Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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(8] Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in terms of new and increasingly uprooted philosophy. Once you've established the prior seven conditions, this one is easy. Anything makes sense in a void. All channels are open, receptive and unquestioning. Formal mind structuring is simple. Most important, avoid naturalistic philosophies, they lead to uncontrollable awareness. The least resistible philosophies are the most arbitrary ones, those that make sense only in terms of themselves.

Popular Philosophy and Arbitrary Reality

There is considerable evidence that the science fiction vision of arbitrary reality inevitably leading to autocracy has already begun to materialize. We can see it in action in the quasi-religious philosophies that are now sweeping the country, gathering in millions of devotees.

The techniques used in gathering adherents to these burgeoning movements are startlingly similar in conception to 1984, Solaria, Brave New World and the eight-pointed list just offered. The results are also similar. Converts effectively submit to having their minds reconstructed along simpler, flat, narrow, but, most important, uprooted channels. This allows them to embrace arbitrary information as though it were grounded in concrete reality.

In a world where alienation and confusion are common conditions, these new philosophies offer a comforting mental order that accepts and absorbs all contradictions. The danger is that once people's minds are so simplified and receptive, they become vulnerable to any leader, guru or system of forces which understands the simplicity of the code and can speak the appropriate techospeak.

Like a mass of Manchurian candidates, the people whose minds have been retrained into passive channels by these technologically based processes are available at all times for imprinting. In this way they merge with and can accept advertising-mind, television-mind and other simplistic intrusions without the slightest belch of rejection.

I am going to be using eat as the example to show how thinking patterns are restructured, but not because it is any worse than any of the other currently popular systems. In many ways it is benign in comparison with Scientology or the mind control used by Reverend Moon. Neither is it worse than advertising and television.

However, est is interesting because it operates in a realm totally outside the media while nonetheless utterly recreating reality in an arbitrary form. In fact, its failure to realize its potential as a world movement stems from the failure of its founder, Werner Erhard, to grasp the use of the media, though he tries and tries.

The est training sessions are always held in huge hotel meeting rooms which have artificial light, air conditioning, no windows, and are characterized by the kind of nondecoration typical of such places.

Trainees are met by est graduates and trainers, all of whom wear coded name tags and amazingly similar clothes and facial expressions, cheerful like airline attendants in advertisements. Hard folding chairs are arranged in neat rows facing a stage and microphone. The instructions are absolute: no talking, no sitting with friends, no eating or drinking. In an eighteen-hour session, there is usually one short meal break, and one or two bathroom breaks. No moving around the room. No clocks. No taking notes.

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