Most people, still today, think that all entertainment to do with movies and drama is there for nothing more than their entertainment. Such has never been the case. The greatest social messages are promoted through movies, high drama, and television, through the fixation of emotive sequences that drive emotional responses as opposed to logical or factual sequences which would drive rational response. Through the emotive sequences points are pushed across in an emotional way which registers and fixes in the mind. The emotional content provided by entertainment media is extraordinarily important. Rather than going through an actual discussion or argument using logic and facts, entertainment media that calls for a passive response is a downloading through fiction that bypasses the discursive parts of the mind. The parts of the mind that exercise critical thinking are in hibernation mode when we become sponge receptors of whatever message is being communicated via story time media. This is particularly true when a generation is trained from the youngest age to soak in front of the television. What the aggressive media does in its entertainment format is to encode messages that are downloaded into the passive recipient without having to engage in debate or even explanation.
With the advent of the National media, the tools of the media have been used for dominion via the exercise of social engineering as expressed by a message that comes in a host of different venues or story-lines but which all reinforce the same overarching narrative.
Now throw into this mix the tactic of diversion. Not only would there be a constant barrage of the same message delivered through an aggressive media to passive recipients but also there would be created diversions that would channel off potential resistance by channeling that aggressiveness into harmless allegiances. H. G. Wells before the advent of National Sports teams talked about “Arenas,” Wells offered, over a hundred years ago, that arenas could be set up all over the world for sports. Now at that time when Wells offered that idea, sports was something that children participated in while, exceptions notwithstanding, adults would go on to adult things. It was unimanigable during Wells time that there would be a need for adult sports on the scale we have it today. Wells idea at the time was to eventually create a “Sports culture” for the men, using a tribal system where men would form allegiances according to a tribal system where men in set geographic areas would exhaust their aggressiveness in a vicarious identification with “their team.” Because men would be more disengaged then ever before from their own destiny a “Sports culture” was developed for them in order to provide an outlet for aggression that might otherwise be channeled in things that really were matters of consequence for responsible male citizens of a commonwealth. Between the passivity created by the entertainment model as well as the messages downloaded for conformity by the elites, and the pseudo and abstract aggressiveness aligned with a tribal team men would be effectively neutered in leadership and castrated in resistance. This in turn would allow the cultural gatekeeper elites to have their way in terms of setting the agenda for the social order.
All of this was reinforced by the majority of the populace being linked to the same message entertainment conduits. People would judge their own sanity by bouncing “their” ideas — ideas learned from their entertainment downloads — off of their neighbors who themselves have been downloaded with the same messages with the result that a reciprocity of comfort would be afforded to neighbors by neighbors, quite without realizing that they all had received these same ideas from those responsible for creating and making and marketing culture. It is quite irrelevant if this programming is true or whether it corresponds to reality, or whether it coheres as long as everyone agrees among themselves what a great ideas they all share.
Once this regimen is successfully put into place a Matrix is created that is almost impossible to get out of since virtually everyone is sharing the same deception. Certainly, there will be some margin for disagreement and often that disagreement will be fanned to life by the Message Masters in order to advance some new Message but by and large the citizenry is all hooked to the same message life support system.
The Cultural gatekeepers have been practicing this game for decades now using men such as Edward Bernays to learn how to create and then control mass psychology. Propaganda has become a science and advertising a art as the culture creators pull the strings on the Marionettes of John Q. Public.
The only thing way that this can be challenged is if individuals and families once again take it upon themselves to enter into the great conversation that has been happening over centuries. People must once again read the great books and then they must converse among themselves as they get together to re-establish genuine community that is flavored with what Augustine said or what Chrysostom offered or what Dante offered etc. Until our conversations reach again beyond the American Idol contestants or the latest episode of “Good Christian Bitches,” we will continue to live in the Matrix and will turn whatever way our Masters pull our strings.
False reality constructs have been created since Eve had a bite of a certain apple. Matrices are sophisticated forms of sin, not the “missing the mark” kind, but the “deny YHWH as the source of law, definition, and meaning” kind. The real red pill, the real way to wake up and see how deep the rabbit hole really goes, is to understand Christ as the incarnation of the Law of Moses. This is the way, the truth, and true life. Everything opposed to this is a figment of a matrix construct.
Arnold,
Thanks for your input. Certainly the only way our of false reality is to embrace real reality which is done by embracing God’s revelation from Genesis to John’s Apocalypse.
In other words – to live the love that Jesus demonstrated in his life.
Hi
I’ve been trying to trace Wells’ remarks about arenas to a specific source. Any ideas?
Bennett,
Thank you for asking.
See below,
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See Well’s “A Modern Utopia.”
http://www.amazon.com/A-Modern-Utopia-ebook/dp/B004TS8GP0/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1362833630&sr=8-1
“That is all easy enough in a world as ordered as yours. I suppose no samurai may bet?”
“Absolutely not. He may insure his life and his old age for the better equipment of his children, or for certain other specified ends, but that is all his dealings with chance. And he is also forbidden to play games in public or to watch them being played. Certain dangerous and hardy sports and exercises are prescribed for him, but not competitive sports between man and man or side and side. That lesson was learnt long ago before the coming of the samurai. Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with this organisation of public sports. They did not spend their lives to secure for all men and women on the earth freedom, health, and leisure, in order that they might waste lives in such folly.”
“We have those abuses,” I said, “but some of our earthly games have a fine side. There is a game called cricket. It is a fine, generous game.”
“Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought rather puerile to give very much time to it; men should have graver interests. It was undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuously ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye in training against the man who was fool enough and cheap enough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, fives, billiards——. You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things in Utopia, but not the samurai. And they must play their games as games, not as displays; the price of a privacy for playing cricket, so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelmingly high…. Negroes are often very clever at cricket. For a time, most of the samurai had their sword-play, but few do those exercises now, and until about fifty years ago they went out for military training, a fortnight in every year, marching long distances, sleeping in the open, carrying provisions, and sham fighting over unfamiliar ground dotted with disappearing targets. There was a curious inability in our world to realise that war was really over for good and all.”
Noam Chomsky writes something similar.
Now there are other media too whose basic social role is quite different: it’s diversion. There’s the real mass media-the kinds that are aimed at, you know, Joe Six Pack — that kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brains.
This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent or whatever they are, the main thing is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League. And to worry about “Mother With Child With Six Heads,” or whatever you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on. Or look at astrology. Or get involved in fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. Get them away from things that matter. And for that it’s important to reduce their capacity to think.
Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about — keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.
You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know? I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean any — it doesn’t make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.
PORCH SWING
Porch swing simple thing steady movement makes
Forth and back thoughts unpack fewer pains and aches
Flashing screens distant memes moving pictures flow
Quiet stilled, blank and chilled, stiffened pile of dough