Subject: Turn Off Your TV: part 5
Turn Off Your TV Set--Part V
The Programming of America by Television
by L. Wolfe
Reflect on the following for a moment: Suppose
someone told you that they wanted you to take a large dose of a mind-deadening
drug, and that after you took the drug, they were then going to suggest
that you do things that without taking the drug you would probably
never conceive of doing. And, they also told you that {you would
not be held accountable for what you did, that you would have no
conscious memory of what took place.} Would you take it?
Definitely not, you say, no way.
Yet, for the last more than 40 years, the majority of Americans,
like yourself, have been taking a daily dose of a mind-deadening
drug, one of the most powerful ever invented--{television}.
With your mind in a deadened state, things have been suggested to
you that, were you alert and reasoning, you would have rejected.
And, {over time}, under the continual dosage of this drug,
you have followed the suggestions, changing the way you think about
yourself and the world around you. And, you never knew that this
was happening and you may even yet, despite all the things we have
already shown you, have trouble believing it. That is how complete
this brainwashing process is, how strong is its power over you.
People like Sigmund Freud, his direct followers in the psychoanalytic
movement, and the neo-Freudians that split from him, as well as
all {social pyschologists}, deny the existence of the universal
truth that man is made in the living image of God and is therefore
distinct from the animal. They deny that man has been endowed by
his Creator with the Divine Spark of reason, and that by the gift
of reason, man can {consciously} perfect his knowledge.
For them, creativity is fundamentally an unknowable, mystical, concept,
an act linked to repression of carnal and sexual desires.
By denying these most fundamental of truths, they deny the existence
of any truth. They seek to impose on mankind a {paradigm shift
that will wipe out 2,000 years of Christian civilization}, returning
man to a bestial and primitive social order.
Using television as their weapon, the brainwashers have launched
a 40-year assault on the universal truths of Western Christian civilization
and on the concept of universal truth itself. In place of morally
informed reason, in the absence of universal truth, they have raised
the false god of {popular opinion}. As we shall show, they
have consciously targetted {the higher moral values} of
society, and even the idea that there could be a set of true moral
values, seeking to substitute {amorality} as the axiomatic
assumption.
Reality as Opinion
Once the concept of universal truth is obliterated, reality can
be redefined by internal ``perceptions'' or ``images'' of that reality.
Those perceptions and images are then validated by {popular
opinion}. Reality becomes a set of conflicting opinions validated
by a mass consensus.
Freud, in discussing this transformation in his 1921 {Mass
Psychology}, identifies the process in masses of people as a
loosening of the hold of what he calls moral or social conscience
(the ``Over I'' or ``superego,'' as it is mistranslated in English)
over a person's more infantile and hence, more animal-like nature
(the I and It, or the ``ego'' and ``id''). To use a term developed
by the neo-Freudians, the individual becomes more ``other-directed,''
governed by the perceived opinions of others, and thus, more easily
manipulated.
Television brainwashing works through the manipulation of images
and perceptions to cause a {paradigm shift} in the ``public
mind.'' It does this through what the television people appropriately
call {programming,} the content of which is shaped and fine-tuned
by ``social analysts.''
Let's see how Walter Lippmann, one of the earliest practitioners
and theorists of the mass manipulation of opinion, describes the
process. Lippmann, trained by the British psychological warfare
unit at Wellington House during World War I and a follower of Freud,
was to become regarded as the most influential American social and
political commentator of the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1922, following the publication of Freud's {Mass Psychology},
Lippmann authored a handbook on the manipulation of the public mind,
titled {Public Opinion}. In its introductory chapter, titled
``The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads,'' he describes
the concept of public opinion:
``Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts
and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which
public opinion refers are known only as opinions.... The pictures
inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves,
of others, of their needs, purposes and relationship, are their
opinions. Those pictures which are acted on by groups of people,
or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion
with capital letters.... The picture inside so often misleads men
in their dealings with the world outside.''
While television might shift some opinions relatively quickly,
a {paradigm shift} involving the {axiomatic} assumptions
that govern all individuals thinking in a society does not occur
overnight; it occurs over a long period of time, in stages.
Think about a profile of the American population, correlating
it to the cumulative amount of television viewing.
First, you have a generation which was born before the advent
of television, the generation who fought in World War II; they had
the strongest set of moral values, since they were influenced by
the war experience and their parents' strong moral values. They
were the most resistant to brainwashing.
Their children, the ``baby boomers'' of the 1947-55 period, were
the special targets of the brainwash programming, as we shall show.
They have been subjected to television brainwashing all their lives.
All succeeding generations have been totally immersed in the television
brainwashing experience.
Thus, you have an older generation which has been watching television
since approximately 1950, and successive generations who have been
watching for their entire lifetimes.
Now, you have parents who were themselves reared by television,
raising children, who were reared by television, who are now starting
to have children themselves: three successive generations subjected
to television brainwashing, without any conscious memory of anything
different.
With this profile in mind, focus on the following: The goal of
television programming is to make each succeeding generation more
infantile, more animal-like, more amoral, thereby {shifting}
the value structure of the whole society. By the end of the process,
the parents of the ``baby boomers'' have adopted all the fundamental,
infantile assumptions of their children.
The Lost Generational War
The Tavistock brainwashers Fred Emery and Eric Trist, writing
nearly 20 years ago, identify the crucial period in this brainwashing
process: the point at which the pre-television generation tried
to raise their ``baby boom'' kids, approximately 1949-69. They note
the following scenario. Throughout the period, children's television
watching increased, especially as the number of shows oriented to
them increased; at the same time, adult watching increased. Children,
they say, learned from what they saw their parents doing: It became
socially approved behavior to watch television.
But then something interesting happened: The television, itself,
took over as a surrogate parent. Children watched to amuse themselves,
and were encouraged by parents to do so. They became habituated
to watching.
The images presented on the screen were more real, more powerful
than the outside world. The messages presented in the shows became
more important to the children than what they were told by their
live parents.
Children watched the same shows, often with their friends, and
talked about the shows, socializing the experience. Emery and Trist,
citing the work of others, report that television became the ``Pied
Piper'' for the children, the {leader} that they followed.
The whole process created an estrangement between child and parent,
although not necessarily apparent at first, creating a crisis in
the fundamental unit of social reproduction, the family. It was
only as these baby boomer children grew into adolescence in the
1960s that the conflict broke into the open. Write Emery and Trist:
``a generation of children grow up on a TV diet, and the more affluent
get sets, then multiple sets, the more likely to use it as substitute
for a presence with their children. The children grow to adolescence,
spend less time viewing, but have a different world view. They challenge
the world view of the parents, face to face....''
In previous generational challenges, Emery and Trist write, the
disciplinary authority of the adult society ultimately won over
its young-adult values. But this time, adult society had lost its
ability to discipline; the adults had been infantilized by their
own television watching. The generational war is lost, Emery and
Trist write, as all society plunges to a new, {lower} infantile
level. The behavior of the children--the drugs, the sex, the anti-social
behavior--is excused or to use a brainwasher's word--{rationalized},
with the help of the messages contained in television programming.
Emery and Trist reach a startling conclusion: The generational
war between the so-called counterculture and the generation that
fought World War II will be the last such sharp confrontation of
values. Under the influence of television, each succeeding generational
transfer of power will be smoother: When the adults are infantile
already, it is more easy to accept the infantilism of their youth.
The children, they state, may be violent, insane and anti-social,
but no one will assert that it isn't their right to be so!
To understand better how we got into this mess, we are going
to have to go back to the early period of television in the 1950s,
and show how what you watched as a child helped determine your values
as an adult.
As we said, the ``baby boom'' generation was the first to be
reared by the television set. By 1952 there were already 30 million
TV sets in America; by the end of the decade the penetration in
American homes was near universal. This provided the basis for mass
brainwashing, targetting especially the children born since 1949.
It is important to understand that the brainwashers think in
{long time spans}. They know that it is impossible to effect
any significant change in social values over anything but time frames
measured in several generations. Hence, the messages presented in
mass television programming in the 1950s, which were planned to
{play back} one and two decades hence. In the same way,
what you and your children are watching today, will shape the first
part of the next millennium.
While your brainwashers think in {long periods of time},
you are being induced to think in shorter and shorter time frames.
Your attention span is shrinking almost daily. For example, the
average half-hour television show is broken into at least four segments,
with usually the longest running no more than five to six minutes,
with the remaining portions occupied by commercials, theme, and
credits. Television news presents items in 30 second bites, with
slightly longer feature pieces. The very nature of the majority
of your television viewing makes it impossible to consider difficult
concepts, especially developments over long periods of time.
Cultural Warfare
Your brainwashers themselves actually fall into two major categories.
They both have the same world view--the concept of man as a beast,
to be controlled and manipulated like an animal--but there is a
division of responsibility between them. There are the people like
Emery and Trist and others at places like Tavistock, who create
and analyze mechanisms for brainwashing, who study the effects of
this brainwashing with what are called {profiles}, and who
make recommendations on how to do it better. They work as social
psychologists, and in similar professions.
Then, there are the people who create the {idea content}
of the brainwashing. They operate on the culture or {paradigm},
as we have explained--the sets of axioms that govern the way we
think. These are the {cultural warfare} experts, who create
the value systems which are in turn imposed on the society by the
brainwashing mechanisms, such as television.
In the late 1930s and during the war, operatives of the Frankfurt
School were involved in major studies of mass radio programming,
and their effects on the population. Their work, with Tavistock-linked
personnel, in what was known as the Princeton ``Radio Project''
provided important conceptual material for later, mass television
brainwashing.
One of the key early pioneers in television brainwashing techniques
was Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt School operative and a former member
of the ``Radio Project.'' Adorno shared the bestial outlook of the
neo-Freudians, developing, along with others associated with the
Frankfurt School network, a perverse theory on the use of mass communications
technology for mass brainwashing. Given the appropriate message
content, said Adorno, media such as television and radio, could
be used to make people ``forcibly retarded.'' An adult personality
could be reduced, through interaction with mass media, to a more
primitive, childish or infantile state.
In a 1938 report, Adorno compares the retardation capability
of existing media. Radio has one level of effect, but sound film
is an even more powerful ``retardant,'' Adorno indicates. Television
is yet another level more powerful, said Adorno in 1944: ``Television
aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because
the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences
will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment
of asethetic matter so drastically....''
In the minds of Adorno and his ``fellow travelers,'' the power
to control the new medium meant the power to determine and control
the values of society: ``Television is a medium of undreamed of
psychological control,'' Adorno wrote in 1956.
That same year, Adorno wrote an essay titled ``Television and
the Patterns of Mass Culture'' that elaborated on the brainwashing
techniques that could be employed with television. It was intended
as a cookbook and discussion guide for people involved with the
programming. For people like ourselves, intended television brainwash
victims, it provides insight into how the messages in the programming
can be ``decoded.''
Outlining his study, Adorno writes, ``[We will] investigate systematically
socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material on both
the descriptive and psychodynamic levels, to analyze their presuppositions,
as well as their total pattern, and to evaluate the effect they
are likely to produce. This procedure may ultimately bring forth
a number of recommendations on how to deal with the these stimuli
to produce the most desirable effect....''
Adorno states that all television programming contains an {overt}
message as defined by plot, characters, etc. in the images presented
and a {hidden} message that is less obvious, and is defined
by the larger intent of those presenting the images. These {hidden
messages} are the brainwashing content, while the {overt}
message--the plot, etc.--is the {carrier} of that brainwash
content.
The {hidden message} operates on the mind so as to cause
{value conflict} over a period of time. As we have stated
before, the conflict will not surface immediately, but occurs over
generational time spans. The {hidden message} in a show
may not surface for 10-20 years as a change in attitudes of the
majority of the population, but Adorno asserts that {it will
ultimately surface.} This is the concept of {playback}
to which we have referred in other sections of this report.
Those `Wholesome' Shows
To make his point, Adorno unmasks the {hidden message}
of a number of popular shows of the early television period.
{Our Miss Brooks}, a popular situation comedy (sitcom),
pitted a trained professional, a school teacher, against her boss,
the principal. Most of the humor, according to Adorno, was derived
from situations in which the underpaid teacher tried to hustle a
meal from her friends.
Adorno ``decodes'' the {hidden message} as follows: ``If
you are humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and charming as she
[Miss Brooks] is, do not worry about being paid a starvation wage.
You can cope with your frustration in a humorous way and your superior
wit and cleverness put you not only above material privations, but
also above the rest of mankind.''
This {message} will be called forth years hence, as the
economy collapses in the form of a ``cynical anti-materialism.''
It came forth with a vengeance among the 1960s ``lost generation,''
and the first wave of the ``counterculture.''
Generalizing from this, Adorno points out that it is {social
tension and stress} that call forth the television images of
{pyschodynamic stereotypes}, the role models and images
from the early television viewing. The more confusing life becomes,
the ``more people cling desperately to cliche@aas to bring order
to the otherwise un-understandable,'' Adorno says.
Another ``decoding'' by Adorno emphasizes this point. Remember
the show, {My Little Margie}? The heroine of this sitcom
was a pretty girl who played ``merry pranks'' on her father, who
is portrayed as well-meaning but stupid.
Adorno says that the {hidden message} is the image of
an aggressive female sucessfully dominating and manipulating the
male father-figure. He ``predicts'' that years later, that young
girls will increasingly mirror this image of the ``bitch-heroine.''
Little Margie is the role model image for the feminist movement
of the 1960s and 1970s that took off as the {My Little Margie'}s
viewers grew up.
The messages need not be contained within a single show; they
could be transmitted through a series of images contained as primary
or secondary features within {several shows}. For example,
Adorno indicates that several shows featured characters who were
artistic, sensitive, and effeminate males. Such images cohered with
Freudian notions that artistic creativity stemmed from either a
repressed or actual homosexual passion. These effeminate, sensitive
males usually come up against the other more, aggressive male ``macho''
images, such as cowboys, who are uncreative.
Recognizing the psychological power in the {hidden image},
Adorno predicts that the ``creative sissy'' will find an ``important''
place in society. Such images are {playing back} today in
the spread of homosexuality throughout society, and in all creative
arts.
{To be continued.}
--
John Covici
[email protected]
