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Medialens Media Alerts

Cogitations - A New Media Lens Service

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

MEDIA LENS COGITATIONS: A NEW MEDIA LENS SERVICE

 

March 4, 2004

 

 

After a recent meeting of the Media Lens team at the Ox Row public house in

Salisbury, we have decided to initiate a new service for readers. We are aware

that many rs to this list are primarily interested in receiving factual

analyses of media performance centring around exchanges with mainstream

journalists, and so on. As readers of some of our previous Media Alerts, and

also our books, will know, we have always felt that this is not enough.

 

Consequently, we are today setting up a second list for rs who wish to

receive our Media Lens Cogitations. These will run alongside our normal Media

Alerts and Rapid Response Media Alerts and will focus on more philosophical,

psychological and personal issues surrounding thought control in modern society.

 

The following Cogitation is intended as an introduction to, and example of, the

kind of material that we will be sending out. To receive further Cogitations

please to the new list by clicking here:

 

http://www.medialens.org/_cogitations.html

 

You will be sent a receipt of registration email and then a confirmation email –

click on the confirmation link to confirm your subscription. This will not

affect your receipt of our usual Media Alerts in any way.

 

Best wishes

 

The Editors

 

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

MEDIA LENS COGITATIONS: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION

 

By: David Edwards

 

March 4, 2004

 

 

Personal - Political

 

Many of the dissident philosophers and rebels of the past like Rousseau, Rocker,

Tolstoy, Thoreau, Emerson and Fromm wrote often about the personal experiences,

motivations and concerns that informed their political dissent. Tolstoy, for

example, eventually came spectacularly clean about his life as a writer:

 

“Horribly strange, but I now understand it all. Our genuine, sincere concern was

how to gain as much money and fame as possible. And the only thing we knew how

to do in order to achieve this was to write books and journals.” (Tolstoy, A

Confession, Penguin, 1987, p.24)

 

This was a deeply personal comment, but it shone a brilliant light on the

intellectual culture of Tolstoy’s time, and ours.

 

But today, personal, psychological, philosophical and spiritual issues are

hardly mentioned at all, with dissidents insisting that their own experiences

are surely of little interest to the public. The operative theory seems to be

that the world is in the mess it’s in because people do not have access to the

facts revealing the criminality and irrationality of power.

 

My own view is that the world is also in the mess it’s in because people often

aren’t interested in, and even actively avoid, these facts. The point being that

the indifference of so many people is often deeply rooted in personal and

philosophical issues.

 

In reality, for example, few issues are more important than understanding just

how and why some people come to feel motivated to work for progressive change.

Perhaps I am uniquely flawed, but a question that has always loomed large in my

mind is: ‘Why should we care about other people in the first place? What

actually is wrong with being selfish?‘

 

From the perspective of everyday life these questions may seem monstrous, but

from the perspective of our predicament in the human condition they are surely

not. We are fragile, short-lived beings destined to lose every last thing and

person we love – we are born into an extremely fraught and demanding situation.

Given that this is the case, why should anyone consider devoting their already

inadequate time, energy and resources to helping others? And yet the 11th

century poet Ksemendra wrote:

 

“Disturbed times produce some who, though buffeted by wild waves, move through

the deep waters to embrace all who suffer. Even when undergoing fierce suffering

themselves, they still extend kindness to others.” (Leaves of the Heaven Tree,

Dharma, 1997, p.421)

 

But why? Where can we find the motivation to extend kindness to others in this

way? The response that it is our ‘moral duty’, that we will thereby be able ‘to

look ourselves in the mirror’, is unconvincing. The suffering of life and our

profound tendency to selfishness are such that we need to address these

questions seriously, and we need to respond with convincing answers. If we can’t

find answers, then nobody should feel obligated to care for the welfare of

others. Or at least nobody should believe that appeals to ‘moral duty’ will have

any great impact on what most people actually do with their lives.

 

The ingrained selfishness of a fragile, finite being cannot be resisted by

illusions, however ‘moral’ they might appear to be.

 

I mentioned a few of my own personal experiences in my first book, Free To Be

Human (titled Burning All Illusions in the US), and apologised for subjecting

readers to them. After all, self-focus of this kind may often be a manifestation

of egotism intended to imply that the author has some kind of unique experience.

My own motive, here, for referring to my very ordinary experiences is to

indicate that many of my political ideas and interests actually have their roots

in ideas and experiences that might be thought to have nothing to do with

politics.

 

It seems to me that we should not attempt to isolate political dissent from the

rest of our lives, from the subtle and not-so subtle feelings in our hearts and

heads. Rather, we need to become sensitive to our internal reactions and

protestations in response to the world around us.

 

 

A World Of ‘Phonies’? - Appearance and Being

 

In one of his books of collected essays, Gore Vidal explains what he finds so

agreeable about the writing of W. Somerset Maugham: “+nothing+, he [Maugham]

tells us with a smile, is what it seems.” (Vidal, United States – Essays

1952-1992, Random House, 1993, p.232, original emphasis)

 

This is also what appealed to me when I read Maugham’s novels and particularly

his short stories. It seems to me that my interest in political ideas began in a

very personal concern with the sense that “nothing is what it seems”.

 

As a teenager, my curiosity was sparked by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s blistering

denunciation of the chasm separating “appearance and being” among his

contemporaries:

 

" We no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under a perpetual restraint.

In the meantime the herd of men, which we call society, all act under the same

circumstances exactly alike, unless very particular and powerful motives prevent

them. Thus we never know with whom we have to deal... What a train of vices must

attend this uncertainty! Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence

are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate,

and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of

politeness... " (Rousseau - Discourses Sur Les Arts Et Sciences, John Hope

Masson, ed., The Indispensable Rousseau, Quartet Books, 1979, pp.38-39)

 

I felt that Rousseau was describing the same world I saw around me - my peers

also seemed to become less honest, sincere and authentic as they ‘grew up’ and

conformed to society’s norms. Aged 18, a year before I discovered Rousseau, I

wrote a short story in which my hero makes a last stand for honesty and

sincerity in the face of ‘phoniness’:

 

“He found he was unable to stand or understand the unnatural behaviour of those

around him. Did the punk with the white hair really think that was who he was?

Was that his real, honest, unaffected self? Or was it an act? Was the girl

talking and laughing hysterically, really showing her true self? Was the voice

in her head the same; or was it a show, a façade?”

 

In the story, my hero quickly chooses to abandon all thoughts of authenticity

and becomes, himself, a phoney in order to win the heart of a phoney girl!

Twenty years later I read this by the 2nd century philosopher Aryadeva:

 

“A soothsayer told a king that whoever used the water when it rained would go

mad. The king had his well covered. When it rained the people of that place went

mad after using the water and since only the king remained sane, they thought he

was mad. When the king found out, he feared they might mock or harm him because

they considered him mad, so he used the water too.” (Yogic Deeds of

Bodhisattvas, Aryadeva, Gyel-tsap, Snow Lion, 1994, p.112)

 

In a later science fiction story, I wrote about an inter-galactic salesman who,

travelling from planet to planet, hears mention of a long-lost college friend

and decides to seek him out. He learns that his friend has been selected as the

sole human trade representative by a reclusive alien race. As a result, the

friend has become an almost mythical figure, rich beyond imagining. My salesman

finally tracks him down, entering an awesome, palatial office to meet him. As

they approach to shake hands, my salesman realises that the money and privilege

have come at a price - his friend’s mouth, eyes, nose and ears have all been

surgically removed in deference to the sensitivities of his alien clients.

 

My sense that there was a conflict between our tendency to trade authenticity

for money and status as we grow older, and my own concern that I should not

become a ‘phoney’, but should also not become some kind of social outcast,

seemed very real to me as I grew up through college and beyond.

 

The problem was this: how can you be yourself and not be rejected by a corporate

culture that appears to find imperfect, flawed human reality ‘uncool’? If ‘cool’

is hair gelled at the right, crazy angles; if it’s the correct jeans and

trainers with the correct logo; if it’s being unflustered and in control of our

emotions, how can we admit or show our insecurities and imperfections to each

other? How can we be real? Or at least, why would we work so hard to create such

a ‘coolly’ confident exterior only to admit the lie?

 

On another level, how can you be an honest journalist – sincere, compassionate,

truthful – when you are selling your work to corporations literally in the

business of promoting consumerism and materialism and, in fact, cynicism with

regard to everything opposing them?

 

 

Giant Frauds And Trojan Dreams

 

The issue of “appearance and being”, of authenticity versus phoniness, connected

with another early interest of mine: the possibility of discovering basic

principles of human nature and human happiness. My interest was sparked, in

particular, by the work of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. In his

remarkable (and, in my view, deeply flawed) work, Leviathan, Hobbes attempted

nothing less than to establish organising principles for society derived from

first principles of human nature. Hobbes claimed, for example, that because all

individuals are by nature vulnerable to physical attack from other individuals,

or other groups of individuals, everyone is in perpetual fear of such an attack,

and so everyone has an interest in joining to form a society providing universal

protection.

 

It seemed to me that the deeper message of Hobbes’s work was that it is all very

well studying politics, physics, history, and so on – just is it is all very

well pursuing any number of careers - but what is the point of studying or doing

+anything+ before we understand the basic principles of human nature, or at

least the basic principles of human happiness? In other words, why set off in

any particular direction, if we have no idea where we’re going?

 

In my mind, a link between Hobbes’ search for basic principles of human nature

and Rousseau’s concern with authenticity centred around wondering how much of

our society’s version of human happiness was actually fraudulent or wrong.

 

It seemed to me that mainstream versions of success – unrestrained materialism,

high status work, rampant hedonism – in fact did not deliver happiness to the

people around me. And yet the media and wider culture acted as though they quite

obviously did - the issue did not seem to be considered a matter for discussion.

Were we somehow victims of a giant fraud? Did the ‘being’ of society in fact

+not+ match the (apparently) agreed ‘appearance’? Perhaps, after all, success

and happiness weren’t what they were supposed to be. Erich Fromm summed up my

growing suspicions exactly:

 

“To see himself without illusions would not be so difficult for the individual,

were he not constantly exposed to being brainwashed and deprived of the faculty

of critical thinking. He is made to think and feel things that he would not feel

or think, were it not for uninterrupted suggestions and elaborate methods of

conditioning. Unless he can see the real meaning behind the double-talk, the

reality behind the illusions, he is unable to be aware of himself as he is, and

is aware only of himself as he is supposed to be.” (Fromm, The Art Of Being,

Continuum, 1992, p.77)

 

Perhaps standard versions of happiness are pursued, not because they give us

happiness, but because they give us what vested interests want us to need. In

1833, a British Parliamentarian observed of the Haitian people:

 

" To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must

be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human

labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the

desire of luxuries; and what were once luxuries, gradually came... to be

necessaries. This was the sort of progress the negroes had to go through... "

(Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Year 501 – The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.227)

 

Compare and contrast this with comments made more recently by retailing analyst

Victor Lebow:

 

" Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way

of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek

spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... We need things,

consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing

rate. " (Quoted, Sharon Beder, Global Spin, Green Books, 1997, p.161)

 

Awareness of the extent and intensity of this propagandising raises an awesome

possibility: that our failure to achieve happiness is rooted, not merely in some

grim reality, but in illusions imposed on us by a grim system of political,

economic and cultural control. Is it possible that we are unhappy, not because

of what we are, but because of what we are +supposed+ to be, because of what

society needs us to be?

 

If this is true, then breaking the chains of illusion might be one and the same

task as breaking the chains of suffering.

 

 

 

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