Subject:   Turn Off Your TV: part 4

Turn Off Your TV--Part IV The Clockwork
Orange Society

by L. Wolfe


I'm back again. I won't even ask you
this time whether the television set is
turned off. By now, I hope, you realize
that it is impossible to think about
any important subject as long as it is
on. But in case {someone else} has
turned the set on, I'll give you a
chance to either turn it off or to go
to another room before we begin.
  The people who had put the Nazis
in power never gave up on the idea of
mass psychological brainwashing as a
means to maintain the power of the
oligarchical elite. They only
grudgingly acknowledged that the Nazi
model of social control, with its
requirement for total regimentation,
could not have universal application.
The question confronting the
brainwashers at such places as the
Tavistock Institute outside London was
how to create a Nazi state in the
United States without its now socially
unacceptable state terror apparatus.
  Americans returned home from
fighting a war in which they had
defeated a monstrous evil at great
human sacrifice. Those involved in the
war effort were thus focussed on the
{higher purpose} in life, the kind of
moral outlook that leads an individual
to be willing to sacrifice his life, if
necessary, to make the world a better
place to live in for someone who might
come after him, while giving renewed
meaning to achievements of past
generations. The war effort led to a
burst of {cultural optimism} in the
population, that made it seem that we
could do great things for all mankind.
  Now, look around at this miserable
nation of ours; it is hard to believe
that it is the same place as 40 or 50
years ago. For most people, there is
little or no purpose to life, except to
survive to the next day. Our people
have a deep-seated {cultural
pessimism}, and are cynical about
nearly everything.
  Now, think hard: over the last 40
years, while our moral outlook has
collapsed, what became a constant,
ever-present part of your life. That's
right, {television}, that box in your
living room. That realization is
necessary to understand what I am about
to tell you.

  The New `Leader'

  The evil Sigmund Freud, in his work
{Mass Psychology and the Analysis of
the I}, said that an individual's moral
inhibitions and outlook can be broken
down as part of a mass or crowd.
According to Freud, people in crowds or
masses behave as if they are
hypnotized: A person becomes more
infantile, and hence more like an
animal under such circumstances, and
loses the power to reason critically.
By using the power of mass suggestion,
a new outlook, based on different
ideals can then be substituted for
values a person had previously held.
  Freud says that each mass has a
leader, who serves the function of
hypnotist. It is to the leader that the
individuals in the crowd surrender
their ideals, and it is from the leader
that they receive their new values. It
is at the will and word of the leader,
that the mass or mob can be deployed.
  Freud claimed that the leader
principle worked as a brainwashing tool
because of some innate need of man to
be led; this merely betrayed his own
oligarchical outlook. He believed that man was
merely a two-legged animal, whose basic
animalism could be induced to come to
the fore in mass situations.
  Freud is wrong: Man is not an
animal; however, he can, under
conditions of mass psychosis, through
brainwashing techniques of the type
described, be made to {act as if he
were an animal}. The key to mass
brainwashing is to create the kinds of
{organized, controlled environments} in
which {tension} and {stress} can be
applied to break down morally informed
judgment, thereby making an individual
more susceptible to {suggestion}. Such
{controlled environments} are organized
so as to appeal to base emotionalism,
sensuality, and even
eroticism--``feelings'' that make man
``one with animals''--and not to man's
higher reasoning capabilities which
truly distinguishe him from the beast.
It is this fact, and not merely the
size of an event, that makes the
brainwashing possible.
  For the brainwashers, what was
required for a new system of mass
social control was a means to organize
a {mass appeal to emotionalism}; the
more overpowering and all encompassing
that appeal, the better. The more
infantile the population could be made,
the less their resistance to suggestion
and manipulation.
  In television, they found the tool
to make that constant appeal to
infantilism, organized on a mass basis.
It had the potential to reach into
{every} home, to reach {every} citizen
with a set of messages and suggestions.
It also had the ability through the
control and dissemination of
information, to create large
{controlled environments} by creating
your perceptions of events. {Television
is the new ``leader,'' the technolgical
equivalent of Hitler}.
  Writing in 1972 with Eric Trist,
formerly of the Wharton School and now
of the University of Toronto and the
leading Tavistock brainwasher in the
United States, Fred Emery says:
  ``We are suggesting that
television evokes a basic assumption of
{dependency}. It must evoke (this)
because it is essentially an emotional
and irrational activity.... Television
is the non-stop leader who provides
nourishment and protection.''
  Emery and Trist report that the
population has never been told this
about television and writing for a
handful of fellow brainwashers they are
now about to let this secret out:
``... the questioning and confrontation
of television has been put aside in
order to maintain its role as the
{leader} in the dependent mode.''
  They note that {all} television
has a dissociative effect on mental
capabilities, making people less able
to think rationally. Harkening back to
the studies of the Hitler experiment,
they find that this confirms the thesis
that ``the leader should be `mad' or a
`genius,' yet all the same people feel
compelled to believe that he is a
dependable leader.''
  Emery and Trist, after looking at
over 20 years of television
brainwashing, comment; ``In other
words, television can be partly seen as
a technological analyst of the
hypnotist.''
  The more you watch, the more
susceptible you become to suggestions
from your {leader}, the television.
``... It turns you off [to] reality and
time,'' Emery and Trist write,
commenting that comprehension of time
relationships and reality are required
for an individual to take reasoned, and
purposeful action.
  In looking at the effects of
habituated television watching, Emery
and Trist cite studies proving that it
does neurological damage: ``{Our thesis
is that television produces a quality
and quantity of habituation that
approximates the destruction of
critical anatomical structures}.''
  They report, however, that the
damage is not irreversible. The
neurological problems can be cleared up
within a few days of halting the six
to eight hours of daily viewing. The effects on
the ability to reason and on moral
value structures are far more difficult
to ``clear up'':
  ``Man can (therefore) be seduced
from purposeful functioning in such a
way that he is unable to become aware
of his deficit.''

  Social Turbulence

  Now, we are ready to look at what
the brainwashers and the oligarchs who
have deployed them have in store for
you.
  Many neo-Freudians have criticized
Freud for presenting too
biologically oriented a system. They
say that Freud failed to understand how
much of a role the {social environment}
plays in shaping the personality of the
individual. A new social psychology
must place an emphasis on the role of
tension-filled environments in shaping
the personality or the ``ego,''
producing regression to more infantile,
or ``id-like'' personalities.
  According the view of personality
held by Tavistock's Emery and Trist,
the {social environment} is either
{stable}, at which point, people are
more or less able to ``cope'' with what
is happening to them, or it is
{turbulent}, at which point people
either take actions to relieve the
tension, or they adapt to accept the
tension-filled environment. If the
{turbulence} does not cease, or if it
intensifies, then, at a certain point,
people cease being able to adapt in a
positive way. At that point, Emery and
Trist say, people become
{maladaptive}--they choose a response
to tension that degrades their lives.
They start to {repress reality},
denying its existence, and constructing
increasingly more infantile fantasies
that enable them to cope. All the
while, their lives are becoming
increasingly worse, when measured by
value structures of a short time
before; to avoid this contradiction,
people, under conditions of {increasing
social turbulence}, change their
values, yielding to new {degraded}
values, values that are less human and
more animal-like.
  Sound like a bunch of
gobbledegook? Well in a certain sense
it is: Morally reasoning individuals,
acultured by 2,000 years of Christian
civilization, do not think in such
ways. They would reject barbaric
choices, the so-called critical
choices, where none are good. They
would seek Truth, and by seeking Truth,
find ways out of the brainwashers' mind
trap.
  Forty years ago, our responses to
problems, and our moral outlook were
different. You would have probably
rejected the kinds of critical choices
you are offered today. But that was
{before television}: Forty years of
television have eroded your ability to
make moral choices, have steered you
into critical choices. You have
followed your {leader}, television,
down a path to Hell.

  Looking into Hell

  Twenty years ago, the
brainwashers, Emery and Trist, laid out
some scenarios for the future based on
a {permanent condition of social
turbulence}. There might be brief
periods of respite, but, according to
them, the world would become
increasinly more chaotic and violent.
  In the hands of those with the
power to make policy--to create the
{social turbulence}--what they have
written is a cookbook recipe for a
desired ``future.'' It were proper to
look at what they produced, back in
1972, as the psychological warfare
underpinning, the mass brainwashing
concept, behind the political doctrines
of such institutions as the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Trilateral
Commission. It for such people that
they were written.
  Their forecast--a period of
continuous turbulence, especially
economic turbulence leading to economic
decline--had its political corollary in
the CFR's {Project 1980s} reports drafted
in the mid-1970s. There, we find
reference to plans for the ``controlled
disintegration'' of the American
economy.
  In 1972, twenty years of
television-watching in the United
States and most of the West had left
populations with three basic
{maladaptive} scenarios for dealing
with the tension.
  One scenario is called
{superficiality}. It is a form of
psychological retreat, an attempt to
simplify choices. Tension, say Emery
and Trist, makes man desire to break
free of the emotional values formerly
placed on choices. A person reduces the
``value of his intentions, lowering the
emotional investment in the ends being
pursued, whether they be personally or
socially shared ends.... This strategy
can only be pursued by denying the
deeper roots of humanity that bind ...
people together on a personal level by
denying their individual psyche.''
  Emery and Trist, writing in the
Vietnam era, point to drug-soaked
rebellion of the ``flower children''
against society as an example of how
this scenario functions. Fighting an
increasingly senseless and brutal war,
the older generation begins to
ultimately accept the moral decadence
of the drug culture of its children,
rather than seek conflict. Society as a
whole accepts a {lower moral standard},
posited as a higher value.
  Citing the Frankfurt School
philosopher, Herbert Marcuse,
popularized by the 1960s
counterculture, Emery and Trist say
that under such conditions choice
becomes meaningless. What is important
is ``the moment,'' and ``the momentary
experience becomes all,'' they state.
  Quoting from Marcuse in his {One
Dimensional Man}, Emery and Trist say
that modern society is thus confronted
with ``the rational character of its
irrationality.''
  The organized societal response to
this process is best identified by
Aldous Huxley's {Brave New World}, the
drug-controlled society, in which there
are {no} individual moral choices. They
identify the 1960s counterculture as
``pioneers'' for this scenario.
  The second scenario involves the
{segmentation} of society into smaller
parts, of a size that one might be more
easily able to cope. ``There is an
enhancement of in-group and out-group
prejudices as people seek to simplify
their choices,'' say Emery and Trist.
``The natural line of social divisions
have emerged to become barricades.''
  In this scenario, it is every
group--ethnic, racial, sexual--against
the other. Nations break apart into
regional groups, those smaller areas in
turn fissure into even smaller areas,
along ethnic or other lines. It is an
incredibly violent scenario, but a
violence associated with a
purposefulness of sorts, in individual
defense of each ethnic or other group.
  The organized social response to
such a psychological and political
disintegration is the Orwellian fascist
state, modelled on George Orwell's book
{1984}. In the book,
individuals turn to ``Big Brother'' to
regulate their lives and conflicts
among various castes within society. A
continuous conflict among three
superpowers, writes Orwell, is ``waged
by each ruling group against its own
subjects, and the object of the war is
not to make or prevent conquests of
territory, but to keep the structure of
society intact...''
  While noting that the Orwellian
scenario is not acceptable in its fully
regimented form, any more than Nazism
could now be replicated in its exact
form, Emery and Trist state that there
are nonetheless obvious parallels in
the ``Cold War'' to the Orwellian ``war
of each against all''; they comment
elsewhere that, should the Cold War
collapse, the ability to control a
segmentation scenario on a societal
scale would also collapse.
  The third scenario is most
intense, involving a withdrawl and
retreat into ``private world and a
withdrawl from social bonds that might
entail being drawn into the affairs of
others.'' Emery and Trist caution that
{dissociation} is not the more
assertive statement of ``me first,'' of
personal selfishness that became the
hallmark of the 1970s and 1980s.
Fearing the terror that surrounds him,
the individual seeks to avoid all forms
of danger entirely. Individuals seek
{invisibility}, to fade into their
environments; they see nothing and no
one, so that no one might see them.
  The brainwashers remark that
{dissociation} has always been a
response of sorts to living in a city.
People tend to ``look the other way,''
at some of what is going on, just as
the person who rides the subway tries
to ``remain invisible'' although in a
crowd.
  Here we can see how Freud and
others' predictions about the behavior
of crowds or masses of people is specific
to only certain types of specially
organized experiences: ones in which
the mass is organized around appeals to
emotionalism, that lead to the
regression of the individual to an
infantile state of mind, to an
animal-like ``freedom'' of hedonistic
expression. Emery and Trist describe a
level of {dissociation} so great that
the individual is reduced to an animal.
He withdraws from the terror around
him, and like an animal ``playing
possum,'' tries to hide.
  With individuals withdrawn into
their fantasies, their minds numbed and
brainwashed by their televisions, the
brainwashers ``predict'' that men will
be willing to accept ``the perverse
inhumanity of man to man that
characterized Nazism''--not {the
structure} of the Nazi state, but the
{moral outlook of Nazi society}.
  Ultimately, the majority of people
withdraws so far that they don't even
bother to go to their sporting events
or rock concerts: {they have such
experiences mediated through
television}. It is the television that
``gives them solace,'' write the
brainwashers.
  To survive, such individuals
require the comfort of a {new}
religion; the old religious forms,
especially Western Christianity, demand
that man be responsible for his fellow
humans. The new religious forms, will
be a form a {mystical anarchism}, a
religious experience much likened to
satanic practice of the Nazis and the
views of Carl Jung. Again, it is to be
television that provides the ``social
glue'' that binds the minds of the
population to their new religious
forms: It is television as the leader,
in this case, the {anti-Christ.}

  A Clockwork Orange

  The organized social response to
{dissociation}, say Emery and Trist, is
a society described in the pages of
Anthony Burgess's novel {A Clockwork
Orange}.
  In the book, Burgess depicts a
society gone controllably mad. A
majority of people are engaged in
useless ``schooling,'' a few engaged in
mind-destroying trivial labors, and
somewhere, there are people running all
this as if it were an insane zoo.
  Senseless violence is everywhere
in the streets, committed by gangs of
youth who lust for blood. In a typical
{Clockwork Orange} street scene, a gang
of drugged, outlandishly dressed
teenagers viciously beats an old man.
He had it coming, said one of the gang
members; everyone knows that if you go
into certain parts of town, you will be
beaten and raped.
  There is no politics to any of it:
Burgess made sure that his ``hero,''
Alex, repeatedly makes clear that he is
{apolitical}. Alex speaks a
language invented by the linguist
Burgess, appropriate to his
infantilism; It is never
translated--the reader is forced to
``learn'' what it means by description
or ``word pictures.''
  Burgess provides no explanation
about how society got this way; there
is no war or other social calamity
referred to. ``That's just the way
things are,'' one character says.
  {A Clockwork Orange}
portrays a society dominated by
infantile animal-like rage. The
{dissociated} adults cannot
exert moral authority over their
children, because they are too involved
with their own infantile fantasies,
brought to them through their
television sets. Even as they watch the
reports of the daily mayhem, they
convince themselves that it isn't
{their kids} who are doing
this.
  For Emery and Trist, Burgess's
{Clockwork Orange} vision
{is} the Nazi state without the
superstructure. It is organized
disorder, without moral control.
  It is the force of the mass
communications media, the {power of
television}, however, that is driving
us toward the {Clockwork Orange
society}. As we have explained in
previous sections, television, when
watched in habituated, long viewing
induces {dissociation}. It also
provides the tension and images of
violence required to create the form of
social organization in {A Clockwork
Orange}. Under its ever-present eye, the
{leader}, television, transforms
children into beasts like Alex and
parents into impotent caretakers of
beasts.
  Over time, one state of mental and
social disintegration can transform
itself into another. Given the power of
television over society, all states
will tend to become more
{dissociative}, more like
{A Clockwork Orange}. As the
Futures Group brainwasher Hal Becker
put it back in 1981, ``Orwell made a
big mistake in his {1984}. Big
Brother doesn't need to watch you, as
long as you watch it.''
  That is enough for now. When we
speak again, I will explain how the
programs you watch on television have
been crafted to brainwash you.
  {To be continued.}
--
        John Covici
         [email protected]

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