Liberty in the television age - part four

Demonology in the information age

If I have not utterly estranged you already, perhaps this next departure might do the trick. Demons, invisible and immaterial spooks having control over your feelings, populate every corner of your illusory free-willed existence.

Such demons as I am concerned with here are those invoked by inattentive use of linguistic/emotional symbols. That's right, through the expression of emotional precepts through specific words or phrases. Speechwriters in composing political rhetoric take great care in deploying these techniques, which are simply emotionally charged words or phrases designed to provoke specific responses in the audience. A clever speechwriter, advertising executive or prophet will also make use of 'framing' - a technique whereby the listener or reader is commanded to give attention to a given concept.
"Do not think about an elephant".
For example.

Chiefly the appeal is not to not consider mental images of exotic wildlife, but to compel the target to dismiss competing ideologies, products or creeds through a duplicitous appeal to the target's vanity. It may be said that the competition is 'obviously' incompetent, that a 'sane' person would vote in this fashion - techniques of rhetorical dismissal again play on the mark's vanity and are disguised as appeals to rational decision making. In fact, we are receiving pleasant signals, an irresistible appeal to identify with the message and its master. Why irresistible? Because of our flight from the world, our fears of personal insignificance, because the longer one has lived in the developed world, the more millions upon millions of such messages have colonised one's very emotions to the point that such 'messages' are indistinguishable from one's beliefs. I go one step further and say that such 'messages' are your beliefs.

To summarise: the mental environment we find ourselves in is literally swarming with well designed appeals to fear and hope flatteringly disguised as appeals to decision making. They are stimuli, not options. They are composed of images and words deliberately attached to the deepest feelings resident in the psyche of the 'civilised' human being.
One interesting exercise used to produce a species of insight into the content of newspapers is to take a pair of scissors to your quality daily, and cut out all the adverts. One would ideally need several copies to account for overlaps, but the idea is to lay out all the adverts, then lay out all the 'news'.

I suggest that the reader develop their attention to the point whereby they can 'cut out' all those elements of opinion, conversation, and self-expression that can be said to derive from news, advertising and other forms of propaganda, and mentally place these alongside originally composed thoughts. This experiment is likely to prove disturbing. Although again fraught with the flaw of demonstrable provenance, there will be sufficient material to establish that the majority of ones own beliefs, ideas, opinions - are a form of advertising.

Spectacle and praxis

Of course, it is possible to become more fully engaged with 'the world'. It is possible, but uncommon, that an individual develops that odd capacity of logical analysis of information. Such a skill consists chiefly in training oneself to recognise those areas of one's own life which are sufficiently problematic to admit of suggestion. Next, the identification of the finite and rather clumsy techniques applied to these vulnerabilities will gift the subject a watchful awareness of how their inner world is being deliberately colonised by these specifically designed messages. Finally, some attention to the difference between logic and rhetoric is necessary, and in this it would greatly benefit the reader if they were to become conversant with the rules of grammar.
These three strands; logic, rhetoric, and grammar, were referred to as the trivia for a long time, and formed the backbone of the Classical education. That is, these things were and are taught to those meant to govern and command, but have notably slipped from the common curriculum of State education. We are no longer educated to the point where we can calmly analyse language in terms of its structure, and therefore achieve a cool distance from the reactions its employment seeks to provoke. A skilled critic of language may readily identify the hidden purpose of any given message, through the same kind of pattern recognition that allows others to design them. One does not have to believe in, say, Freudianism, to remark the effectiveness of modern propaganda, or, if we like, the remarkable power of the trivial to command purpose.
Such terms as 'terrorist', 'democratic', 'freedom', 'beauty', 'reasonable', 'serious', 'insane', 'immoral', and countless others have more than a one or two dimensional reality in terms of transcription or other transmission. They have something akin to their own personalities - complexes of association built up through repeated contextual employment. They are, in effect, non-local. Such a term could be applied to any given group of symbols having a comprehending audience of more than one.

To consider terms as having 'personalities' allows us to patiently examine their introduction into any given situation. Why would a company, politician, preacher use this particular term? Of course, the context in which they employ it gives it a particular mood - it is part of belonging to tacitly accept the given definitions of a group. 'Freedom' in the mouth of the politician is a different kind of exhortation to that in the mouth of the philosopher. The question here is not to arrive at exhaustive definitions of each instance of utterance, but to bear in mind that among the phatic, throwaway 'fillers' found in all messages, there are certain terms and images deliberately employed to provoke a specific response. The point is to remark the effect these messages have on oneself, and to ask why the message has been so constituted. It is an offence to the cultivated mind to remark on how intrusive such images and rhetoric actually are. They are perhaps best described as a form of mental pollution.

To fix one's attention on one's own reception of information from the world is to approach a state of authenticity that all producers of such messages despise. Just as the message of television is always 'keep watching', so the message of contemporary 'developed' culture is really permanent distraction unto death. Permanent distraction unto death.

It is time to take the power back.

The How and the What

We have skimmed the techniques employed in the universe of consumer propaganda, and have seen that its purpose is to offer only itself, its options, its definitions to the passive receptor called the Self. Its chief effect is the promotion of despairing impotence. Behind the urgent need to acquire more things, become cooler, younger, hipper, more bleeding edge, more expressionlessly 'attractive', is a sense of mordant purposelessness. How to move from the audience and on to the stage is the question?

What prevents this is the whatness of both Liberty and personality.

You are afraid of freedom. Face it. Your entire life is governed by thoughts and feelings you call your own, but which have in fact been placed in you precisely to displace your own agency. The practice of freedom of thought, feeling and action is what I call Liberty. Such freedom comes only through practice.

To learn to make decisions is dependent on the ability to detach oneself from the barrage of thoughts and emotions that constitute our experience of being in the world. Apart from the hall of mirrors presented by phenomenology (the attempted study of lived experience from 'within'), what is meant here is the engagement with a particular mode of being that accepts the inbuilt limitations and weaknesses of one's own personality, and practices attention to the methods by which it makes sense of that. Simply put, to achieve trained awareness of precisely how and why we interpret the world in the manner to which we have become accustomed. I will present a simplified model of the formation of the personality to illustrate precisely how this may be carried out, and to further underline the distinction between personal freedom and consumerist passivity. It may also be said that this is the difference between joy and misery.
The reader is invited to hold the following as merely a model.

Imprint and condition - how the brand behaves

At certain stages of life the human organism is exceptionally vulnerable to what may be termed 'formative' experiences. As the Jesuits understand, such events are chiefly found in the early stages of life. We can identify four basic developmental stages which correspond, in order, to one's feelings of security, one's ability to manipulate the feelings of others and 'make one's mark', one's competence in using verbal symbols, and one's adjustment to prevailing morality. These imprints, forming the basis for our subsequent selection and interpretation of data (which becomes, through habit, our 'personality), occur at birth, potty training, acquisition of language and puberty.

Number one: birth. The experience of coming into the world and our immediate impressions of how welcome we are in it provides us with a near-immutable foundation for our subsequent behaviour. Insecurity about being - the 'ontological insecurity' of Humanist Psychiatry, is explicable in the terms of reception that one encounters as a new-born human being. Consider the appeal of the various forms of 're-birthing' on offer. 'Born again'.

The experience of being born gives us our basic imprint of how welcome we are in the world. Panic attacks, anxiety, depression, self-loathing, a feeling of not belonging - all behaviours built or conditioned through the prism of this initial impression of one's reception in the world. It has been termed elsewhere the Bio-Survival imprint, as one is naturally vulnerable, and one can readily accept (perhaps!) how one's 'right' to be in the world is strongly imprinted according to one's initial reception. The imprint is decided by the method of birth, the attitude of carers and parents, and the emotional environment produced by these factors.

Next comes the anal/territorial imprint, in which the struggling infant seeks to mark its territory. The relationship between excrement and territory would be obvious to primatologists, and the reference to Mankind as primates probably offensive to those addicted to flattering verbal fictions.

It is enough to say that the conscious evacuation of one's own faecal matter marks a developmental stage in the formation of the personality. At this stage, potty training if you will, the security or otherwise of the personality in relation to its territory -its claim on being in the world - is imprinted. Subsequent behaviour in the field of feeling justified in 'making one's mark' is conditioned through the emotional prism of this formative stage. Again, a 'stable' personality will be one which is allowed to experiment and explore without castigation or irrational censure, and whose home environment is one largely free of confusing and competing tensions. The emotional fabric of the infant's environment is the context in which all these developmental imprints solidify their 'meanings'. Most psychologists who accept Dr Lorenz's imprint conditioning hold that imprints are indelible and irreversible.

We have seen then that 'imprints' here understood consist in embodied emotions rendered durable at moments of maximum vulnerability. It is to be carefully remarked that it is simplicity of emotional environment that is conducive to positive imprints. At these stages of life we are desperate to come to terms with our presence, and then our place, in the world. The child who is bombarded with conflicting emotional messages will construct a palimpsest of contradictions as the basis for their subsequent selection of messages (or conditioning), and will likely retain a lifelong substrate of polarised tensions as the foundation of their personality. This makes them ideally vulnerable to the messages of consumerist propaganda.

As the attentive reader will have gathered, what is meant here by 'conditioning' is the erection of structures of interpretation upon the foundation of the imprints received at birth, and through 'potty training'. This holds true for the subsequent periods of 'imprint vulnerability', and is given most complicating richness and texture through the following stage - that of the acquisition of language.

Before the attempt to master the strange vocalisations of one's parents and others surrounding us is partially complete, what we have to base our responses to being in the world upon are feelings. These are of course derived from the behaviour of those to whom our care falls, and are conveyed with efficacy through intonation, inflexion, outbursts of emotion, rule enforcement and indeed, every act to which the infant bears witness. The sum total of the emotional content thus received is the content of the imprint, always viewed from the point of view of dependence. One is not yet independent of the care one receives, and, as new mothers will be aware, infants rapidly become skilled in noting the behaviours they may employ to effect change in the behaviour of those who superintend them. What new mothers may not be aware of is the extent to which their behaviour has furnished the infant with this knowledge. It is chiefly explained by what one does unconsciously around one's child.

When the acquisition of language takes hold, when the child begins to grasp that certain vocalisations map onto certain phenomena, life becomes at once more complicated and fraught with competitive interpretation. At this stage, the opportunity arises to reorder the world in terms of description. The formation of concepts and attendant rules allow for the creation of a verbal map of experience, and therefore of 'the world'. Bright children will learn that deviousness can benefit from the gulf between events and description - in short, that the manipulation of verbal symbols leads to greater power than that merely achieved by stage two, emotional/territorial exercises.

Here much damage can be done, much confusion and near-indissoluble tension wrought in the nervous system of the child by conflicting prohibitions and approvals, inconsistent castigations, and plain old nonsense presented as 'fact'. We all of us have our little rituals to effect 'control' over our daily experience - few of us relish the notion of submitting these internal 'spells' to logical analysis. From 'if I step on the cracks, it will/won't happen', through 'saying a prayer to St Anthony' for finding a lost object, and even simple taboo words like sexual or scatological swearwords, habits of magical thinking slip unnoticed into the imprint of the child. The internal irrationality of the parents or carers becomes, to a degree, solidified in the tissue memory of the developing infant. The trauma caused by the conflict of these often primitive domestic laws with lived experience can be lifelong and acute. It is most difficult to challenge, as, with the previous two imprints, associations are made with those whom we are expected to love and cherish. The acquisition of language is also therefore the acquisition of contradiction, the assumption of inviolable and irrational codes of conduct, of the conflict between representation and experience. Hopefully, the child will be raised in an atmosphere of playful delight, where verbal reasoning closely resembles demonstrable consequences. It is at this stage that a person is most likely to develop word-totems which for them provide them with alibis for their subsequent conduct.

The greater the gulf between the terms employed in their presence and the events which they fail to adequately explain or describe, the stronger the tendency of the subsequent adult to fall into a dissonant trap of self-referential terminology having its chief function as the defence of a matrix of logical inconsistencies - a personality explained in common parlance to itself, that takes care never to engage with the contradictions that it exists to conceal from its 'owner'.

In brief, nonsense at this point will encourage a flight into language and its internal laws, where terms become forever detached from events and vocalisations become ends in themselves. This programmed failure to seek evidence for the validity of utterance has its roots, again, in fear of an unpleasant experience. One conceals the facts behind a closed loop of verbal terms because to examine the structure of one's personality is to concede that one's parents often made mistakes, and that the logic they have transmitted to us is flawed, damaging, even ridiculous. Strangely, the acquisition of language reinforces our unwillingness to bring our parents into question, as it is through the means of verbal communication that we gather anecdotal evidence of the social import of one's family ties. Criticising them, even with due cause in terms of the effects their behaviour has had on one's development, is far too close to questioning the unconditional security and love that we in imprint one wish to sanctify forever, and seek to recapture in our emotional attachments to causes, ideas, religions and other people.

Likewise, in later life, such attachments come to own some of this Verbotenism. They are, like the one we feel to our parents, circumscribed by taboo. It is rare to meet a person who can submit their beliefs or conduct to rational analysis without becoming 'defensive'. What is under attack is the sacred nonsense they have absorbed at a time of need for security, projection of identity, and description of the world they inhabit.

The final imprint we shall look at again compounds the foregoing three. The grounds for the interpretation and imprinting concerning sexual and wider morality have been prepared in breast feeding, parents' attitudes to nudity, emotional responses to the child's defecation and exploration of its own body, and verbal signals of proscription or disapproval - "Nice girls don't touch themselves there", "If you do that, it will drop off".

I say "sexual and wider" morality because few things in life compare in terms of immediate and enduring urgency as the emergence of the maturing sex instinct. As the appetite for sex is 'internal', and the preferred means for its satisfaction are chiefly 'external', the imperious hunger for sex brings the developing human sharply up against contemporary morality.

The abrupt conflict between what is desired, and the often bewildering difficulty in making sense of how one ought to satisfy this urge if at all, provides an enduring example of the restraints placed on the organism by custom, rumour, regulation and internalised commands. we come into conflict with our environment not so much as our cultural environment - the rumours, customs, and fragments of 'advice' that lie like threats or clues along the path to consummation of desire.

Persons raised in an environment prohibitive will likely experience lifelong guilt at this, the closest aspect of their entire organism to the raw vitality of life itself.

Suicide from shame is not uncommon, but what is far more widespread is a withering self-disgust - not restricted to 'disappointments' or 'perverts' such as homosexuals, but also among those whose sexuality would be rationally deemed 'unexceptional'. The amount of human cruelty and needless suffering attributable to the torturing of the organism in this fashion is impossible to calculate.

The dangers of loss of parental, and group, approval, the uncertainty as to how to comport oneself towards a prospective partner, the confusing mishmash of illogical and bizarre verbal eruptions that form the background to our 'thoughts' ; these are among the conditions in which the unfortunate developing human finds themselves attempting to make sense of a culture that insists on its promotion of freedom, on the primacy of the Self, when the reality of experiencing emergent sexual hunger is isolation and shame. Schools cannot agree on which sterile method to employ to administer the biological facts; none to my knowledge have attempted an honest appraisal of the vital importance of a functional sex life to mental and physical well-being.
The contradiction between language and experience found in the home is writ large across our society nowhere more clearly than in its degraded and utterly corrosive attitude to sex. Either one submits 'freely' to the satisfictions of pornography, 'sex workers', puerile innuendo etcetera., or one struggles to contend with the problem of sex in a humane and rational fashion. Hopefully, not entirely alone.

The importance of the sexual/morality imprint is far more profound than that pertaining to one's sexual guilt or preferences. It is the moment at which one decides how to contend with the submission that our culture seems to demand to a series of baffling contradictions which, by now, are streaming around in our heads like a grotesquely enigmatic carousel. It is as if we have been abandoned in a menacing fairground, whose clowns do not smile so much as grin, and all seem to regard one as a person with a dirty secret now being publicly shared.

The experience of the urgent conflict of the organism's most basic drives, with the internalised contradictions of our culture - invisible, irrational, and immanent laws - usually seals one in a sense of impotence and despair for life. The message here is often that one cannot do as one would see fit to satisfy one's urges, as it is merely you who have them. Consequently one's sexual life is likely to be abrupt, painfully self-conscious, fraught with distracting 'temptation' and poisoned by anxiety and disgust.

Mankind's separation into frightened social atoms, quivering with undischarged desire, and bound into near suffocation with anxiety - this is the arena of the Great Disappointment - that adult life brings not liberty but submission to an authority insubstantial and invisible. The life instinct, the spring of our vitality, is stymied by whispered sneers. This overwhelming urge to seek loving union is perverted, turned against the subject, so that instead of union one finds isolation. Disappointment, loneliness, conflicting commands, and a litany of contradictions prohibiting the vitality and health of the body itself are the result of the young adult's initiation into the grim spectacle of adult life. It is an experience from which few ever recover either their passion for life or their dignity. We have learned that we are alone, to fear our biology, that Society demands restrictions for our own good which generate a template for lifelong misery and mistrust.

Without this deliberate atrocity being visited on the tenderest regions of the young, The Paradise of Adverts would lose command of its favourite tool - SEX, SEX, SEX.