Liberty in the television age - part five

The Laughter of the State - blue lights and blue days

The relationship between sexual frustration and authoritarian government has been excellently explored in the works of Wilhelm Reich, and, in the theatre, in Jean Genet's curious play The Balcony. I am here concerned chiefly with the matter of the generation of the Self - which remains the property of the Image Makers - and the attendant habits of passivity, submission, and reification of disastrous habits that its necessary displacement of autonomy demand.

If one accepts the foregoing model of personality development, culminating in the dramatic disappointment of adulthood, one can easily accept that the personality resulting from such near-indelible accidents will be desperate for escape. Security is not guaranteed, one's ability to control one's environment is limited, language provides in the main a means of obscuring unpleasant behaviours and events, and the individual is isolated in their 'bestial' desires and incapability to reconcile them with an inclusive and healthy notion of love.

The result is a person in perpetual low-level panic or anxiety, so confused as to be unable to confront, much less make sense of the thought, emotion, and behaviour patterns that have been for the most part unconsciously imprinted upon them. The personality is most often a site of appalling crisis. It is in the interests of the State, and of the corporations that seek to supersede it, that this remains the case.

Such anxiety ridden personalities are easy meat to these structures of manipulation. The religions offer one form of release, as do the ideologies of capital, mob, perpetual youth or demonstrable affluence. The Self is the vehicle offered by such entities to not merely compensate for, but to utterly displace through parasitism the wounded personality of the individual.

One is offered goods and lifestyles to which to aspire or compare oneself - reaching for these, even for the phenomenally wealthy and conventionally successful, is only to invite the frigid agony of Tantalus.

One is offered groups or individuals to hate, or to emulate. An outlet for the rage and despair proper to masses who lack the direction or means to establish a meaningful relationship with a world beyond their immediate comprehension. In like fashion we are flattered by entertainments such as current affairs and documentaries, whose programming we willingly adopt as our own, so that, around the bar or dinner table we might seem informed and intelligent. In fact, these factoids represent for the most part a world so divorced from our experience that much of it may be said to take place only in the production suite.

What is the politician without his scripted answer and his brief? What is the catastrophe without its cause? In whose interest is this version of events? - this is a question proper to all forms of communication, including this essay.

One is offered a seemingly inexhaustible array of new products, television series, 'celebrities' and 'personalities', each carefully researched to match one niche or another described by your forensically identified unsatisfied appetites. Yet these appetites are not your property either, but that of the Self, the only vehicle into which you are allowed to comfortably fit. This vessel has been engineered with meaning in mind - or rather, out of mind, as the meaning it provides proves unstable when questioned from the outside. It is possible to stop watching, and to start participating in life. The first step might be to turn off your television for good and develop your own opinions for a change.

Why are you addicted to a ceaseless array of scripted one-liners? To 'surreal' comedies, ephemerally modish, though whose momentarily fashionable catchphrases you come to narrate the spectacle of your life?

What do these phrases seek to catch?

These unrealistic realist dramas, these unattainably sassy shows, these become the basis for comparison on which you come to judge and admire your friends, who are themselves engaged in an elaborate game of Image-emulation. We tell ourselves that we are unique, but then what is meant by fashion? Exactly how many things in your home, your head, are the product of your own determined contemplation? If we are honest, these things will simply 'be there', won't they, rather than having resulted from the false calculations of a bargain, or of an expression of preference.

Thought is not something commonly practiced, whether in terms of purchasing decisions, or gaining purchase on decision-making. What one calls thoughts more closely resemble a stream of uninvited guests traipsing through the open house of the mind. They repaint the walls, and these colours summon up moods and emotions. They introduce new furnishings, and we enjoy these additions as our own. They are, these uninvited 'guests', not the product of the exercise of your mind but of its neglect. Seek to make the room empty.

Detaching oneself from the internal onslaught of distracting inner chatter is the same thing as achieving liberation from the exterior bombardment of the Image Makers. To do this requires discipline, and it cannot, in my experience, be achieved without developing a distaste for the immediate identification we unconsciously perform with our emotions.

As the astute reader will gather, emotions become embodied in our cells through tension which is unreleased - and such patterns can be triggered by the attachment of an emotional state to a phrase. Why else would mere noise so often result in violent exchanges?

Remaining victim to immediate emotional identification, refusing to recognise that neither your thoughts nor your Self are your own - these are the ways by which you condemn yourself to lifelong distraction unto death. If your job is miserable, your life devoid of meaning, and your attachments replaceable with others, then the problem is you. It is thus, for without you the State of Permanent Distraction could not continue.

At present, our government in the United States has administered a course of abstract fear to keep one step ahead of the power of corporations. On the advice of Mr Bernays, they manufactured the religion of Anticommunism to terrify the 'Free World' into a form of profitable cohesion. Doubtless a similar character has hit upon the fact that the Self responds well to irrational use of language which connects to the structures of anxious contradiction on which it is built. The trigger word to compel agreement is usually "Terror". Sometimes, "the terrorists". If one is not with us...

Of course, the argument is nonsense as it relies on giving substance to an abstract noun. Yet it proves galvanising to the crowds of Image-hungry Selves clamouring for meaning, order, security and yes, to be told How Important You All Are To Us. Again, the risible line that those who initiate these horrendous acts of mechanised slaughter maintain that they do so in our defence. And they are right. Without their maintenance, the Self would collapse, as such fictions give a sense of mission to those in search of a soundbite 'cause'.

Such persons emotionally identify with the speaker, the Big Daddy of the day, as it pleases them to please Daddy, and also because they feel that some of his Big Daddy power rubs off on them. We used to drink the blood of lions, and later, wear the skins of wild cats to similar ends. The difference is that the roman standard bearer would be marching into an actual battle where he might meet with a sudden and violent death.

The repeater of mantras - be they political slogans or other fragments of popular culture, is in conversation with their Self. These phrases are polish for the Self, and its display is a narcissistic affair. This seems an adequate explanation as to why such repeaters do not seem to notice that their mantras are hypnotising them, and, rather than offering the telling précis of events that they seem to take them for, in fact blind them to the startling series of conditioned responses that have led to their adoption without regard to evidence.

Such phrases may also arise from one's attempt to synthesise a personal moral code from the accidental or deliberate traumas of their sexual awakening.

Language allows very well for these games to substitute experience, because we are forgetful of the fact that words and things are not identical. Speaking of a thing for many seems a natural substitute for experiencing it. The alarming tendency in us to extrapolate intricate structures of self-contained reasoning is one of the chief methods we employ to blind ourselves, through verbal noise, to events which might prove contradictory to our precious alibis. As I hope to have shown, such dissonance-as-sense is commonly the product of the acquisition of language itself.



Remember, your job is to keep watching

We have seen that our reality as experienced through the media, through all methods of Public Relations, is a closely engineered competition between elements of the State and Businesses. To these I add religions, ideologies, all causes that promise empowerment and deliver passivity, a grandiloquent excuse for remaining the same. We have enough 'joiners'. See what they have wrought. What this 'world' wants for is antagonists.

Liberty, the true subject of this essay, is the product of insight into the motives of one's being. It is not an end, but a process. An appeal, not a command. The appeal is to a new world, populated by those who have cut the umbilicus of false hope and monstrous nightmare. To cease to be programmed to the whims of calculating executives, we must come to truly value our own lives.

What is necessary is no less than a wholesale rejection of the Industry of the Self, that Pleasure Island on which we all turn to braying asses sick on our Self-indulgence. The Self is deliberately insatiable. It is a parasite, and its food are your emotions and your very life. Without your co-operation in submitting to its keening imprecations it is nothing. It continues to survive because you do nothing to dislodge it, and the longer it lives, the less of you there remains to move it. It is the greatest and most inhumane insult to humanity that has ever been created, and its favourite phrase is 'freedom of choice'. It prods you in those parts it knows hurt most, and you pay for this, daily, continuing to feed it even as you dream.

We have yet to learn the consequences of a free society. If we do not stop watching, we never will.