Right under our noses there’s a ‘power’ struggle going on that most people don’t truly comprehend. What’s going on now in the way people are influenced, manipulated, governed is something so new and unthinkable just a couple decades ago …. but people foresaw this threat years ago.
I believe there’s real credibility in the words of Orwell, Huxley and C.S. Lewis …. those writers, novelists who over 50 years ago wrote how our Western society is being politically, socially and mentally ‘programmed and manipulated’ to make us so weak to our own personal thoughts and emotions that we behave like big government, advertisers, media tell us to!
The power and bias of the national and global press is an ominous threat to our well being and future. They are rushing around trying to change their purpose. Instead of being an objective observer, like my reporter contacts in Portland, many ‘major’ media people also insist on being our ‘moral’ guides. They’ve lost historic perspective many times. What really worries me is they don’t understand the vast nuances of normal human nature …. and, they forget that people have a mind of their own that can find the truth thru common sense, good facts.
I read books on how modern life has messed with our ability to make good decisions. One method I have a problem with is the constant race to ‘update’ every single thing we buy! From a banking service to a phone to a customer service line there’s constant upgrading! It’s maybe meant to make us customers think the company is looking out for us or giving us a better product, but it’s just so incessantly clogging our life. It’s a crazy race designing a new colorful statement or changing a company name to something ‘catchy’. We are missing the sense of reliability, long time credibility, etc.
What’s really gotten extremely dangerous is the idea that the press is allowed to be like our ‘thought police’, telling us which celebrity is immoral, whether it’s in sports, politics, entertainment …. they often go around reporting who are the good people and who the rotten ones are! I mean, where is mercy, making a mistake, giving a guy or gal a second chance, checking out the history of a person?? We need more reporters rather than commentators.
The thrill of a good read, be it an article or book, is almost gone nowadays! Our reading is often more like reading an advertisement, which is like answering our base desires not our deep hunger for truth. Telling us the ways things should end up, who the good guy is, etc. is like a control mechanism, and it’s robbing our joy of discovery! Our ‘imagination’, which is at the heart of a strong culture, is being predicted because we follow what is being fed us. It’s like we are living the ‘1984’ novel, or ‘Brave New World’ reality.
‘Animal Farm’ was written about 1943 and it made Orwell famous for a very good reason. He exposed some of what Stalinism, other ideologies perpetrate on the public. I don’t think he knew the full reality of how deep the mind police could penetrate society. Here’s a few of his oft quoted words to sum up the deception that can be found in the printed material we often come across daily in our country:
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”