TV: One Nation Under Control
Well, it sounds worse than it is. Most people know that human life is short, though a bit longer than for dogs, cats, and horses. As Hobbes once observed, “The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If the shoes fit . . .
For most of us, a few cheap pleasures and other soul-deadening “opiates” (thank you Marx) make life tolerable. If common people still read, they might agree with Thoreau that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” The song? Pop culture is full of them, as YouTube is witness.
Who cares if television is really just a liberal monopoly owned by a handful of unelected, but unknown investors from who knows where? It’s still the voice of the community and, even more importantly, it’s free to those with discounted large-screen televisions and antennas. Seen predictably every hour, the actors and news people are more real than any actual, dysfunctional family. At least there is a common core of politically-correct opinions and values (good, now that the church has lost its social sway).
Commercials are a boon to the general television-watching public. They make programming free-of-charge, so who cares if the “messages” contain hidden social engineering values that are, wisely so, consistent with other politically important agendas? Free is free, isn’t it?
No question that Internet streaming (Netflix and many other on-demand television options) contain no commercial brainwashing as such, but at least viewers can exercise critical thinking if their primary education made allowance for it.
Yet all programming is rife with pre-established values. Some wonderful, others anathema. If viewers want distraction for its own sake, then no problem. The unknown programmers become the big people who know better.
To add a moral conundrum, the Internet of the future, being the Great Brain that it is, can monitor all programming requests that you make–and can deliberately take them out of context to use against you if they want to. But make no mistake, the masses won’t have a clue–or come to your rescue.
