoded standards."
They note that television, with its power, need not be direct in its advocacy:
"As a leading form of mass entertainment, television rarely mounts the
barricades. Instead, it breaks down barriers one by one, gradually extending the
limits of social acceptability."
How well this brainwashing has worked is reflected in some new reports from the
Census Bureau, based on 1990 data.
Some 61 percent of all adults are wed, compared with 72 percent in 1970.
In 1970, 85 percent of all children under the age of 18 lived with two parents;
now only 72 percent do. Divorce caused 37 percent of the single-parent homes. In
33 percent of the single-parent homes, the parent has 'never' married.
In a reflection of the infantilism that now grips society, these reports also
show that a larger number of youth, aged 20-30, continue to live at home with
their parents than at any time in recent history, be they single or married and
"regardless of economic circumstances".
Brainwashing by Remote Control
In the early days of television, the Hollywood-based programmers were 'directly'
influenced by Frankfurt School operatives. Now, most of the people in charge of
programming, both in writing and producing shows and determining which of those
produced make it on the air, are in the approximate 35- to 45-year-old age
range. In other words, the programmers themselves have been brainwashed by 40
years of television programming! To use a television metaphor, "the brainwashing
is now taking place on remote control".
This is confirmed by a profile made by the authors of "Watching America". Their
survey of a random sampling of the top 350 people involved in television
programming reveals the debased moral value structure that now determines what
you watch:
* some 73 percent of this crowd comes from either the Boston-Washington corridor
or California.
* Although 93 percent had a religious upbringing (59 percent were Jewish), 45
percent claimed no religious affiliation or belief in God; those who said that
they had retained some religious faith, said that their religious affiliations
were nominal; 93 percent said they seldom or never attended religious services.
* some 75 percent described themselves as "left of center" politically and
"liberal". These "liberals", however, are strong believers in "free enterprise",
and almost all support the "free market system of economics".
* some 43 percent think that the American system of government and the
Constitution need a "complete restructuring".
* some 91 percent are in favor of unrestricted rights to abortion; 80 percent
believe that there is nothing wrong or abnormal about homosexuality, with 86
percent supporting the rights of homosexuals to teach in public schools. More
than 83 percent think that extramarital affairs are okay, while 51 percent do
not think that there is anything wrong with adultery.
In addition, nearly all support a radical environmentalist agenda to one degree
or another. No question was asked about whether they believed that Man was a
beast, but their other answers reveal that their answer would have been a
resounding "yes".
Finally, when asked which groups should influence American society the most,
they listed consumer groups and intellectuals at the top and religion at the
bottom. Two-thirds believed that it was their role to program television
entertainment to promote "their" social agenda.
Think back a moment to those figures from the Census Bureau on the American
family, which showed in statistical form the collapse of the nuclear family.
Can't you see the correlation between those figures and the degenerate values of
the television programmers?
You are being brainwashed
“Camera’s got them images, camera’s got them all…Nothing’s Shocking”.
“I have a vision…television!”
“Honey, where’s the remote?”
A funny thing happened to me about six months ago. See, being that I’m pursuing
a career in the entertainment/music/radio industry, I’ve been pretty broke. An
offset of my being broke is that I had to decide which expenses and bills to
keep and pay, and which ones I could do without or get away with not paying for.
I’ve eliminated such luxuries like buying new sneakers, switched from drinking
Guinness to drinking PBR, and, my hardest transition was going from smoking kind
nugs to cheap schwag. All of this took some adjustment but I began to fare well
with my new financial state.
One of the bills that I decided to blow off for “just a couple more weeks” was
my cable bill. The notices started coming more frequently and the phone calls
began, but I felt that I didn’t really need cable so it wasn’t on the top of my
priority list. Eventually, the digital part of my service was shut off and I was
left with just the basic channels. That lasted about two weeks until, finally,
the axe fell and I was left with a pair of rabbit ears that could pick up three
channels on a clear day.
My first few days without television were like the first few days a junkie tries
to kick heroin. I needed those Seinfeld reruns. My day wasn’t complete without
at least an hour of “I love the 80’s” on VH1. I didn’t know how I’d survive
without my ritualistic Sunday night Simpsons. How would I talk about Friends
with my friends?
It felt very similar to getting out of a relationship that both parties involved
knew was no good for the other, something I have also become something of an
expert on. Yes, breaking the habit of not watching television was the same as
breaking up with a bad girlfriend, but the true test was to see how long I could
go without that comfortable booty call.
After the first week or so, I started to feel less of a need to lay motionless
on the couch, scratching my nuts and farting into the same couch cushion every
night for upwards of three hours on end. I found myself writing and reading
more. I went to HACC and registered for some courses. I got my own business
going again and started working part time with a radio station. I go out and see
original music at least 5 nights a week. I genuinely feel as if I’ve just now
started to truly realize the world around me for what it is.
As the weeks went on and the momentum built from my new found energy, I began to
think more about why I hadn’t started doing all of the things I’m doing now
sooner. Was it the divorce? Was it the psychological toll that a custody battle
took on my mental constitution? Or, just maybe, could have it of been the fact
that I, just like every other American, was spending an average of 7.2 hours in
front of the television every single day?
That’s right! 7.2 hours of each day (on average) is spent staring at a
flickering screen filled with images that do nothing but distract, coerce, and
waste valuable time of the viewer. 49 hours of every week is what it adds up to.
Sure, right about now you may be saying, “Well I don’t watch TV for 7 hours
every day”. Sure you don’t. Not every day. But think about this: Have you ever
spent an entire weekend clutching the remote control as if it were a morphine
drip button after painful surgery? How many days off from work have you woke up
with Katie Couric, had lunch with Bob Barker, and went to bed with Raymond?
It all adds up to an average of 7.2 hours every day that we spend watching the
television, and in my experience, I can tell anyone reading this that your life
will become dramatically better if you just turn it off. Period.
In my 27 years, according to the institute that figured out that Americans watch
7.2 hours of television every day, 65,318 hours of my life has been spent in
front of the television. Holy shit. That’s a lot of hours. And what have I
gained by watching that much television in my life? Nothing.
Television is not real.
Nothing we see on the television is based on or presented to us in a realistic
setting. Sure, they try really hard to convince us that it’s real, but what is
reality? Reality is what we make of it. Reality is the color of the walls in
your bedroom; reality is the itch on your back that you just can’t reach;
reality, to me, is the notion that marriage is over rated; reality is the fact
that I’m not worried about my daughter getting stung by a bee or falling down
the stairs, because those things are going to happen; Reality is the fact that
I’m actually afraid of when she goes to kindergarten and has to pass her Hello
Kitty backpack through a fucking metal detector.
With the exception of The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and good old porn and movies,
the main purpose of the television and networks, it seems to have become, is to
force us into being bigger, more gluttonous, greedy consumers than we already
are. Sure, America is based on capitalism, but when did it become a requirement
for me to sit in front of an electrical box and be forced into a decadent mental
deterioration that is being brought on by massive psycho-seductive efforts
enlisted by multi-national corporations all fighting for dibs on my hard earned
money? Every image we see on the television is shown to us in order to convince
us that what we see is how it is, and I just am not buying what they’re selling
anymore. From what I’ve seen, what they’re telling us just doesn’t add up.
Question Authority.
Personally, I don’t like being told what to do. I’ve always had a problem with
authority and to me, the television seems like it has become the most respected,
and feared, authority that we know. Where do you go to get the scoop on what
semi-developed country Baby Bush has decided to go into and fuck with? Where do
you go to find out what all the cool kids are wearing to school this year? Where
do you go to sneak a glance into the life of some homogenized, dramatized,
idealized life of a family that you wish you were a part of?
Right after they tell you what to be afraid of (Sars, Y2K, Aids, child
pornographers, a suspect described as a black male in his 20’s, virtually anyone
of Middle Eastern descent, road-rage, air-rage, airbags, con-men, a suspect
described as a black male in his 20’s, killer bees, brain cancer from cell
phones, cell phones causing explosions at gas pumps, the imminent threat of a
terrorist attack at any given moment, Anthrax, West Nile, a suspect described as
a…get the picture?) they tell you what to buy. Go lower your cholesterol with
Cheerios and then brush your teeth with Colgate, pick your kids up from soccer
practice in the all new, gas guzzling SUV, make Kraft macaroni and cheese with
your Swanson fish sticks (and remember, Kraft is made by the good people that
bring us Marlboro cigarettes, Philip Morris), get that purple pill to keep it up
for the wife, and don’t forget the duct tape and plastic sheets, and then, if
you’re unemployed because of an accident, call Angino and Rovner and get the
compensation that you deserve. Sue somebody.
Know who I think I’m going to sue? ABCNBCCBSFOX. Yes, I’m going to sue them for
wasting 65, 318 hours of my time. I wonder how much I can get? The television
has given me plenty of skewed, spun, and unreliable information that I had to
un-learn in order to function properly again.
“But how do you get the news?”
The news. Ah, good ol’ Tom Brokaw. How about this theory: Ever stop and think
that “The News” is just another program that is “brought to you by our
sponsors”? That’s all it is. Your nightly news broadcast is no different than an
episode of Roseanne. How can I say that? Well, I’ll tell you. The news programs
that we watch are scripted, choreographed bits of fluffed up crap that are
sponsored by a variety of corporations. Yes, all of the things that they show us
on the news do actually happen, but it’s nothing news worthy and most times all
of the good news (good, in this case, meaning positive or heart-warming) hits
the cutting room floor because it’s not as interesting as someone getting shot
or a fire burning down three houses on 6th street. Notice this next time you see
a segment on 20/20 about how unsafe your car is: immediately following the
broadcast about car safety or dangers, I guarantee you that you will see a
commercial for Volvo, or Volkswagen, or Subaru telling you how safe this new
$32,000 MSRP piece of machinery is. Brainwashing.
TV-A
I’ve spoke with a lot of people about kicking the habit and I get almost the
same response every time: “I don’t watch that much TV.” Know what that sounds
like to me? An alcoholic saying “I don’t drink that much” or a smoker saying “I
really need to quit”. Television can be considered an addiction. That’s a good
way to look at it if you truly want to eliminate it from your life. You need to
tell yourself that you’ll be all right without CSI or RAW! on a Monday night.
Trust me, you will be able to get to sleep without the 11:00 news flickering in
the background with the sleep timer set on “90”.
Know what else is interesting to me? Now, being an ex-watcher, I notice how many
times during a typical day that people reference or mention TV in conversation.
It’s crazy! It’s almost as if the television is the most interesting thing in
peoples lives. When in reality, it’s a box of transistors and wires blaring
enticing images with the sole purpose of selling you something. And I’m not just
talking about the commercials either. The following is taken directly from
author Ron Kaufman who published this on the Website
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com (go ahead, click the link…just make sure you come
back and finish reading my article).
The Beautiful People Syndrome is what happens when you watch too much TV. You
begin to believe, or expect, regular people to act, behave, and look like
television stars. Does TV imitate life, or does life imitate TV, or does both
happen? Television images portray people as beautiful, smart, wealthy,
quick-witted, creative, instantly compelling, and exciting. Television wouldn't
be worth watching, for those who watch, if it wasn't unbelievably interesting.
In the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, New York University Professor Neil
Postman explains how television has changed modern imagery: "It is implausible
to imagine that anyone like our 27th President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred
pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in
today's world. The shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of
his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing or on the radio . . . but it
is quite relevant on television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image,
even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties
conveyed by speech."
Postman goes on to explain that "on television, discourse is conducted largely
through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation
in images, not words . . . You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its
form works against the content."
After watching hours and hours and hours of television imagery, those "Beautiful
People" will become burned into your mind. The handsome, pretty, skinny and
witty characters on the show "Friends" are more famous than writers, poets,
politicians and more important than teachers, policemen, or firemen. The
characters on "Friends" or "Ally McBeal" live the lives we all should live --
and they don't even have to work that hard.
The Beautiful People Syndrome is attacking the psyche of television-addicted
America. For a man, if you are not 6'1'', handsome and wealthy you are not
ideal. Any woman who isn't bone-thin with a large chest certainly is below the
standard. Television is warping the American mind. Unfortunately, the
Americanization of the rest of the world may contribute to mind-warping
worldwide. Everyone wants to be one of the beautiful television people.
And now, a word from our sponsors:
So what should we do about this television thing? Most likely, a lot of you will
just keep watching. Some of you will actually close your web browser, disconnect
from the internet, go lay down on the couch, and turn on your TV. And that’s
okay; just do me a favor? Next time you’re watching some kid in the mall in Camp
Hill strut around like a street thug from The Bronx, or your kid tells you that
she absolutely has “to have the new DVD from Jessica Simpson” that she saw on
MTV, or your annoying co-worker feels obliged to engage you in a conversation
about which American Idol character he thinks Simon should take it easy on, just
remember this: it’s not too late to turn it off.