The Double-Edged Sword of Movies, Media, & Entertainment: Unintended Consequences That Shaped A War Machine
I know that title sounds bold and rather dire, but I'd be willing to bet that this article will take you somewhere many do not.
~Where I'm NOT Headed With This Article~
A lot of people are self-educated and aware enough to know just how inept and corrupt much of modern media is, both intentionally and unintentionally so. Many understand just how much darkness resides in the entertainment history, much of it backed by intention, by decades of control coming from very powerful people who have creepy, unethical, and at best questionable agendas.
I also know, from the many conversations about this I have had over the years, that I'm not the only one who's had the recent epiphanies I have had about just how many layers of effects on the modern world (on the human mind) exist directly as a result of decades of media and entertainment bombardment.
This article is NOT going to focus on:
-specific persons or people and their agendas
-already known/discussed subliminal messages and programming that is hidden in commercials/movies/media
-how entertainment and media cause a stimulation addiction, as well as subconscious fear addiction
-why and how the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgans and others so strongly controlled the birth of American media and entertainment
The amount of information about the above is so thick and easily available/verifiable, that it has become widely known and understood. So much so recently, that I would not have wasted my time writing any article about this topic... except this one.
~*~
It Began With Doing One Of My Favorite Things: Looking For My Deepest Assumptions
Perhaps some people do stranger things in their spare time, but I'm pretty friggin weird, and out of the many things I do for fun... one of them is searching my mind for something new that has gone un-checked (it's a lifelong process, I promise).
I will consciously dig for an assumption about myself, reality, or others, that is either unhealthy, out of alignment with something I know to be true, or damaging to myself or others in how it guides my actions. It's both a humbling and a rewarding process. If you want to increase your genuine intelligence while avoiding the slippery slope of turning into a pompous arrogant jackass, I recommend giving this a try. It starts with watching your own thoughts and mental patterns as you go about your day, and stopping them in their tracks when you catch yourself thinking or assuming something absurd. How do you tell? Well, the mental pattern or thought will often have NO provable basis in reality.
For example:
Stereotyping is common, and I have still caught myself stereotyping someone, while I know FULL well I appear to be a stereotype to many strangers in many ways. Someone could look at me and assume a host of things about me from my dress, and manner, and approximate age, etc.
A few of those things would probably be right, but because I am aware of things about me that make me somewhat unusual as a person, I know that a lot of people's assumptions would be horribly wrong, and getting to know me would bring them a lot of surprises.
My logical brain understands that a lot of people have so many details and complexities both to their external and internal lives, just as I do, so this part of my brain will catch my old poor assumption patterns. It's good, because it reminds me that I in fact know almost nothing about most people I see or meet in passing, and most are far more than their stereotypes alone could reveal. To assume any more than what I immediately see and observe on the surface is arrogance at its finest, and you might remember having been taught such a concept as a child by someone - Don't judge a book by its cover. I actually think that analogy is poor for several reasons, but if you've ever picked up a book that had a lame cover and ended up loving it, you know why people still use the phrase.
"Damnit, Get To The Main Point, I'm IMPATIENT!"
I know there are always the readers who want the punchline either right away, or within a few sentences. I could write an entire other article just to tease you about why that particular impatience is a result of how modern video editing is done, but I'm not that mean, and I get it.
So cheers, this is for you impatient consumers. ;)
All human knowledge is limited to some degree. To this very day, humans are constantly learning new things and un-learning incorrect things. Much knowledge is never known or understood by a great many, and what any one human being can know beyond a shadow of doubt in his or her life is remarkably limited even now with the internet and mass communication/information exchange in place. We start as babies with zero. We start with a powerful processor that instinctively knows a few important things, and almost nothing else. In the course of a human life, one person will come to know many things -- most of that knowledge will be under one of two categories: What He/She Thinks They Know, What She/He Actually Knows.
Before media, massive instant information exchange, and entertainment, humans had very limited reach and knowledge. If you go back before phones, quite a bit less.
On this continent not all that long ago, generations lived and died where people didn't know much about the world outside their farm, homestead, village or small town... unless they saw it for themselves. People had to experience other people in person, most of the time, in order to know about them. They had to visit, or have the means to travel to other places on earth, even to go just a little ways outside their area.
And most -- even with cars invented -- simply didn't have the means and never got to. Many people did learn to read, and so read books, and learned from the knowledge passed on to them that there was quite a big world with quite a lot of different cultures in it outside their own, but if they didn't go meet other humans outside their immediate world for themselves, they knew very very little about the rest of the world.
{"Ok seriously Amanda, you haven't said the punchline, and so far that only points to what is COOL about modern media and entertainment! We can communicate and know about each other! We can hear each other's stories. We can know we're not alone."}
And I'd agree with you there, which is why I refer to all of that as having a double-edged sword. The power of information is that it can be as much a weapon to smash lies and clear obscurity, revealing truth, as much as it can distort and obfuscate and manipulate.
~ FINALLY THE FRIGGIN PUNCHLINE ~
The hidden, deeply programmed, absurd assumption that imbedded itself in the minds of many (including my own) over generations is:
OMNISCIENCE.
For those of you doing this right now: "... ?!?!?!"
... hang tight.
Omniscience is 'the state of knowing everything'. Whether you're a Christian, an atheist, a buddhist, an agnostic, a pagan, a deist, a theist--whatever worldview you hold--you probably already know you don't have the equivalent of GOD-like knowledge, or a knowledge of EVERYTHING (everything that ever was, currently is, or will be).
A few of us have met the sort of people who often seem to think they do; they're typically the least pleasant to be around.
No human being has omniscience. If you asked myself or most people if they thought they were omniscient, they'd look at you pretty funny.
Yet, remarkably, this is the very real hidden assumption that gradually imbeds itself in the brain when humans become overwhelmed with new knowledge about each other and the outside world.
Pay Attention Here, Closely..
When I sit in front of a screen and watch a movie or documentary play out, I am ALWAYS seeing mere pieces of reality. I am seeing fragments of truth, fragments of a story, and I am sitting as a watchful third party who is unnaturally privileged in being handed information about either characters or real people.
"Unnaturally privileged? Explain?"
It goes like this:
When we relate to the characters on the screen, or relate to the people we see on the news or in documentaries, it engages our empathy. It either..
-engages our empathy because some part of us relates on a basic human level to one or more of the humans we are watching/observing
-or it engages our empathy because we feel injustice or irritation directed at someone in the story we believe has done wrong/harm
What the subconscious brain will tend to do is automatically fill in some of the blanks of the story of their LIFE, or fill in the blanks of details about a character or person we are watching -- and these 'filled-in blanks' are the details we neither actually witnessed or observed. Weird, right??
It's actually a part of what your brain is meant to do--to compute things and try to form a picture--and we may often imagine that the people we see on screen lead similar lives to us. Conversely, we might imagine they live very different lives from us based on the fragments we happen to see. About much of what we conclude, we could be RIGHT!
But therein lies the danger, my friends.
For what we are NEVER close to understanding, or entirely knowing, is EVERYTHING about the internal and external workings of the lives of others we do not know.
Those of us who have lived long enough know that we cannot even know everything about the people closest to us necessarily -- and that's not to sound dark or ominous, its to point out that all humans are layered, and there is always something I cannot see or do not fully understand.
Humans cannot convey every thing we think and feel and do to one another constantly, it's impossible, as our brain doesn't even quit when we sleep like bricks in our beds.
Humbling Introspective Questions To Examine Your Psyche With
Have you ever had to eat words because you misjudged someone without knowing nearly enough about them?
Have you ever been hurt because someone else chose to judge you before they knew you, or heard your side of a story?
Have you read the countless historical documents that show just how many wars occur and continue because some men are willing to shoot strangers in a foreign land based on the hearsay of their television screens inciting them to anger and revenge?
A Fun Exercise In Conscious Thought
Watch your mind watching a movie or documentary, or some so-called exposé. Very carefully watch to see if you can catch yourself beginning to "put a picture together" of the person or story, built on assumptions of details you did not at all witness or confirm at any point.
Ask yourself how you really know any of this is true, and try to answer that question sincerely:
How do I know for certain any of this is what it is portrayed to be?
What do I know of the people involved personally, if anything?
What mountain of life and details exist that I did NOT see, which are as much a part of this story as what I did see?
Do I, or should I, automatically trust that all the fragments of a story I see are authentic and fully correct?
Are the biased perspectives of people involved in this something I should trust implicitly,
or is that giving too much credit where it isn't due?
If I've been misled about events in my own life, which I was myself involved in,
can I really know for certain what happened behind the scenes I'm seeing on TV/online?
Insidious Effects
Contrary to what children's movies would have you believe, evil is not obvious, it is covert. It is born when good people's good intentions are used against them to cause them to unwittingly take the place of God, or to act as a god, assuming they know so much about a stranger's life that they are willing to blindly follow another man's order to end the lives of not just one innocent... but dozens and hundreds, and with an army of unwitting good-intentioned people -- thousands.
A Closer Second Look At Watching Movies
There is something extremely unnatural about the very act of watching certain movies. Movies attempt to help us see the deep inner workings of other humans-- their lives, stories about their lives, from a perspective we don't get to have in the real world of every day life.
Character studies will go in depth, the character will spill their thought and emotion, and we get to watch their life on a screen in great detail. We get to "know", quite often, what each character thinks and does, what their perspectives are, and often we hear them say their deepest beliefs right out in front of us in the story.
The unnatural part of this is we can be the "watchful eye of God", knowing who was where in the story at what times, and often knowing all manner of details that we COULD NOT HAVE KNOWN otherwise, if we had had the limited viewpoint of being one of the characters in the story itself.
In no other way do we experience this in real life. In real life, I don't have a way to know for certain what every member of my next door neighbor's family is up to at all times, or what they're thinking, feeling, saying, planning... much less know their deepest thoughts or motivations (not without being a stalker, at the very least a professional stalker for the NSA perhaps).
With the rare exception of a spouse (and many marriages lack a real bond), or a best friend or sibling, we do not know EVERYTHING about really anyone. We cannot closely know what millions and hundreds of others are really doing, thinking, or being. Even when a someone tells us some of that in books, or in videos, we are seeing a small fraction of it all.
If my life was the Truman Show, and you saw my every breath and move, you still would not have enough knowledge to truly know me deeply, there would be thoughts and feelings and patterns you would never be privy to because they would not be detectable on screen or in any external event of my life. Some of the deepest changes that have taken place inside my psyche and heart are only detectable if you had access to watching the gradual shift of my habits and patterns over the course of a year or 10, and access by way of living with me and hearing me talk. Even then, you'd not be able to know it all, because not even I do.
Most of us don't even know the vastness of what our subconscious, our memories, our psyches hold buried within. How could a story, or a sound bite, or a brief claim by someone on a screen, or one book, or a documentary give me nearly enough information to think that I would be welcome butting in to someone else's life?
Yet these precise chunks of information: from news/media, movies, stories, television, even books... have incited people to assume they know everything about a person. They incite people to rage based on assumption, or to love based on assumption, or to sympathy, or hate or sadness. All based on small fragments, fragments that are at best just 1/100th or /1000th of the truth, OR usually,... fragments that aren't even real or accurate. Fragments that typically are false or fabricated, twisted, or taken out of context.
Often, it only takes so little as a news station calling out the name of a "suspect", and millions of people who see that absurdly assume that
- they know the person is bad or wrong,
and - must be caged or killed.
It only takes one person to accuse another of something, and then for media to publicize it...
and you can watch the Programmed Assumption of Omniscience rearing its ugly head just by reading the public comments about it.
They are suddenly GOD, or talk like one.
Sentencing the person to all manner of ills, declaring they should be shot, beheaded, castrated or raped, or left to rot in prison or otherwise. All because a screen displayed some writing or played some human words and images while declaring that an accusation of an act was made against that person.
True Humility Is Remembering What We Do Not Know
I have been the judger, the accuser, and I have been the judged and the accused.
I have seen how even people who think they know someone well, can come to find out they knew a lot less than they realized, and the consequences were severe.
People hear about something, and their GOODNESS causes them to think with their feelings.
They have a sense of justice, but it is being twisted by the illusion that SOME information is equivalent to a GOD's information (if you think or do not think there is such a thing it makes no difference to the point).
To understand how much we still do not know, it takes learning. The more you learn and stay humble, the more you see how little we have time on earth to know or consume. The more you see how so much of mankind is still finding out how wrong we have been, the more you see how much information it would take for you to be able to confidently say you "know" everything about someone, or any thing for that matter.
Knowledge helps us become aware of the suffering and joy of others, and for this we can be thankful, and we can engage in empathy. But when we think we know enough to USE FORCE, or call for GOVERNMENT agents to USE FORCE ON OUR BEHALF, against our fellow man, there is a built in arrogance. It is not conscious for most of us, it was not conscious in me.
When you watch a documentary, or a movie, you are playing the unusual role of "almost like God". No one is a god, but when we get to be an ALMOST 'all-knowing' watcher, we must remember that in the real world we don't really know even a fraction of what movies and television have trained us to assume we know.
A lot of people believe they know a lot about the world. At one point I might have arrogantly thought I did, I have learned enough to know far better than that now.
In any one place on earth, there are millions of lives, billions of thoughts and emotions, actions, interactions, reactions, manipulations, intentions (good or bad), and they weave a complex tapestry not one of us will ever see but an infinitesimally small fraction of.
No, I do NOT know what an ENTIRE COUNTRY (thousands or millions of square miles) is 'like'. I don't know what hundreds of thousands of people half a world a way are like or what they will become or do. No, the media does not show me or you an accurate portrayal of the world, they cannot.
Every major media outlet (and others) have proven for decades to be dishonest, but even if they were honest, I now understand that NO media shows me everything, or even a fraction of enough for me to make a judgment call on what the people doing or saying deserve.
I do know how to judge direct actions against myself, and those I love, in real life. I can judge what I witness myself in person, and even then I have to judge carefully.
The manipulation is thick in this world, and more than half of it is not even intentional.
Now imagine how arrogant a human has to be, to think he knows for certain that hundreds of humans half a world away whom he has never met DESERVE TO BE SHOT OR BOMBED, because some stranger he doesn't know told him so, or because he saw some images of things on a screen happening, and thought he knew exactly who deserved to DIE or to LIVE.
How blind and arrogant do humans have to be to go to war? All you need to know to answer that question is to start asking yourself...
HOW BLIND AND ARROGANT HAVE I BEEN?
Stop making so much sense, dear, or you'll get arrested.
Incidentally, this is part of why, when I write fiction (like "The Iron Web"), the reader is only allowed to know what some particular character knows: because that is how reality works. In exactly ZERO cases do we have access to an omniscient narrator in real life.
I had never considered that aspect of fiction. Quite interesting. :)
This is why I think epistemology is so important. Thinking through how we come about claiming to have knowledge about something is so important. Does it involved reason, logic, and evidence with an appropriate amount of skepticism? Then maybe we can talk with a bit more confidence and, importantly, we can transfer that information to someone else in a way they can understand it.
Without a good epistemology, people believe all kinds of random stuff which shapes their thoughts and actions if very destructive ways by those who know how to predict outputs given a worldview and a set of programmed inputs.
Luke, did you ever read The Romantic Manifesto? Of all of Ayn Rand's work her essay on epistemology influenced me most. It helps one fine tune their compass, moral or otherwise.
My favorite Rand work is: "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". I have read it over and over. At 75 I can reflect it is the most influential philosophy I have read. (Philosophy was my college major.) It helped me understand (analyze) all philosophy. Ayn gave me a "key to the universe".
At 51, I cannot reflect as far, but I agree with your sentiment.
Nice darygan post sharing uplode my vote
When voters call you 'arrogant'.