Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

We have had to re-create ourselves to fit. We have had to reshape our very personalities to be competitive, aggressive, mentally fast, charming and manipulative. These qualities succeed in today's world and offer survival and some measure of satisfaction within the cycle of work-consume, work-consume, work consume. As for any dormant anxieties or unreconstructed internal wilderness, these may be smoothed over by compulsive working, compulsive eating, compulsive buying, compulsive sex, and then our brands of soma: alcohol, Librium, Valium, Thorazine, marijuana and television.

Born within the walls of our reconstructed environment, unaware of any other, we are like the chimpanzee in the lab. We are making the best of a situation that seems as inevitable as it is ubiquitous. Participating in it is the only logical way to get along.

Yet there are people who do not adjust, who cannot be made satisfied or functional within these confines. They eventually fall out of the pattern. As you may have noticed, a lot of people seem to be going crazy these days. People are shooting each other as never before, walking the streets with blank stares, lying in doorways, making jail a way of life, or living off welfare. Others burst out, unable to contain their frustrations: beating children, torturing animals, forming gangs, or, on another level, among those who view these matters in terms of power, forming revolutionary movements.

These people are unable or unwilling to remake themselves to fit the given arrangement. In Huxley's world, all of them would be moved benevolently out of the system to islands. In Orwell's world they would be imprisoned and changed by torture and brainwashing. Our own world uses a combination of separation, removal and reconstruction, but there can never be any question of the enforcement of the overall model. If too many people fell out of the pattern, the whole system would be endangered. If even a small percentage of the population should step out of the cycle of button pushing—work-consume, work-consume—then we'd see the gross national product decline and the economy begin to disintegrate. After a time no one would deliver our food from afar, the buses would cease to run, jobs would disappear, hospitals would close, money would be useless, and having lost all individual skills of survival and all contact with the earth itself, people would experience craziness and a breakdown of order as the new reality.

Breaking the Skin Barrier

Given how critical it is to keep the production-consumption process flowing smoothly, advertising obviously occupies a place of considerable importance.

It has been assigned the specific duty of keeping people buying, buying, buying and therefore working, working, working to get the money to do so. It is the system invented to break the skin barrier, as it were, by entering the human being to reshape feelings and create more appropriate ones as need be.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print