How
Television Ripped America Apart in a Single Generation
 |
| Old Glory Pushed Back 150 years Due to Unanticipated Consequences of Technology |
June
17, 2012
Who
would have ever guessed that such a seeming benign activity would have the
power to change the values and behavior of an entire nation in one
generation? Only one man, Marshall
McCluhan, a professor and futurist at McGill University in a book, "The
Medium is the Message" c.1960. He
warned that electronic media would overload our nervous systems with data and
it would make us sick, because we had evolved no defenses against this new form
of stimulus. He said we would
unconsciously protect ourselves by blocking incoming data, but not being aware
of the cause, we would make poor choices about what stimuli we ignored. And so we did: we ignored our spouses,
children, families ,friends, schools, and how our children were doing at school
,and what our government was doing. Like
zombies we bought any made up product the Madison Avenue boys thought up, and
they fortunes. The products we were told
we needed became increasingly more expensive, and we bought them as we were
told to. Our ability to perform critical
thinking disappeared in a narcotic daze.
Soon our "must haves" exceeded the fathers income, and he
worked overtime and weekends, and the mothers left home to work, and this
hastened the deterioration of all the things we ignored listed above. Next, the opportunists made a bundle of money
by doing us a "big favor" and let have the desired products on
credit. The noose tightened as we became
a nation of unhappy obsessed consumers becoming deeper and deeper in debt as we
watched our institutions: marriages, schools, and government unravel and we
couldn't stop any of it. Many trusted
the government to fix things, but the government was no longer interested in
doing that.
Opportunists,
like sociopaths, quickly learned you could tell the public ANYTHING to get
elected, then do what they wanted, which was to line their pockets with money
by selling their votes to lobbyists, and passing unfair laws that benefited
only themselves and their wealthy friends.
So everything the government did to solve the multitude of problems that
arose because we were to busy watching TV, failed, because they were designed
to fail. GW Bush's "No Child Left
Behind" was incredibly stupid and made things worse. Children don't learn more because you
evaluate them more frequently and more thoroughly. Teachers were forced to
"teach to the test" because their evaluations and jobs depended on
the children's scores. This made school
even more boring and of course, children even less even, if their test scores
went up. That is an example of the
perverse nature of government solutions when government has no interest in
solving problems, because the do not care about the American People. This
became the prevailing attitude in Congress because such a high percentage of
Congress were sociopaths. Sociopaths are
biologically incapable of caring about anyone but themselves
This
to went largely unnoticed until the party in power went too far, and went war
with Iraq against the guidelines of the Constitution, and lied without guilt
about the reasons we were going to war on many occasions. This war was really
to protect our oil interests in the Middle East, and nothing to do with
terrorism. It cost the country the
deaths of 8000 soldiers and probably three times as many were permanently
disabled. It generated 1.5 Trillion
dollars in debt, and Bush responds to the shortage of funds by giving tax CUTS
to the rich. Now a significant portion
of the American public stared to wake up from their half century of TV induced
daze, and found that the government was completely corrupt, both parties
getting richer selling their votes to the lavish "donations" (bribes
in any other country) to lobbyists, even those of foreign governments which should
be considered our enemies. Mean while neurophysiologists and psychiatrists had
figured out the mechanism that caused people to "loose their minds"
while watching television down to the molecular and genetic predisposition
level. So, 50 years after McCluhan warned
us of the dangers of television, which we ignored, he was proven to be correct,
not only at the level of behavior and overt social deterioration but the
neurological mechanism he speculated would cause this was proven to be also
correct. A genius, far ahead of his peers, anticipated a totally unexpected
consequence, so powerful, and so detrimental , that the very survival of our
nation as we have known it , is in serious trouble.
We now from this example
and many others that human behavior is as much due to biological factors as
psychological factors. That means our world view has been based on only half
the truth. And since our institutions are based on a deeply flawed
understanding of human nature it is no surprise that are crumbling during a
time of radical change and stress it produces. So the rules and guidelines have
to be rewritten, almost to the point of starting over. But the Constitution was
wisely designed to be a flexible document capable of adapting to unanticipated
changes in the world and in our country. A few simple amendments would level
the playing field and enable us to return to negotiating solutions to problems
instead of them being dictated by a party that has gained an excess of power to
the point where imbalance render the system of governance, which was based on
principles of balance and a system of "checks and balances" to insure
that that happened. Simply put is not the viable system that it was after WWII.
To return the Constitution
to a viable living document, amendments such as term limits for congress would
dilute the effectiveness of lobbyists; a revised tax system based on flat rate
of 10-15% with no deductions would be fair and everyone could understand it.
Compare that to Mitt Romneys’ 2010 tax return, published on the internet with
analysis by tax experts, is over 200 pages long. I'm not an accountant, but
even I know that the shear length of document implies tax evasion, because the
filer has taken deductions for hundreds of items many or most of them highly
questionable if not overtly illegal. The documentation of an offshore bank
account also reveals that he is likely to be hiding money from the government,
since that is the sole reason those accounts were established in the first
place.
There are many other good
ideas about how to change the rules to rebalance the system, but before we can
do that we have to retake control of the government. that's why these November
elections are so important.
By the way, I have not
watched TV since 1969 when I read it 3 times in college at the University of
Texas. While my peers were watched “The
Twilight Zone”, “All in the Family”, endless reruns, soap operas, and every
sport known to man, and creating the curious phenomena of the “football widow”;
I was reading non-fiction books about new thought in wide variety of
fields. Perhaps, that is why I have
learned these revolutionary concepts, which will change the world every bit as
much as the discovery that the world is not flat, but a sphere. It took Europeans over 200 year in the late
Middle Ages to accept that concept. We don't even have 10% of that time to learn this new world view.
With our world in social
and economic chaos, beginning a period of profoundly challenging climactic
change, AND running out on natural recourses (most critically water and oil),
or species must harness our most creative an imaginative thinking in order to
survive. Having a more accurate model of
human of human nature and our history of our species has to be helpful in our
attempt to survive and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Morris Creedon-McVean
June 18, 2012, revised May 4, 2013
Austin, Texas
walklikeaturtle@hotmail.com
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