How much does watching television promote degenerate behavior?

Of course, humans will always produce macabre reflections of themselves in the actions of murderers, thieves, addicts, and other dysfunctional behavior. This is not to say that we should blame society for the ills and actions of certain individuals, BUT we must also realize that there will always be a percentage of the larger population who are vulnerable or not as mentally strong as others. A society which forces this percentage to confront ridiculous and unnecessary stress or emotional disruption is asking for a chain reaction. But providing for the basic needs of all people is seen as socialistic. People are assumed to benefit by competiting with individuals, or they fall by the wayside into some subservient realm because they can't hack it.

The bang-the-hammer-harder approach and its concomitant ideas about survival-of-the-fittest mistake the individuals for the species. We are no different than ants. We cannot live separated from the others, and our survival depends upon everyone else being able to survive. Decisions must be made for the good of the whole. When decisions are being made which are bad for the whole, they are justified based upon a model which assumes that which is good for the individual is also good for the whole. But since all are not created with equal strengths and weaknesses, we cannot presume that all individuals will be able (either physically or mentally) to benefit from any arrangement which presumes that only the strongest will survive. This is true when it comes to the species, whereby only the strong species are able to live and continue to have offspring. When we discuss the intra-relations within the members of the species however, we are mistaking the individuals for the species. Within the species survival depends upon balance and shared responsibility.

The philosophy of striving and getting ahead cannot understand balance and shared responsibility because these ideas are not even on the mental map. Striving and getting ahead only concern themselves with behavior mechanisms, points of strategic value, and how best to defend the perimeter. In this mindset, the belief that the individual creates society is only a reflection of the world view that comes from striving and getting ahead. The idea of balance extensively lessens the importance of the sacred perimeter and creates mechanisms which are not bent upon getting ahead, but of sharing and cooperation. The idea of team degenerates into an egotistical competition of teammates. Although the team can function well enough under this condition, the ideas and roles of the teammates are not the same, much as the friendly neighborhood police force is different from a corrupt, pugnacious and autocratic version of the police force. The roles of our institutions lose touch with their purpose by this polarity of individualism.

Where does such a rampant individualism come from? You got it. Television. A gaining percent of the daily time we spend incorporating into our attention the actions of acted roles and commercial advertizements paid for by huge corporations. There is a decrease in the attention span spent cognizant of those in our community. Where and how we get the daily news is just as important what the news is. The cultural display of ourselves, the morals we like to embellish, the cherishing of heros and heriones has degenerated into stars and fantasy lifestyles, and moral self-righteousness. Commercials depict us as slavish nicompoops, crafty idiots, or suave players in the game of life. We watch as we applaud ourselves and as we point fingers and try to have everything nailed down to one short paragraph so that we can provide for the watchers -- at this very second -- that which alludes the grasp and cannot be captured. But we have it right here, only on the Itz Happenin Now channel.

And thusly a certain portion of our selves and minds grow an attachment to this display of culture and twisted commercialism. We presume that we can filter out the silliness, but nevertheless the attachment is formed whenever a thought occurs in response to stimuli. Gradually we are pulled away from the mutuality of the species, and slowly we are trained to adhere to the survival-of-the- fittest mentality, and slowly we lose the balance and shared responsibility because we begin to respond to the evolution of decades through the medium of the TV which has portrayed those decades.

We cannot presume that our species will remain the same when we are interacting with new mediums of communication and machines, including this very computer upon which these words are read -- and typed. Every tool brings benefits and dependencies, but no tool has ever had the power of television to shape the mind without a context based upon a false here-and-now reality. What you see on TV is somewhere else, and may have happened at some other time. Or it is many different points of time in the past that get chopped up into a final version. When you read, your mind produces its own mental imagery and thoughts. The combined video-audio experience that is television and cinematography however provides everything, so there is no development of mental imagery and thoughts, only an emotional reaction to images and thought packages, and a memory of what you saw and heard, not what you thought about or wondered.

Did I answer the question?

Citizens, denizens of urbanity, bucolic holdovers of rural redoubt, it is now time to reveal the Law of Cultural Development.Who we are as a people is directly proportional to what we pay attention to regularly, and how the rewards of society are distributed.

That being said, you have to ask : what justice and sanity makes it reasonable to assign wealth to the luck of birth? This is not really a moral question. It is not that it is bad to be rich. There is nothing wrong with having money and living well without concern for food, clothing, and shelter. But why should this just be the luck of birth, and what happens when the surplus funds get used to gather more money?

Money is created to represent all the wealth obtained and transformed from the Earth's natural resources. Essentially the number of people in the world or community who desire or need the resources exchange the bills of commerce. So when large amounts of it accumulate into smaller groups this means that more people have less and less control over their own well-being, and are subject to the whims and desires of those who control the way the resources are distributed.

We assume that wealth is a reflection of success and hard work, which is often true. The majority of millionaires work very hard for their funds, and are just as often only a bad sequence of events away from bankruptcy. Wealth is not in itself a reflection of unworthy accumulation. Those who take on larger responsibilities, those who are responsible, reliable, and who work hard should be well paid. But what does it mean when the rewards of financial accumulation also accrue to those who gain control of funds to where they are no longer ever in danger of bankruptcy because they are too large to fail. Billionaires do not go broke.

Our society does not like to discuss the issue of power. Instead we gloss over the issue with the automation of the free market economic system. All those who are wealthy have obtained that status because they were efficient providers of goods and services, or they were talented and determined. But what if we speak of men who are talented at duplicity and manipulation that are determined to accumulate more power? These are the nascent beginnings of aristocracy.

And what happens when the developing aristocracy decides to collectively relinquish any responsible relationship with the society, building gated communities from which they occassionally leave while being driven by a chauffeur. This is not a process that develops over a couple of years, but rather after a couple of generations.

The final analysis is this : there is equal danger between a bureaucratic corrupt government as there is the rise of an aristocratic order. There is no difference between the one and the other when the aristocracy does not live the lives of the common people. Despotism is not just something government creates, as certain liberterians would ascribe as their root philosophical understanding. Despotism occurs when power accumulates in the hands of a few. The sycophants and psychopaths who decorate the enterprises of dictatorship are the same people, whether they are exploited by political hacks or the aristocratic regime of a few plutocrats.

The fiends of mind-warped opinion are just power addicts and guilt trippers. They hire themselves into huge pyramids of talking smack addicts, all of them bent on kissing ass and playing mind-games while each they try to claw over one another, smiling and high flying when in the spotlight.

They are like high school debate club addicts. They don't care about right and wrong. They confuse manipulation with reason because all they care about is victory and money when they dip in and out like glossy sharks waiting for the precise moment to strike, pondering the slithering words which will prepare the victim for the stiletto.

So when you pose heartfelt and reasonable objections that have solid details, don't expect them to listen trying to understand your point of view. That is you. Not them. They are sniffing for weaknesses. They are quickly throwing up objections like fighters in a boxing ring. They see having a discussion as a combat which results in a victory, rather than an event which results in a common understanding; or as some moment to play their cards right, to put forth the smoke-screen amongst their other fellow confabulators; or plot with them. Oh, they are the first to denounce, ridicule, and vilify the philosophy of what they perceive as an opposition because it is the core of their believe system. Ask them what they believe in and notice that the result is not rooted in details, or is often stated with a "I just don't believe that..." They run their mouths on and on about being "fiscally conservative" or "fair-minded" but look the other way at wasted money and corruption.

It's all talk. Nestled next to their strident hypocritical, self-righteousness is an amorphous ambiguity, able to twist and distort every argument, even lie, because the goal is victory not understanding.

These people are dangerous, but the self-promoting sycophants are allowed mouthpieces of vast influence. They sit around (and go around) acting like their rampaging banter is the equivalence of insightful conversation. They beam a pompousness that resembles children proud of their new "poopy," and every moment for them is another re-enactment of that time they took their first shit. And really, they hate themselves. Which is yet another, darker reason for their vigilance over victory. They have to win because the consequences are but too dire. They talk the talk because they have to tell themselves that others have problems, and that that which they denounce is not themselves.

And they will keep talking until some "big daddy" kicks them where it hurts, whence they transform into pitiful and driveling, like slime gladly able to still cling to the brick wall. Yes it is slime that is holding the attention of an audience of fools. They have merely put up the illusion of themselves, and the audience believes.

Okay like, it’s really quite simple, you know, but, well, this might take a while to explain. You see. It all started sometime in the past, although I can’t offer you any particular date, or specific time when the said event occurred. Rather, it was just something that all of a sudden became realized. The thing was there all along, and still is, always will be, and so on and so on, and so on. Then, one day – or one moment – the realization of what the thing was or could be appeared like a sudden burst of fire, and the mind burned with the seething realizations, millions of beads of water pounding upon the stone, falling from the waterfall 200 feet above. This thing is called life. You cast yourself into the unknown thoughtlessly, completely driven by the habits of sheer will. Every now and then a little morsel of understanding appears, every now and then there are painful breeches when we have to try and understand what is quite non- understandable. During these situations there are no words which completely describe anything, only emotions which don’t make any sense. In our often deranged irrational attempts we use to feebly try to solve that which is unsolvable, because these are great wounds and take time to heal, and crying is the only way we know how to heal. I said it was really that simple. Crying is the only way we know how to heal.

None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its' conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its' lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. There is no shortage of filament. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

Listening to Republicans speak of themselves, you get the felling that the party is one big love-fest when they refer to themselves as "freedom loving." But since "freedom is not free" then where, I ask, is the love or the freedom?

Freedom loving. What a joke. Oh they love freedom alright. Let me explain.

They love freedom so much that senior citizens are not free to purchase cheaper drugs from Canada. When asked why, the representatives of the "freedom-lovers" say that imported drugs are not safe, but fail to mention that many of the drugs drug companies sell are imported from Canada. So you can only import drugs if you are a corporate Drug company.

Ah, ha. Freedom for corporations and wealthy investors only.

Oh and freedom is so loved that they bribed Republicans on the floor of the House to get the Medicare rape bill passed. Republican legislators were not free to vote as the wanted, and had to have their arms twisted by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay for 3 hours.

So Republicans in Congress are only free to do as the leadership tells them, or they get the cold shoulder and are ostracized.

And then the Bush administration was free to lie about the real costs of the medicare rape bill. The head administrator who audits medicare was threatened with his job if he revealed the true costs. Tax payer money was used to make news videos with fake news reporters speaking gloriously of the great new medicare bill. This is apparently called freedom of speech, but all of it is a grand hoax to bilk the tax-payers and sell our nation to the front corporations controlled by wealthy investors.

And don't give me that "everyone can buy stock and invest in corporations" nonsense, because although true, you can't compare a small $500,000 investment to a trust fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There are millions of small investors vulnerable to the big players, no different than the millions of consumers vulnerable to the big corporations.

And because "freedom is not free" we have to have military excursions into choosen middle eastern nations that have lots of oil. We have to lie about the reasons and promote forged documents about non-existent yellowcake Uranium sales from Nigeria, because freedom also included the freedom to lie. And freedom is no doubt being installed now by the massive fire-sale of Iraq to corporations and administration cronys who hired imported cheap labor and export profits without reinvestment. Corporations who provided supplies to our freedom-fighters were not able to provide adequate supplies, but were free to skim off their profits -- since freedom is not free you see.

And elections are free when we call them free, ignoring all of the polling booths that are bombed and all of the trade union leaders that are getting assassinated by "operatives." Because the people are free only when they accept their corporate masters, and when they pull the levers to choose for one of the acceptable government candidates. Is it important that only 50% of the population will vote? Is it important that Iraqi's had to register to vote before they got their food rations? Not according to the Republican ink- fingers who blame our bad foreign policy on the "insurgents","terrorists", and "dead-enders" who hate freedom -- or at least the current version. The people are free to drink untreated water, to breathe the radiation and the toxic waste created by the military bombs dropped from the freedom-loving Americans. We killed more people in Iraq because of the war and the 10 year economic boycott than Saddam did as the freedom-hating dictator. But freedom is worth the cost I'm sure. And after all, freedom is not free, right?

This is the freedom to exploit and profit at the expense of the localities being exploited, who get to watch the profits made from their resources leave the nation to freely find other investments and make more profit.

These freedom-lovers are oxymorons. They blind themselves and sing hymnals of praise about a glorious cause, using words that have no underlying contextual validity. There are plenty of killers who justified their murdering with convoluted self-serving reasoning.

Which freedom are they talking about? The freedom to lie, cheat, murder, and steal.

It's a very small world, very small, smaller than the cubicle into which we place ourselves day after day, rotating from one function to another, looking at the world as if through a microscope, with one eye closed, and the other focused on a tiny pinprick.

Across this world, we carve tiny traces of ourselves that disappear and become non-existent almost as soon as they occur, and everything seems to fall upon us at once, so that we only remember but one little dot on the map, one little morsel in the vast ocean of existence. It is only the mind, and the reinforced sycophancy of fawning others which might convince us otherwise, but nevertheless we are still as relatively insignifigant as hapless dust in the workings of the universe. Would that we led a nation to war and back, we are still merely a mortality of flesh with a soul. Nothing more, nothing less.

And thus we seek stability, ritual, and routine, because we cannot often bare ourselves to such existential nihilism. The nestling of absolute nothingness, an abyss without anything we might care to recognize, is not comforting insofar as is the white noise which appears on the television when there is no signal.

Ladies ... and .... gentlemen .... do not miss tonight's world premiere showing of The Spice is Life, that great all American TV show where you get to waste your life sitting on your bottom staring at the oncoming sounds and changes in light patterns, all of it falling into and across your mind, giving you the freedom to see and hear, rather than perceive and listen.

The spice of life is somewhere on the hundreds of stations out there, cheap laughs and morality plays dancing before you with nary an effort on your part. All you have to do is have a pair of eyes and ears, but you don't need to use them, because your brain automatically takes over once the mind is inundated with sound and light, that comes so rapid and swift that you don't have time to decide what to filter out. But relax, your subconscious id takes over and does that for you.

Train yourself to become accustomed to being entertained, rather than entertaining yourself. Sit there and watch, instead of developing skills and knowledge. Then, convince yourself that you are becoming wise and intelligent by whatever the TV brings to your palette. Learning, you see, occurs when you pay attention to the filtered presentation of light and sound. We learn to glean knowledge from these external imprints of light and sound, rather than pull from our own internal resources an image or mental association. When you read, your mind produces an image; when you watch your mind only stores a replica or a reminder that the image existed. When you hear, your mind interprets, but you don't get to ask questions or reinterpret from a medium that allows no interaction. There is no feedback or interaction possible from the Television.

And when we get used to the habits of storing incoming lights and sounds, when we get used to non-interactive learning, we become non-responsive automatons.

You know, I was reading a book review in the New Yorker earlier this week. The author, Jared Diamond, has written another anthropological treatise that will probably rival his prior masterpiece, Guns, Germs, and Steel. According to the review, Mr. Diamond has taken up the theme of society's collapse as the result of environmental exhaustion. He uses the two examples: one of the Nordic Vikings who inhabited Greenland in the early part of the 2nd millennium, and the Easter Islanders who chopped all of their trees down and thus extincted themselves. The Nordic immigrants could not culturally adjust to the Greenland environment. Proud Nords insisted on raising crops and raising livestock, refusing to eat fish, which were endlessly abundant, thereby exhausting the land and resulting in the elimination of the Nordic settlement by the middle of the millennium.

Man is an inbred creature, intra-mentally associated with the taboos, blindnesses, and impressions of those with whom one has shared a common existence. Man also tends to derive his self-esteem and his sense of peace from that amorphous ambiguity of the fellow man and the community. A shared language relates the everyday existence within sub-groups of the species.

In the modern world, we exist as parts of a worldwide human machine, but we still understand ourselves and our roles in that machine within and not removed from the context of our experience with the machine. And since we live in such an anonymous world, the idea of the human community as something as alien and unknown as a machine indicates our detachment, our feelings of dependence, and a fear of helplessness because each of us has to perform some role within the huge division of labor on the planet. We are not self-reliant farmers or tribal groups who can feed, clothe, and shelter themselves without the need for grocery stores, without the need of gasoline for the automotive commutes, and not spending 3 or 4 hours a day shopping and accumulating stuff at various stores and malls. And whereas tribal groups were on intimate life-long terms with the members of their community upon whom they depended, modern man has only an icon of an anonymous someone to thank for all the conveniences of modern living. In more simpler times about 100 years ago, before the rise of the financial giants called corporations, this was much less so than it is now. We live within an inbred philosophical reality.

Another book I picked up (or rather found in a box by the door to the faculty room) concerned how to make money on the stock market. On the cover poised two confident looking men with arms folded across their chest, and a slightly smirking, self-assured grin. Ah, yes, making money on the stock market, or rather, reducing our role as members of the community into a small cell wherein we join mutual societies called mutual funds for the promise of mutually making money. Adduced with a simple notion of cause and effect, profit becomes the sole importance of the social network. The human machine thus charts and statistically analyzes itself, hoping to manipulate the rhythms of up and down, the gyrations of buying, selling and supplies that is at the very utmost central root is just a representation of all that is grown, mined, and built on and-or from the earth. The planet earth is the medium used by which man manipulates other men and profits so as to hope to obtain the lavish fruits of the great extraction system that mankind has created. Earth has been rather passive so far, but this will not last. The society of modern man will also collapse because of the pressures of a decimated environment.

This alone is, to me, what is so damn annoying about those who espouse the "business friendly" argument which excoriates tree-hugging environmentalists and impish weak libr'uls who live off of government salaries and grants because they can't hack it in the "real world."

Like, grow up. Don't equate anti-business with being smart about the environment. Some people might want to ride the hog and burn the house down, but then you give a 14 year-old one million dollars and no responsibility and see what happens. And that thing called "the real world" is ambiguous and ephemeral, and probably is just a mirror image of the self's illusion.

Sorry Y'all. I've been mentally and spiritually on vacation. I will reappear again in a couple of days.

Promise.