Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (11 page)

Finally, the message of the film is clear. The process of going insane began long before the launch into space. It began when life moved from nature into cities. Kelvin’s ride from woods to city to space was a ride from connection to disconnection, from reality to abstraction, a history of technology, setting the conditions for the imposition of reconstructed realities by a single powerful force.

A generation ago both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley wrote twentieth-century classics on this same theme. Both
1984
and
Brave New World
have been analyzed and reanalyzed, but with each turn of the technology screw, they take on new levels of meaning and relevance.

In Orwell’s
1984,
the central technique of oppression is the absolute control of all kinds of information, both in the traditional sense—news, books, language—and also in the sense of information from the environment.

A suffocatingly narrow language, Newspeak, is imposed. It has no vocabulary to express many ideas and human feelings, and without expression, they begin to atrophy.

Every room contains a television set which constantly floods people’s minds with martial music, news of military achievements and the despicable actions of the leader of the Underground, Goldstein.

The past is completely eliminated. History is revised. Books are destroyed. Without print media, there is no evidence that anything has been different. Even keeping diaries is forbidden. People are expected to absorb and accept the new information delivered by the television sets even if it directly contradicts the news of a month ago. Since it is impossible to prove the contradiction, it is useless to try to resist. Without points of comparison, all information is equally real. The Underground, for example, or a distant war between Oceania and Eastasia, might have existed or they might not have; there is no way of knowing.

A critical element in
1984
that has been little observed by commentators is that the people are confined inside cities. For any visit to the natural landscape—
which is itself the past
— special permission is needed.

Sex is illegal, except for purposes of propagation. Pleasure is outlawed. In this way, Big Brother is able to enter and control people’s experience of their internal nature, as he controls their experience of the landscape. Humor, feeling, senses and instincts are also part of the past.

The effect of all this is to purge all references to any alternative. Whatever is offered as real can no longer be faulted. Nothing is provable by direct experience because all experience is manufactured. All existence becomes arbitrary, subject to the creation of Big Brother and the Party, Orwell’s Solaris.

“The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

“. . . The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

“. . . In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. . . . If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

“. . . Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.”

While Orwell was primarily concerned with the excesses he saw in the Soviet Union, Huxley directed
Brave New World
at Western technological society. Instead of a grim Party that ruled through fear, the brave new world had a benevolent group of corporation-type managers; satisfactions were guaranteed by “emotional engineers.”

Huxley’s future world resembled Orwell’s in that all physical experience was rigidly limited. Orwell’s list was considerably grimmer, but Huxley realized that the point was a short list rather than a grim list. Sensual pleasures were encouraged in
Brave New World,
programmed into people as infants through “hypnopaedic” messages repeated thousands of times as they slept. The messages encouraged sexual promiscuity, attendance at mass entertainments such as “feelies” (movies with tactile stimuli), and, most important, the ingestion of drugs such as “soma” for any and every unpleasant feeling or little distress.

The goal was to keep people focused on their own satisfaction and limit their needs to those that could be conveniently satisfied by the social engineers. This precluded discontent.

Most important, life was contained within planned, controlled environments. People were programmed to believe that any “natural” experience was inconvenient or disgusting. The idea of personal love or caring for one’s own infant, especially to the extent of breast feeding, was made so horrible that the very thought of it would send people groping for their drugs.

There is no underground in
Brave New World,
but there are two contrasting societies. One, modeled after the Zuni and Hopi villages where Huxley lived for a time in the 1920s, is the home of the “savages,” museumized remnants of the non-technological past. The city people take helicopters to these places to observe the savages’ strange and sickening ways. The second society, confined to “islands,” is filled with the mistakes of the genetic and hypnopaedic assembly line, people who’ve expressed the cardinal aberration: dissatisfaction.

In a foreword Huxley added to later editions of the book, he mused on the trends he saw in the world: “To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world’s governments will be more or less completely totalitarian before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization . . . can arrest the present tendency. . . . At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.

“There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane . . . it is demonstrably inefficient, and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned . . .”

This could be achieved, Huxley believed, by new technologies offering “a greatly improved technique of suggestion,” by the dissemination of drugs, by mass spectacles to unify experience and feelings, and by eugenics, which would standardize people themselves. Writing in 1932, Huxley was not aware of any
single
technology that could achieve this standardization and unification process, but he saw that technology would inevitably lead in that direction. It was
his
particular genius, I believe, to perceive that the critical element was the creation of the joyful cooperation of the people being controlled.

Huxley made the assumption, natural to the 1930s, that governments would be the main propagators of pleasure controls in the future. Only lately have we seen the emergence of trans-governmental corporations that exercise similar powers, molding living and transportation patterns, rechanneling human experience, instilling habits of mind, and using “hypnopaedic” technology to do this programming.

Huxley understood that no matter who the controllers are, their success depends on confining experience and awareness to predetermined patterns. Both Huxley and Orwell recognized that human feelings and any wilderness experience were complicated and unwieldy and revealed alternative realities. They were, therefore, dangerous to the controllers. Anything connected to natural (“savage”) awareness must be ridiculed and eliminated, and all experience must be contained within controlled artificial environments. In a large society, technology is a good standardizer, and the confinement works best if technology has been enshrined.

I could go on with examples from dozens of science fiction works on the theme of technological control of reality. Sometimes it is deliberate, but sometimes, as in
Solaris,
the use of technology to produce autocracy is not so much deliberate and conscious as it is evolutionary.

As technology has evolved, step by step, it has placed boundaries between human beings and their connections with larger, nonhuman realities. As life acquired ever more technological wrapping, human experience and understanding were confined and altered. In
Solaris
these changes happen in a nonspecific order over time, until people’s minds and living patterns are so disconnected that there is no way of knowing reality from fantasy. At such a point, there is no choice but to accept leadership, however arbitrary.

Such leadership may very well not plan its own success. It emerges organically at the moment when human experience has been sufficiently channeled and confined. In this cultural analogue of mass sensory deprivation, simple, clear statements assume a greater authority and profundity than they deserve.

Whoever recognizes that such a crucial moment has arrived, that people’s minds are appropriately confused and receptive, can speak directly into them without interference. The people who are spoken to are preconditioned to accept what they hear, like the Solaris astronauts or the poor, puzzled masses of
1984.

Technology plays a critical role in this process because it creates standardized arbitrary forms of physical and mental confinement. Television is the ideal tool for such purposes because it both confines experience and implants simple, clear ideas.

Seen in this way, a new fact emerges. Autocracy needn’t come in the form of a person at all, or even as an articulated ideology or conscious conspiracy. The autocracy can exist in the technology itself. The technology can produce its own subordinated society, as though it were alive, like Solaris.

Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy

The three fictional works I have described, when combined with those rare political writers who approach autocratic form from the point of view of technology (Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse), begin to yield a system of preconditions from which we can expect monolithic systems of control to emerge. These may be institutional autocracies or dictatorships. For the moment, it will be simpler to use the dictatorship model.

Imagine that like some kind of science fiction dictator you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this: