Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
Thinking openly and critically has become an art form in modern times. The ironic thing about having so much media is that there are actually only a few major media companies, and they all pretty much repeat their own messages and values on all of their platforms, and then these blurbs are repeated like ripples in a pond ad infinitum until the entire world is literally filled to saturation with these same ideas and hardly anyone can claim to have a single original thought at any time in their lives because everything they think is a reiteration of what has been jammed into their brains. This is a perfect storm for international brainwashing at its best.
The concept of an Orwellian media has been around for a long time, and so you would have thought that we would have been on high alert about this. The truth of the matter is that we are so highly fixated on our addiction to the media that we are like fish in a bowl who have no idea that we are even in water.
The Drudge Report/Fox News crowd is sure that it is the Liberal media that runs the world and that the socialist agenda is to turn us all into robots by taking our freedoms, taking our guns, forcing gay marriage, and a host of things that seem at the end of the day to be a paranoid nightmare. Some of my older friends who watch a steady stream of this stuff are terrified, and are only comforted by the blondes in the short skirts with curt trim voices and tiny waists who tell them that our new smaller government will cut the chains that bind us, and free the market to bound to new heights and a more secure universe, thank you, Jesus.
Our friends on the Huffington side have tried, however successfully, to frame the business people, the rich, the towering moguls of corporate greed, as the true perpetrators of this new nightmare. Everything that is being thrown at us is due to lobbyists, and the corporate hammer is coming at us like a totalitarian ghost, seeping into our lives one teraflop at a time. Every connection we make using any resource is another bit of our privacy eaten away, and we are being systematically groomed for becoming rats in a maze to do the bidding of the ultra-rich. Even those semi-well-to-do’s who now support the conservative agenda will become fodder once the secondary layers of government are installed, and we will all become a part of the matrix, so fooled and coddled that we will not even know that they have syphoned our blood right out from under us and funneled everything we have all worked so hard to build into the fortunes of the compassionless elite.
It’s all just too well-planned out, the team-against-team mentality. And it starts early with competition in sports, and ratings, and market share, and grades, and percentages concerning creating statistics out of everything until we are convinced of a them-against-us mentality, which then becomes a defensive posture of us-against-them for preventative strike measures, and now we have a generation of children who are growing up in a media war where if you engage to any degree you are asked to join in and hate someone for some reason to make sure that their agenda does not mess up your agenda, and this is going to go stressfully on forever and into our sleepless nights and heart attack days.
I meet people every day who start their world by tendriling out to find out who is conservative and who is liberal. Whatever they are, the other one is a heartless, blood-sucking bastard who only wants to mess with our children’s minds and steal their souls. Democracy is dead and this is a Republic! Huh, republican? Those rich people are just trying to make everything a corporate sponsorship so that everything is turned into capital gains and America does not produce anything anymore; we will have lost our ability to own the means of production and then it will all consist of investment banking and our becoming servants to the rich. This is the new feudal state, and the new kings of the corporations and the venture capitalists are taking the world over one data bank at a time, invading our privacy and stealing our souls…….and on and on.
Honestly, it makes for really good TV and movies. We have had the bejesus so scared out of us on so many occasions and so much so that we are like a flock of birds in formation. How are we ever going to gain a sense of thinking for ourselves when the entire array of conversations in front of us are simply reiterations of what the media systemically and retroflectively reproduces? I have actually left a conversation, Googled what the other party said, and seen it appear almost word for word on over 100 websites. People are just thumb drives in skins, walking around delivering preformatted messages. And they think of themselves as speaking freely, when in fact indoctrinated people sound like cult members who can only quote from the cult playbook.
And it really does not matter, as long as everyone picks a side and becomes polarized so that others are objectified and we are objectified and no one sees anyone else as being human and having mixed feelings about things, because then the media machines have done their work. Freedom to think depends on our being able to be persuaded if we are attempting to persuade others, and as long as we are only waiting for the other person to take a breath so we can jam their radar with our opposing message, we are not free thinkers. If I ask someone why he believes what he believes and he sites his media resource, I know that I am not looking at someone with a clue that he is, in fact, swimming in a sea of cult–like thinking.
What would it take for us to become objective? I don’t think that I am, completely, but I try to check myself all the time by talking to people from all sides of the equation. This guarantees nothing, but it does make me confront my own stereotyping, my objectifying, my taking my own message for granted, my sense of having a superior point of view, and my inner-insecurity about my own thinking. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, and yet the language we speak and the phrases we use are often so bent down a particular path that we hardly notice that we are merely all speaking, in some way, the party line. “Hey, my name is _____________, and I repeat as gospel whatever I hear in the media.”
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