One might have supposed that the sheer quantity of material that is in the mass media would pose a risk to the aims of the Global Establishment. One might have supposed that it was very risky to allow such a lot of 'stuff' to come to the attention of so many people - that this situation represents a lack of control.
Of course there is - and increasingly - as censorship of the mass media; yet with such as 'mass' it can never be a very complete mechanism of control.
Past tyrannies have tended to go down a path of aiming at total control of information; with the consequence that the mass media was kept very small. In other words, communication was controlled by trying to prevent all but a small volume of prescribed communication.
For example, under Communism at some point, apparently Romania had about an hour of national television per day, which consisted of little more than someone reading the scripts of official speeches given by government ministers. That system of complete control makes sense from the perspective of aiming at total control of information.
So it it seems that the current totalitarianism on the one hand wants control (since there is centralised creation and dissemination of 'stories', and sanctions against contradictions); yet allows a system that is so large that control will always be very incomplete.
These are the facts of modern-day Life - how can we make sense of them?
I think the answer is that the Establishment aim at near-complete control of the interpretative framework - but have a relaxed attitude about the content. Indeed, the more diverse and even contradictory are the specific details, the more this reinforces the power of the interpretative framework.
No specific detail can ever contradict the ideology - because The System is a theory that is proof against any possible 'fact'.
This is why evidence has become ineffectual. Whatever happens, The System can explain it. Whatever problem arises - even when caused by The System, the answer is always more System.
Threats to the System are not from any facts, or any possible evidence; but from rival 'systems', rival 'ideologies', rival interpretative frameworks.
In sum The System is a Theory of Life; and as such it permits, indeed encourages, an almost unlimited volume of data - but excludes any rival System.
And since The System includes all possible this-worldly, secular and materialist ideologies - this means, in practice, that only Religions are a threat to The System.
And the only Religions the are a threat are those that expand the scope of Reality to include more-than-the-material, and more-than-mortal-life - those that repurpose Life from The System's focus on gratification within our lifespans, and men conceived as annihilated by biological death - to Life in a context of divine goals.
This means that the Global Establishment can get all the many advantages of a population addicted to an ever expanding mass media; but can avoid the problems of dissonant information - so long as information is supplied in an atomised, specialised, unintegrated fashion; so long as a genuinely Religious perspective is excluded.
An appearance of freedom, a kind of excitement, can be allowed when it comes to secular ideologies - because these are all contained-within The System: so we get the various Punch and Judy fights of Left and Right, Socialism and Capitalism, Equality and Freedom, prevention of suffering versus enhancement of wealth, Global versus National etc. etc.
This is all just Office Politics, sub-theories: None of it matters.
Because all of it is contained by the theoretical imperative that only the material matters, and only the scope of a biological lifespan is real.
The one 'thing' The System cannot tolerate, is another System.
A certain religion that we don't care to mention by name seems to be tolerated well enough, and even encouraged.
ReplyDelete@William - The manner of toleration/ promotion is very telling - the alternative religious/ 'ideological' explanations are excluded from the mass media. For example, the distinctive (conspiracy theory-type) interpretation of world events; or explicit and compulsory religious attitudes to specific issues. Even to describe these in public discourse can be prosecuted as a hate crime in the EU.
ReplyDeleteSo I would regard this as an exception which proves the rule.
What is being aimed-at with the vast and unfiltered deluge of stuff has always seemed rather obvious, at least in the case of fiction and poetry.
ReplyDeleteIn theory Heaven is infinite in potential and there could likewise be an infinite number and variety of divinely-inspired creative works of Tolkien level or above. In practice there is only a very small number of people who are able to do creative work of that level. Likewise only a small number of people who can do honestly motivated amateur work (e.g. good-quality fanfiction writing). Making sure that as much mediocre media as possible will be funded will ensure that these types of divine work get lost in the noise.
The advantage of genius-produced media is that it is not always immediately obvious and can sometimes cut through the noise in unpredictable ways to attain mass acclaim. But this happens rarely enough that instances can be dealt-with on a case by case basis.
'Copyright' is also a key support to the strategy of evil, since it ensures media production is remunerative and that the mass of mediocre media can be funded in deniable fashion. Moreover, mediocre media can be funded on the back of genius-level media. (Studio buys film rights to Tolkien, makes halfway-decent Tolkien movies, recycles profits into producing noise and fluff.)
(There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an author being paid through copyright, but in practice much like with 'funding' the advantage ends up mostly on the side of evil.)
If media production were no longer remunerative in the way ensured by copyright law, it would only be done by intrinsically motivated geniuses and amateurs OR directly-funded propaganda campaigns. The distinction between the two would be much more obvious. The scale of production for the good media would be much more modest (no more animated films prepared by armies of people and, nowadays, rendered by massive server farms) but the balance of the media would very easily tilt towards more wholesome content.
@Ara - Interesting perspective, good argument. I am persuaded. I used to favour copyright until I noticed the negative correlation with quality.
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