Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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Living within this environment ultimately foists upon us a bizarre choice between two equally disconnected realities. We may decide to accept as real our artificially reconstructed human environment, ignoring that it is an arbitrary re-creation, and accepting this interpretation of reality as our own. Or we may recoil from it, allowing ourselves to see our new environment as a stage set or a series of false fronts. This is the way the schizophrenic often describes the world. Those who make the latter choice risk the dangers inherent in trying to understand the world solely through their own isolated internal mental processes.

Either choice, acceptance or rejection, separates us from the possibility of interacting with and learning from the organic reality which exists outside of human conception. But what we call sanity lies in the first choice, acceptance of the arbitrary as real.

Laing proposes, therefore, that the schizophrenic of today is not suffering a psychological problem with a personal cause so much as he or she is making an apt response to a true condition of the modern world that has a political or technological cause. The so-called sane are holding on by our teeth to an extremely flimsy and arbitrary framework of reality.

Thus far, political theorists have failed to make very much of the effect our modern environments have on us. Failing to grasp that the physical world we live in is itself arbitrary, and thereby likely to be confusing to masses of people who seek solid ground on which to stand, political observers have not made some critical deductions. Primary among these is that when people cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal. None of them can be understood as any more or any less connected to planetary truth. And so the person or forces capable of speaking most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic—even if it is an unrooted logic—can become convincing within the void of understanding.

Where political theorists have overlooked these phenomena, others have not.

Looking at today's worlds from the outside in, as it were, and extrapolating from here into the future, science fiction writers have often been politically visionary. In their analyses and uses of the relationships between artificial environments, high technology, sanity and insanity, and, therefore, the inevitabilityor more accurately-the fact of human mind control, some science fiction writers produce work that merges with political criticism.

A second category of people who have noticed the modern human relationships with the environment is the leadership of the new popular philosophical-religious movements, such as Scientology, est, Arica, Mind Dynamics and others. Unfortunately these leaders do not warn us of the consequences of the confusion, but instead take advantage of it.

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