Relevant information is always out there, however it’s flooded with irrelevancy and boosted up to news from no-news events. People, especially the working families have minimum time to engage in local or global events. Even more so, the habit of real engagement is never taught nor promoted. Unlike the consumption of pre-packed acceptable thoughts and engagements. In schools kids learn for years about some ideal ways of how a democracy, government, economy and politics (ought to) work. Instead of looking at the real political and economical situation in their countries and around the world. Mixing that with idealism and a study of how, let’s say, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince can be applied to current events. And why not the eternally relevant and concise transcribed speech by Smedley Butler called War is a Racket.
Otherwise the empty calorie preparation for the kids into the real world of politics and governing, just leaves them as future adults and parents who’ll consume educational programs, news programs and all other programs herd-approved and offered. Everything except the raw individual critical observation, which has to be re-learned or re-discovered. This isn’t something new, a herd mentality keeps the sums and parts of that herd align. Human consciousness can be conflicting, where the reality indicates something but the herd adaptive reality says otherwise. It’s summed up in the smoke filled room experiment that concisely exposes dangerous conformity. When you see what you see, do you react despite others not seeing it? This is also known as the bystander effect (bystander apathy).
That’s why the flood of distraction can easily grip the family and for the spare time adults or parents have is filled with news programming that every day resets the last days news events. Which leaves it all at the level of mentioning the headlines with colleagues, friends and so on. The other major programming is entertainment, mostly series that also give the adult an excitement kick from a dramatic simulation on the screen, a cliffhanger, violence, brutality or soft-comedy. So from the routine daily life the masses get their neurons, adrenalin and kicks fired up from the entertainment industry. All in all, a big mega industry offered to the end product, the adults, through a quasi critical thinking education program by a few, ordered down from the government to the teachers, served to the kids. No wonder adults don’t ask questions that matter, feel or engage in that which matters. That instinct is washed away through years of programming and later maintained by programming. Simple, brutal and to the point. A cliché you have to experience to understand.
Now, to the biggest cost of the masses being foggy in their consciousness, that’s war. War is a racket and has always been. From all of these simple small-scaled ideas and experiments, if you multiply that in people it all morphs into an easily controlled mass population – just as ten boxes of tea put in a store shelf at the same time, one hand on either side. No wonder there’s such a battle for the freedom of thought, speech and expression on the internet.
What do you think?