Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (13 page)

“The amazing thing is that even with everything I know about how fascism operates, after a long-enough time I lost touch with my logic and began wanting and needing the approval of this asshole and the smiling, plastic robots around him; there was a moment there when I was with them.”

I don’t think that Werner Erhard is a particularly dangerous person. I’ve met him several times. He attends a lot of San Francisco cocktail parties. He strikes me as another aggressive, success-oriented man who fell into something hot because of his years around auto showrooms, management seminars and Scientology workshops. What makes him not dangerous is that he has never figured out television. Though he would like to push
est
through television, when he gets on he goes flat. He doesn’t “work” on television, to put it in his own terms. He knows the medium changes his message but he can’t figure out the dimensions of the change.

Dangerous or not, Erhard and some of his contemporary gurus are tinkering with an amazingly powerful form. They have learned, as the science fiction dictators have, that if you control environment carefully enough, and confine human experience totally enough, you can shatter all human grounding. This leaves the subject in such a disconnected state, you can easily predict and control how he or she will respond to the addition of only one or two stimuli. These are, in effect, mass sense-deprivation experiments. They leave people floating without connections, their minds separated from their bodies, open to implantation of any kind of arbitrary logic. In the end, their minds have been restructured to accept whatever comes. They are clear, simple, open, receptive channels. All personal experience, irrelevant. All complexity, eliminated. All points of reference, disposed of. Floating freely in space. All information is arbitrary, the product of mind. One piece of news is equal to the next. Everything is believable and not believable at the same time. There is no reality aside from mind. The only existence is belief.

As we will see in the latter half of this book, television does the same thing in virtually the same way.

Schizophrenia and the Influencing Machine

On September 27, 1973, a young man walked into the lobby of San Francisco television station KGO-TV and began shooting. He killed an advertising salesman before he himself was killed by police.

The local media then pieced together the story. The man had been in and out of mental hospitals for several years, and his complaint was always the same. He said that a receiver had been implanted into his body in a secret operation, that it was constantly broadcasting to his mind, that he couldn’t turn it off, that he was in agony, and that it was making him crazy.

His action at KGO was presumably an attempt to silence the broadcasts. He had taken a previous trip to Hawaii to escape the broadcast signal but to no avail.

Though very few mental patients go so far as to shoot up broadcasting stations, the number of disturbed people who say they can’t get broadcasts out of their minds is apparently growing.

A description of this problem was offered in the
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
by Dr. Joseph Robert Cowen. He described a woman obsessed by television signals.

“For many months during the course of her hospitalization she made frequent reference to television. When she referred to television she would develop a look of ecstatic terror on her face. In various ways she described how she was being controlled, persecuted and tormented by television. She had clairvoyant experiences with other patients mediated by television. She variously described herself as being ‘hooked’ or ‘taped’ into television. Periodically she would tell me, ‘Everything would be all right if they just wouldn’t turn on the television set.’”

Dr. Cowen described his patient’s distortion of the very word “television” to “tell-a-vision.” He felt this word distortion explained how she could fantasize that television was a “machine of infinite power which inexorably demands that ego alien material be told through it . . .” Cowen goes on to say, “The singling out of various instruments as the source of trouble is common in regressed states where projection is the predominant feature. With the advent of television it has become a frequent clinical feature.”

Most mental institutions in this country now keep television sets operating during all waking hours to occupy their patients without a thought that this could possibly have a negative effect. Dr. Cowen does not mention whether he ever considered merely turning off the television set as the woman was asking.

In 1919, Dr. Viktor Tausk, a colleague of Freud’s, wrote an amazing article called “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia.”

Tausk wrote that a significant number of patients described their problems as being caused by an “influencing machine” operated by alien forces. These aliens represented belief systems threatening to the patient’s own and which were being forcibly implanted in the patient’s mind.

The influencing machine usually has gigantic wheels, gears and other paraphernalia, Tausk says. It often has the ability to project pictures and invisible rays in some way capable of imprinting the brain. The pictures frequently emanate from a “small black box” and are flat, not three-dimensional, images. The machine and its emanations can produce feelings and thoughts in the victim, while removing other ones, according to Tausk, “by means of rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. It creates sensations that in part cannot be described,” says Tausk, “because they are strange to the patient himself, and that in part are sensed as electrical, magnetic or due to air-currents.”

Soon, Tausk reports, the victim cannot distinguish information—feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories—that have been received from this “external” source from those that have been personally generated or are the result of personal experience and discovery.

Tausk’s hypothesis, similar to Cowen’s, is that patients create this machine fantasy as an outward manifestation of an internal confusion between the external and the internal worlds; the world of one’s own thoughts and the concrete world outside the person.

This confusion has its roots in early childhood, Tausk says. At a certain age, a child seeks a reality beyond the parents, seeks to contact an outer world and so begins exploring. To the degree the child succeeds, it learns to integrate and process the wider world it has experienced. It can tell the difference between the impulses, images and experiences which are connected to the world outside, and those which are totally self-generated, floating, not rooted in the world. If the child has made this distinction, then the projections of his or her own mind can be distinguished and identified. This is sanity.

The schizophrenic, says Tausk, does not learn to make this distinction and cannot tell which images emanate from inside the mind and which are connected to experiences in the world. At this point, all experience, whether internally generated or the result of an interaction with the world, is equal. Projections of the mind take on the same quality as direct experience of the world. One’s experience of the world becomes unreliable, as do one’s own thought processes. Both become floating, unrooted. All are equally internal and equally external.

At this point, Tausk suggests, the patient will create an “influencing machine” fantasy as a physical manifestation of the confusion. Capable of implanting images which are in the form of rays, capable of implanting alien realities outside of one’s own experiences, capable of changing one’s feelings, this machine “causes” the patient to fall into utter confusion about what is real and what is not, what is internal and what is external.

Doubtless you have noticed that this “influencing machine” sounds an awful lot like television. The mystery is how the phenomenon could have existed in 1919 before the apparatus was invented. Dare I suggest that television was invented by people similarly preoccupied, as an outward manifestation of
their
minds?

In any event, there is no question that television does what the schizophrenic fantasy says it does. It places in our minds images of realities which are outside our experience. The pictures come in the form of rays from a box. They cause changes in feeling and, as we will see, utter confusion as to what is real and what is not. All reality becomes ethereal, existing only in our minds.

Like the machine of Tausk’s suffering patients, television is a final manifestation of an already apparent confusion. This confusion existed at the time Tausk was writing, but it has now been institutionalized by the ubiquitousness of the artificial environments we live in. A real world which cannot be questioned has been submerged beneath a reconstructed, human-created world. We live inside the manifestations of human minds. Like the child seeking outside connection, we find only the projections of other humans. We can’t know the natural from the artificial, since the processes that would reveal that are nowhere visible. We are cut off, floating in space, living within a nationwide sense-deprivation tank. We see a stimulus, a light, and we cling to it. It becomes everything. It causes images in our brain. We call this experience, but we can’t tell if it is
our
experience or something else. It is in our heads, but we didn’t create it. We don’t know if it is real or it isn’t. We can’t stop the broadcasts. We accept whatever comes. One vision is equal to the next. One thought is as good as the next. All information merges. All experience merges. We take everything on faith. One explanation is the same as the next one. Contradictions do not exist. We have lost control of our minds. We are all lost in space. Our world exists only in memory. Everything is arbitrary. TV is the guru speaking reality. We have merged with the influencing machine. We are the Solaris astronauts.

ARGUMENT TWO

THE COLONIZATION OF EXPERIENCE

It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to.

VI
ADVERTISING: THE STANDARD-GAUGE RAILWAY

W
E
have seen how the natural environment has been transformed into secondary, artificial and abstracted forms. This process has been described as though it happened by accident, without purpose. I have been avoiding conspiracy theories.

It is true that no small group could successfully plot to dominate social and technological processes that take millennia to evolve. Yet at any one moment, some people may benefit considerably more than others from particular forms of social organization and the technologies that accompany them. These will be the people who sit at the hub of the most critical institutions at any given time. They will naturally seek to consolidate their own position by concentrating their control while widening its effect. In this way, a tendency that may have been going on for hundreds of years or longer, beyond the range of human conspiracy, gains power over time. And so the tendency, the social and technological line of development, becomes more monolithic, more dominant, more difficult to stop.

Take, for example, the growth and centralization of energy-production systems during the last few hundred years. No single human could have planned to reap the great benefits that some have gained from the evolution of wood-burning stoves into coal-burning stoves into electric utilities, gigantic power companies with nuclear facilities and multinational oil companies. Each technology grew out of the previous one. At each stage, a small number of people occupied key spots and were able to guide change in ways that would concentrate the direct benefits in their hands. By now, the energy technologies and the institutions that serve them are so large, they dominate virtually all of life and even our political and social systems, while an exceedingly small number of people have come to control them.

Meanwhile, other technological systems have also become larger and more monolithic at the same time. Transportation systems, for example, have advanced from horses to horses and buggies to railroads to cars and trucks on freeways to SSTs. Long-distance communications systems have gone from telegraph to telephone to radio to television to satellite. As these technologies grow, their power and influence grows with them, but the number of people who control them shrinks.

In a capitalist, free-enterprise economy, that the controllers of the communications systems should become personally acquainted with the controllers of the energy systems, the transportation systems and so on and eventually begin to cooperate with each other ought to be obvious and predictable. The fact that it is not obvious to most of us, at least not so obvious that we act to stop it, has allowed matters to “pop” organically into still larger and
more
monolithic patterns of domination and control at each turn of the cycle, affecting human lives and political organization.