Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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The schizophrenic, says Tausk, does not learn to make this distinction and cannot tell which images emanate from inside the mind and which are connected to experiences in the world. At this point, all experience, whether internally generated or the result of an interaction with the world, is equal. Projections of the mind take on the same quality as direct experience of the world. One's experience of the world becomes unreliable, as do one's own thought processes. Both become floating, unrooted. All are equally internal and equally external.

At this point, Tausk suggests, the patient will create an "influencing machine" fantasy as a physical manifestation of the confusion. Capable of implanting images which are in the form of rays, capable of implanting alien realities outside of one's own experiences, capable of changing one's feelings, this machine "causes"—the patient to fall into a state of utter confusion about what is real and what is not, what is internal and what is external.

Doubtless you have noticed that this "influencing machine" sounds an awful lot like television. The mystery is how the phenomenon could have existed in 1918 before the apparatus was invented. Dare I suggest that television was invented by people similarly preoccupied, as an outward manifestation of their minds?

In any event, there is no question that television does what the schizophrenic fantasy says it does. It places in our minds images of realities which are outside our experience. The pictures come in the form of rays from a box. They cause changes in feeling and, as we will see, utter confusion as to what is real and what is not. All reality becomes ethereal, existing only in our minds.

Like the machine of Tausk's suffering patients, television is a final manifestation of an already apparent confusion. This confusion existed at the time Tausk was writing, but it has now been institutionalized by the ubiquitousness of the artificial environments we live in. A real world which cannot be questioned has been submerged beneath a reconstructed, human-created world. We live inside the manifestations of human minds. Like the child seeking outside connection, we find only the projections of other humans. We can't know the natural from the artificial, since the processes that would reveal that are nowhere visible. We are cut off, floating in space, living within a nationwide sense-deprivation tank. We see a stimulus, a light, and we cling to it. It becomes everything. It causes images in our brain. We call this experience, but we can't tell if it is our experience or something else. It is in our heads, but we didn't create it. We don't know if it is real or it isn't. We can't stop the broadcasts. We accept whatever comes. One vision is equal to the next. One thought is as good as the next. All information merges. All experience merges. We take everything on faith. One explanation is the same as the next one. Contradictions do not exist. We have lost control of our minds. We are all lost in space. Our world exists only in memory. Everything is arbitrary. TV is the guru speaking reality. We have merged with the influencing machine. We are the Solaris astronauts.

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