SIGHTINGS



The Golden Road To
Unlimited Totalitarianism
- Conclusion Of Part One
By Diane Harvey <merak@sedona.net>
5-28-00
The Golden Road To Unlimited Totalitarianism - Part 4
 The Golden Road to Unlimited Totalitarianism - Part 3
  The Golden Road To Unlimited Totalitarianism - Part 2
  The Golden Road To Unlimited Totalitarianism - Part 1
 
Is it really so dire then, to sit in front of a tv or movie screen, voluntarily remove the contents of our own heads and replace them with the feelings, thoughts and motives of others? Don't we all do it on occasion and survive? Yes, we do, apparently. (Although- how would we know for sure?) There are two aspects to consider in this ritual drowning of ourselves in the normally murky oblivion we call entertainment. The first is the previously mentioned complete absence of personal self-existence. Not a problem? But a good working description of totalitarianism would be: the imposition of feelings, thoughts, and ideas on others. Then why lay down our discriminating minds and beg to receive implants of imposed ideas from who-knows-whose nefarious corporate brain?
 
 
Television could be a benign and useful tool IF the minds and motives behind it were free from all desire to impose stupification and robotic compliance in humanity. It is not, strictly speaking, the technology itself that is so dangerous. It isn't the hardware so much that annihilates consciousness. It's the deliberate and criminal use of scientific advances in knowledge to manipulate the human mind and emotional nature downward and backward. People watching a sacred drama unfold in ancient Greece were also in a light hypnotic trance, but this served them in absorbing a message that had genuine value to their lives. There is interesting work available which relates the various degrees of what we call trance states, or passive consciouness, to different kinds of religious and spiritual experience. Still, it stands to reason that passive consciousness is fraught with peril, to be managed with utmost discrimination. Or perhaps, we should let some other kind soul manage this for us?
 
Almost everything we are absorbing on tv and at the movies has been brought to us by a Thing calling itself a corporation. A corporation is a legal entity with all the rights of an individual human being (and then some, in reality). At the same time corporations have practically endless "rights", they have, surprise surprise, no human sense of responsibility whatsoever. If Frankenstein's Monster were to come alive today, he would lumber on up off the table, look around, and hasten to file articles of incorporation immediately. (Actually, of course this has already happened, but that's another story.) Corporate Things need to throw a discrete veil over their bald naked greed, and to generate public images of what warm caring fuzzy-bunnies they honest-to-goodness really are. But of course a corporation has as at the core nothing but a powerful single icy cold will-to-devour, instead of a human heart and a human mind. We have accepted this frightening Franken-fact about the foundations of our society at present, without much of a fuss, and have completely confused it with "the democratic process". Which is, of course, exactly what they wanted us to do. We are taught by the paradigm itself however to imagine there are only two possibilities here. If we feel it highly objectionable to base a social structure on outright bloody-minded vampire bat-ism, we must naturally therefore... be socialists, or communists, or worse!
 
Corporations have brilliantly used a great totalitarian device here, and leaped to all your conclusions for you, to save you the trouble of thinking at all. They have quite successfully imposed the idea on us that there are no possible alternatives to this revolting enslavement of the human soul to a dog-eat-dog level of life: except for previous failed systems! Faced with this false but powerfully imposed conundrum, most people give up the attempt to think any further. Yet this country was founded on a daring new experiment in human social engineering, never imagined, never thought of, and never tried out before. And not a single one of the great souls who devised the innovative form of a democratic system had greed as their motive. Quite the opposite: most of them paid for this most noble experiment personally, sacrificing their own health, wealth, happiness and lives. How could they ever have imagined an entire nation lolling about- in the time they can spare from direct unrelenting enslavement to the profit motive- being electronically entertained, while simultaneously undergoing a conscience-removal operation?
 
Separate these two, democracy and nonhuman Thingified corporate unchecked greediness, and consider as if for the first time the following obvious fact. Everything we are sipping up inside ourselves by sucking on the passive straw of tv and movie-watching has a singleminded original dark intent. In back of The Dance of the Seven Veils of superficial enjoyment lies the base Prime Mover: Profit-Without-A-God.
 
Entertainment amounts to passively accepting being manipulated and rearranged internally for someone else's profit, and your loss. Is this not an absolutely astonishing and disgusting concept? Most astonishing of all, we don't, by and large, object very strenuously. By "watching" (a better description would be "unconsciously internalizing") programs we are actually undergoing reprogramming ourselves by corporate interests. Our beloved entertainment is scientifically calculated to the last hair of a molecule...to methodically skin us alive. And we like it. It's so enjoyable.
 
If a tree falls in the forest of your mind, and you don't hear it, has it still fallen? Suppose our entire individual psychological ecosystems are being demolished while we curl so cozily on the couch? If we aren't aware of it, if we don't feel uncomfortable, it might somehow be OK, yes? And what if our own tiresome thoughts are being replaced by more interesting ones: why not share minds and go with the flow? Why be so picky and prickly about this? Why, it's just possible that Gene Roddenberry was the reincarnation of Homer, for example. The eternal urge to tell fascinating stories is a great and lasting, ever-recurring human good. Well, yes, that is clearly so. There are times when giving our minds over to others might be salutary, healthy and reasonable. But now we are talking about being extremely and consciously selective with a medium that presents us with the opposite practical effect: it automatically mesmerizes, regardless of content. Think of so vast a portion of humanity over the years, in an induced light hypnotic trance, subconsciously superglued to the overt and covert corporate message (BUYSEXBUYBUYDEATHCONSUMEHURTEATDEVOURMOREMOREMORE) emitted from tube and screen. The last half of the 20th century has seen the worst voluntary degredation of the human soul in recorded history. And the great "secret" engine of "Project Corral-the-Populace/Denature-and-Dumbdown" has been powered in large measure by the profoundly efficent dynamo of commercial entertainment.
 
There's an outstandingly horrifying example of what a single truely dark person can do to an entire planet, in the life and works of that revered popular icon, Walt Disney. Consciously or otherwise, this man and his productions systematically destroyed one of the most precious attributes of the soul in a large proportion of our most vulnerable population. He sold his ugly crude little cartoons to the world as "works of the imagination", purportedly stimulating to the fantasy-life of children. In reality this gargantuan takeover of children's imaginations by artistically vicious and stupid dumbed-down images accomplished precisely the opposite effect. This stands alone as one of the most successful psycholgically totalitarian con jobs of all time. To this day, most people do not know what a cartoon really is, what it does, and why it is the worst assault perpetrated on the souls of children in human history.
 
This Great Satan of the Entertainment Industry managed easily to sell his dark distorted nightmares of banality to the world: as "cute". Right here is a point of no return in the downfall of our natural commonsensical perception. One of our country's best poets, Walt Whitman, referring to the ineffable everyday glory of the created world, put it this way: "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion infidels." And so it is! To the eye that can still see, it is. And now, replacing this direct awareness of a quivering wee bundle of fabulous complexity (which only a very great poet and a normal child can see) we have something else. We have that mornonic, one-dimensional, hideously anthropomorphic, squeaky-speaking, jerkily gesticulating stick-figure Mickey. And an entire imaginative death-trap of a similarly badly fabricated ersatz animal-crowd to go with him. That's still not enough, either- more can be done here. So, presto, before you can say money-in-the-bank, we have an actual entire manifested hell-on-earth kitsch-world to go around all this. We have- Disneyland. Our children have been successfully programmed to beg to go there, and we have been equally well programmed to be unable to refuse. How cute.
 
There was no effective resistance whatsoever to this worst-case-scenario attack on the delicate and highly sensitive marvels of a child's perception. Before Uncle Walt, the divine faculty of imagination had not been surgically removed from the human mind on such a broad scale, or so thoroughly replaced by the imagery of complete idiocy. There were still exquisitely illustrated and beautifully written children's books, and a parent not too exhausted to read bedtime stories. Yes, these books still exist, but most children are more likely to be innocently undergoing the torments of the damned, in front of the tv.
 
Totalitarianism, quite rightly, has always feared and hated human creative imagination, and has always replaced it with the most visually and audibly brutalizing substitutes. And the place to start, as all totalitarian regimes know so well, is with the youngest, most innocent, and least able to protect themselves. Feed them the crudest eye-and-ear-offal as early as possible, and they will never ever know the difference. Corruption is complete only when you catch them young. The reason for this is simple. Children are chock-full of the tenderest and most sensitive unformulated feelings and perceptions. This sensitivity to impression and sweetness will be projected willy-nilly onto whatever in is their enviornment, good, bad or indifferent. We are designed to love, and to be impressed by the lives and activities around us. This is why, for example, an abused child will love a cruel parent as much as they can, just as a loved child will love a wonderful parent.
 
Totalitarian forces pushing all kinds and varieties of obvious unwholesomeness on children have understood this perfectly. They have aways liked to stomp right through this door of innocent receptivity, right on into the vulnerable loving souls of children. They have no trouble making themselves at home because a child has no natural defense system, no discrimination yet, against incoming impressions. Therefore, once they are in there, attaching the child's unconscious mind to their every bit of proffered nastiness, it takes a miracle to get them out. Children are the very essence of unthinking wholesale loyalty. It's a done deal, if darkness can just slither through unnoticed- meaning, wearing the most attractive mask the advertising department can buy.
 
To the unadulterated and developed imaginative faculty, banality or crudeness in art is one of the manifestations of artistic "original sin". It is registered as an aspect of primal imaginative evil. There was a good reason for this massive assault on the perception of a generation. Unfettered, unpoisoned positive imagination is the key to continual refinement of perception. Creative imagination is a soul attribute, and of extreme spiritual importance to the evolution of the human race. Children, of course, are in the most need of the highest visual and audible representations of refined human imagination. When these are replaced by products of uttermost simplistic subnatural dopeyness, a child's very perception itself, and growing emotional and mental interaction with the world, is short-circuited, stunted and paralyzed. Once the world accepted cartoon images as "cute", it was all over, for a while. Cartoons are to the imagination what a rotting corpse is to food. Yet hardly anyone noticed: tv and movies slipped this deadly Mickey to the soul of humanity with no trouble at all. And the public demand for this perpetual artistic chloroforming of the souls of children continues unabated. If you listen closely, and can bear to it, you can hear angels weep. _____
 
End of Part One: Death By Entertainment Note: Email will be read and appreciated (or otherwise) but not answered.

 
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