(Continued from Part 1.)
Having looked at the social paradigm of conflict and retribution that the cabal foisted on society over the course of the last many decades, (1) I’d now like to examine one source of the social programming that was engineered to dumb us down and think in terms of promoting conflict and seeking retribution, unawares: television, including the movies that end up being aired on TV.
So many of the crime dramas are solved these days by magic thinking. Have you ever watched a crime unit (police, NCIS, CSI, FBI, or some other unit) analyze a crime? Have you noticed how what is said forms one complete and continuous assertion, with each member of the unit saying one sentence to which the next person’s contribution flows seamlessly as if all are thinking with a single mind? That is one form of magic thinking.
A second form of magic thinking comprises the superhero theme (whether the heroes are mutants, psychics, time travelers, extraterrestrials, or whatever). The superhero has access to ways of thinking or technology that the rest of us do not.
We’re left thinking that our futures are assured by heroes who don’t in reality exist. We end up feeling comfortable leaving those futures to the ones detailed to protect us, even though in real life, as we’ve found to our dismay, often the ones detailed to protect us are the ones implicated in taking our rights away.
A third form of magic thinking is the manner in which the crimes are solved, the hero being unerringly savvy or intuitive. In the process of playing up the superhero, we’re fed values like confidence, faith in authority, cooperation with the protectors of the law, and so on, much of which has not paid off, I’m sad to say.
Here’s another form of magic thinking. Have you noticed that the bad guys, at the start of a show, have incredible accuracy and, by the end of a show, cannot hit a barn door?
Have you noticed how the hero has the ability to devise a way of destroying the bad guy from only available materials, which unfailingly provide what he needs, on a moment’s notice, or that a talisman or magic agent is almost always available at the last minute to save the day?
Special effects, witty lines, sarcasm, coincidence all are used to dazzle us. But nowadays no sooner do we accept the flawed characters we’re being offered than we’re slipped a double whammy. The coup de grace these days is that the good guys, regularly now, cross the line between bad and good. They muddle our thinking and our values.
Have you noticed how many films or TV shows feature good guys doing bad things? Cops throwing criminals off the roof, special agents blowing up (“erasing”) the bad guys, cops lying to protect their partners – the line between good and bad is blurred and the ends are reinforced as justifying the means.
This blurring of the lines dumbs us down as much as the endless drumbeat of crime and punishment, the dazzle of the racy lines, and the distraction of the special effects. I’ve reached the conclusion that the powers that were decided television would be the ultimate means of dumbing us down.
Turn on your TV and watch, if you can stand it, the endless shows that extol or bemoan evil, from spawn to alien to predator to vampires to the ultimate in gore and nonsense – the walking dead.
As many in society pull out of their hypnotic trance under the impact of the rising energies, the dragooning of television into the dumbing down of the masses has never been more obvious.
I presume that, just as the journalistic media are still controlled, so is the entertainment industry. I also assume that that will end soon and that all of us will know, at some point, how an industry that many of us began our lives trusting sold out to the same cabal that planned our ultimate end in a nuclear World War III. (Sorry, that show was cancelled.)
Anyone familiar with the endless shows that focus on Armageddon, planetary catastrophe, the war of the worlds, extraterrestrial predators, etc., will already be aware of the scare factor. But what has hit me more recently is how complete that scare campaign has been and how sophisticated it was.
The moment at which I could no longer stay silent arrived when I watched a TV show or movie (cannot remember which) called The Gamer. In The Gamer, the heroes of the video game began speaking back to their users, taking Tron and The Thirteenth Floor a whole lot further. Even The Lawnmower Man did not blur the lines as much.
I left off feeling almost totally unable to see where reality ended and fiction began. I was so confused as to be optimally open to being hypnotized in any way whoever it is that’s making these shows wanted me to be.
A prime demand made upon readers and watchers of science fiction is to suspend disbelief for the period of the read or program. If I suspended disbelief in the face of this onslaught on my mind, I feared I would have lost it. The hero was killing so many people, I couldn’t keep track of the side of the line they might have been on.
How things were resolved I know not. How it ended I cannot remember. I only remember being so confused I was a ripe target at that moment.
And it was at that moment that I saw that magic thinking was being used to utterly deprive me of any critical faculties that remained from watching TV. I realized the extent of the attempt to defeat my powers of reasoning, discrimination, moral values and everything else that resided in me as civilized behavior.
What a completely moribund view of society is being served up to us at present. In the moments when I feel the need for some diversion, I suppose I could watch Nat Geo Wild and see who’s eating whom. There are very few programs on TV today that aren’t focused on predation, evil, misfortune, and tragedy. Through this steady diet, we’re being inured to a way of life that fosters conflict and seeks retribution.
Footnotes
(1) See from “Conflict to Peace” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/06/from-conflict-to-peace-2/