Buy, buy love!

Here follows a piece carried in the autumn issue of The Chap www.thechapmagazine.net

Listen out for the laughter of the brass god!

Down Cemetery Road

Athwart the crass farrago that is la vie moderne, the Pharos of the Chap has cast its beam, and its charmed rays have bathed chumrades new and old in the lambent Tao of Tweed. Yet it has also revealed many enemies, visible and otherwise, whose deplorable motives must be identified and denounced for the degenerative influences that they certainly are. Let us lay aside the Chinese pipe, and set our minds to the task of rendering our world one fit for the aristocracy of spirit that is certainly our credo. The mantelpiece of reflection being forever wiser than the tigers of wrath, let us repair thence, the better to know our selves and others.

The last redoubt of beauty in our society is surely the imagination, and on its defence relies the foundation of a world fit for foppery. Its territory is ceded daily to the routines of school and its elder sibling, work, in whose service the myriad confections of hawkers compete for the mastery of our desires. Such is the despair occasioned by this assault, that it can lead grown men to beg for the arm of a toad.


Roads to Toad-dom

Philip "Giggles" Larkin was one of our best known racist comedians, whose mood was obviously improved by his transition from Oxford to the librarianship at Hull University. His Toads, like much of his poetry, is a gently fatalistic elegy to the human spirit, driven under by the banality of necessity, to the surrender of a lifetime to waged routine.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
To drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison
Just to pay a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

It seems simple enough at this point - the toad work is the blight on our lives, and to shuck his slimy caul from ourselves would be enough to free us. Yet he continues:

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

..and the picture has changed from one simple enemy to include an enemy within. A slimy Quisling, if you like. This inner toad is the force inside us that says the routine is safe, is the only reality of the two on offer that we are fit to inhabit. The other, that of "the fame and the the girl and the money" is, like rebellion, "the stuff that dreams are made on". In Toads Revisited, Larkin develops this theme to an uneasy relationship verging on toad-dependence:

Give me your arm, old toad.
Help me down Cemetery Road.

Larkin is saying he has no choice, that the toad inside him knows that these dreams are forever to remain so. Dreams of liberty, of success, of glamour and of adulation. The dream world of advertising.

The Dreams that Stuff is Made On

The specious language of managers and advertisers alike is an attempt to motivate the listener to comply with a demand disguised as an invitation. It seeks to collapse the distance between the phrase and the act, the image and the object, presenting their motives as helpful, or benign, and framing disagreement as a faintly troubling tendency likely to result in some form of ostracism. These characteristics it shares with the language of nocturnal dreams. Since Freud made a present of his Interpretation of Dreams to his nephew, the American priest of Moloch Edward Bernays, the vocabulary of the unconscious has been a tool of the advertising industry. Bernays, who said,
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,"
went on to engineer amongst other things the national religion of anticommunism through his close association with Eisenhower. It chiefly due to him that women smoke, and that bacon and eggs is thought of as a breakfast at all, never mind 'British'.
Following Bernays, in the mid twentieth century we saw the invention of the teenager, followed by the counter-culture industry of packaged rebellion. Having completed the taxonomy of both childhood, and of adolescent desires, modern advertising has carefully pursued the extension of childhood into the adult life of the consumer, giving us the 'kidults' of our times.
They are everywhere, their poor diction soiling those gasps of air yet untouched by odious corporate 'music', botoxing their faces into passive impastoes of vacuity, dressed for a perpetual playtime in some notional North American High School. Before we reach for the automatic weapons, let us dilate upon the genealogy of this malaise, in hope of a possible cure.

The Third Toad

Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin used the 'cut-up' method to create "The Third Mind" - a state where new interpretations could arise, so does the dessication of our hopes through work and mortal despair give suck to the Third Toad - debt. This unholy trinity of misery, toil and compound interest is the very foundation of our economy; tumescent in times of flagrant excess, limp in periods of sober restraint.
Every advertiser knows that a happy individual makes a poor consumer. It is for this reason that the industry relies on the promotion of impossible ideals of bodily perfection and lifetstyle to intensify the dissatisfaction of their target audiences, thus rendering their brands 'necessary'. In this sense, the notion of 'retail therapy' as an emollient has some truth, but only in the same sense that a bottle of Buckfast has for the street drinker in withdrawal.
Since the service sector is now seemingly run by a cabal of self-aware telephone messages, our economic fortunes rise and fall in line with consumer spending - spending allowed by access to debt, and fuelled by the sale of impossible dreams.

'More' is the Health of the State.

Debt, "the slavery of the free", has done much to commend to all of us the arm of the Toad work. Yet one cannot induce the happy and the sane to enslave themselves for the sake of an endless supply of hundred pound plimsolls. To this end, The Third Toad requires nothing less than the creation of a Brattish Army of lifelong children, each clamouring for the immediate satisfaction of desires implanted in them by that cult of false dreams, advertising. Through the attempt to attach one's basic fears and desires to brands, the mantras of this new priest-caste assail the seat of our motives, the imagination, the success of their methods guaranteed by continuous experiment on we their prey. The goal is to promote what Thorsten Veblen termed in the 19th century as "conspicuous consumption" - in pursuit of whose origins we must turn our gaze hindwards.

Consumer Culture in Carthage

History is a fascinating collection of cautionary tales; their content tragic, their reception comic. Those who are concerned with appearing in it seldom read it, and for this reason it often resembles a species of Crimewatch in period costume. Most of us delight in ignoring its lessons, just as unruly children do their teachers. Despite the warnings of these wise alcoholics, such miscreants persist in their gleeful ignorance., for children love to challenge a warning. To the mischievous child in all of us I offer the following example of the fate of unwary children of all ages.
The ancient state of Carthage had the custom of sacrificing children to their brass god, Moloch, as it was thought that the satisfaction of his rarefied appetite was identical with the fortunes of their nation. Priests would beat drums to drown out the wails of parents and children alike, as the young victims were rolled from the outstretched hands of the idol, to be 'consumed' in a pit of flames. Once the Romans arrived, they replaced Moloch with Caesar, and 'consumption' gradually came for us to signify the qualification for a life of swooning and versifying in a large wig.

Demonic Possession

Sadly, the days of the Macaroni gave way to those of the merchant, and by the late nineteenth century came, with 'conspicuous consumption', a further aim of work. It was no longer to be solely concerning with securing the necessities of life, but with the gain and display of totems of status. This tendency began with the erection of one kind of folly and the general adoption of another - that without ever-larger televisions, cars that resemble electric razors, and an endless supply of tawdry gimcracks our lives are worthless in the eyes of our envious peers. Evidently, without the work of the nefarious priest-caste of Moloch, the life-long sale of our minds and bodies could never be so cheaply arranged.
Hence, far from being composed of the 'agents of rational choice' of Classical economics, our country is populated by irascible debt-slaves with little impulse control and the vocabulary of a teak-skinned estate agent. When our people are not waddling to the shopping centre, they are dutifully taking the arm of the toad down a road which they mistakenly believe will lead them to Beckingham Palace. What actually awaits them is an abrupt expiration in the flames of the fiery pit of Moloch, fuelled by a pile of final demands and smouldering sportswear in XXXL sizes, their sole lament the brazen laughter of the gourmandising god.

Victim or Invictus?

The promotion of this epidemic crapulence of personality and product we Chappists abhor begins with the colonisation of the very hearts and minds of its victims, and it has led us into a Toad's Paradise, one fearfully squatting within, another riding atop like some slimy mahout. Hurried on by the hectoring croak of the third, the eyes of the many are fixed on the horizon of an ephemeral paradise, to which their true desires and dreams are forever ransomed. It is for a glimpse of this Erewhon that most of us work so hard, for so long, in servicing and swelling over a trillion pounds of personal debt.
The acceptance that we are indeed all going down cemetery road usually signifies the end of childhood, and is the beginning of a sense of outrage proper to the consumption not only of culture, but also of its population.
In the face of mortality, we are only partial masters of our fates. Yet, with a mind resistant to the mantras of Moloch, we may defray this bitter price by remaining captain of our soul.

For friends and other strangers

At last I have remembered to update this blog, albeit with a flurry of long posts. To view the whole essay of 'Liberty in the Television Age', click on the titles on the sidebar on the right.

Your comments would be most welcome.

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.

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.

Liberty in the television age - part three

Flattery will get you nowhere

It will, if you are so minded, win you the adhesion of the biddable, and with their money, it may take you all the way to "the biggest mansion in mansion-land". Of course, flattery is an effective tool in the armoury of the manipulator, but it cuts both ways. We have a tendency to solidify our thought patterns in behaviours, to literally embody the things we say and think and feel. Thought, being largely a form of inner speech, leads to speech itself, and therewith to emotion, tissue memory, posture, gait, gesture and conduct at large. Of all the work I might cite in support of this bold assertion, that of Francisco Varela is most accessible and recent. His work consists chiefly in investigating the relationship between thought, speech, and cognition as a systemic entity giving form to the 'personality'.

Flattery, or its bedfellow, pandering, are corrosive habits that devours one's dignity and ability to reason. To flatter oneself is to lie to oneself or to others, to exaggerate desirable traits, to posit clear reasoning or rational agency where none exists, to posit a thinker, a decider in 'control', who is, naturally, wise. To pander is to recognise, to acknowledge one's shortcomings or those of others, and to deliberately manipulate these vulnerabilities through flattery. The first often leads to the second.

Flattery, often so well and frequently practised as to be as automatic and invisible as feeling itself, is the means by which we account for our shortcomings when we lack the courage or integrity to confront them. Pandering is, arguably, more developed, inasmuch as there is some recognition of the 'way one is' - but this in itself is used as an excuse. Consider how often you have heard yourself or others offer as a final defence 'I'm just like that'. This is a common instance of pandering to the weaknesses or undesirable aspects of one's character that allows the speaker to dodge agency in the face of some fatalist 'truth' about themselves, and thus appear insightful as they so do.

These mechanisms may be seen as part of the defences of the personality. Flattery helps to modify experience, to bring the shambolic personality more into line with the Image of the Self. After the fact, one can say 'I willed it thus', 'It happened for a reason', 'it turned out for the best because...'. Perhaps you did, it did, but more likely is the case that you have failed to come to terms with the fact that it is you the psychoanalysts mean when they say mankind is ruled by irrational urges. It is your fear and hope that is the prey of the advertiser. Your agency is deliberately, expensively, intricately limited as a result of your being in the developed world, in a fashion far more effective than that practiced in even the most extreme of authoritarian states. This is because you still believe that you make your own decisions. As long as you cleave to this flattery, you are going nowhere.

Pander, then. Pander to the partial insight of your diminished agency by saying 'I am powerless in this degree, I might as well enjoy myself'. Pandering is a more sophisticated defence, and it mirrors the Image game's chief trick in allowing the subject a sense of freedom, of insight and control. Saying with a mock sigh something like 'what can I do?', reifying the cartoon character of your 'choice', the TV antihero on 'your' favourite sitcom is nothing more than a shallow irony masking despair. There is no way out other than to demand control of your own emotions, and to begin to understand how they have been wrested from your control.
The extent to which these insights will change your life is determined only by the depth of your interest. You may be a fashionable bore, who delights in repeating grand-sounding ideas to impress or silence your friends with your 'knowledge'. Here is a new and impressive word for you; "Sciolist". Let us hope that one day your friends learn this word. It describes a person who speaks with authority of things beyond their experience.

I hope that at some point you have decided to read on despite the 'arrogant' tone, or the attempts to insult or alarm you. If you have, you may congratulate yourself on having overcome a few printed words. In the next section I will explain this third rate enigma together with the portrayal of your freedom as a more effective prison than the Lubyanka.

Where is my mind?

First in imagination, then in will, then in reality. Ideally, yes. Practically, it goes a little more like this:

morass of emotions - static, interference, memory, censure, censor
stream of verbal 'thoughts' - background chatter of the mind
tension, low-level anxiety, awkwardness/boredom/detachment

Of course this picture is incomplete, this map does not even pretend to a substitution of itself for the territory. However, these sentences would be helpful to refer to as we discuss the nature of human cognition.

Our experience of the world is never immediate. Each sense has its roots in feeling. Light has weight, the ears transmit vibrations, the throat, tongue and teeth generate them. Sense data is not 'directly apprehended' by the brain. It is mediated, first through the organs of sense, then further, given structure by the brain itself to render this array of impressions into sensible order. The purpose of including this data here is to remind the reader that at every level of experience some mediation or interpretation is involved.

The argument here is therefore not over the authenticity of this 'truth' or that, but how we order the data we receive from the world. What do we include, and what do we reject? How do we automate these patterns of distinction between useful/useless, desirable/undesirable, interesting/uninteresting and so forth?

It is my view that the most common form of magic is everyday consciousness. I contend that experience is ordered though interwoven systems of symbol, interpretation, pattern-matching or tessellation, conditioned emotional response and subsequent verbal reasoning, as I prefer to term them, alibis.

We always speak after the event. Oftentimes in speaking we seek to alter, at least, tailor the event. But to whose design?

Again, events can be re-presented through description - a person's life may be villainous, heroic, tragic, pointless or amusing depending on the speaker's point of view. This point of view is itself rarely immediate, in the sense that what one 'makes' of experience in terms of translating impressions into language is dependent on an interface between memory, emotion, and verbal tabu.

Hostility to new ideas, or even to experiences that do not resemble former experiences, is rife. What governs this mechanism is what governs one's purchasing habits, 'opinions', choice of newspaper - fear and hope. We fear what we do not know, and we hope to find reinforcement of what we think we do. Composers of public media throughout the sales, news, and politics industries are aware of this, and make use of flattery and pandering to reassure the subject that what is one offer is all that there is; that to select between the deliberately limited options presented by the consumer model is a refreshing and invigorating exercise of rational free agency.

The undisciplined mind is like an echo chamber of suggestions, a self-referential and almost impregnable feedback loop. What one disremembers - the unflattering repetitions of obvious failures, for example, emerge as rumours behind the squall of the preoccupations in the foreground - faint echoes of a preoccupation partially displaced by that presently engaging the mind. As such, it may appear subtle, fresh, a new insight or direction - but is in fact just the dying echo of a familiar pattern of thought and feeling.

The same tricks work time and again to stimulate buyers, electorates and readers. Your favourite brands have a fixed identity, updated only in terms of finding new modes of articulation for their formulae of coolness or desirability. The political rhetoric employed at any given time by any party is a contention for the adhesion of your hopes and fears. You will find the same themes recurring in bestsellers, self-help books, strands of religious publications - for the most part these aspects of culture are fixed. They are fixed because they reflect the structure of the personality, and its tendencies towards word-totems in language and thought.

Liberty in the television age - part two

Self with a Capital "S"

What I call here the "Self" is the result of one astute domesticated primate's business acumen. This clever chimp, Mr Bernays, hit upon the notion that as well as fulfilling the wishes of people, business and government could also use the knowledge that man was driven by irrational desires to generate new wishes. By attaching these wishes to brands, Bernays discovered how to make smoking cool for women, doubling the market for gaspers. Eggs with bacon? Bernays again. He continued his experiment in the field of politics, suggesting to Eisenhower that the people be given an irrational fear of communism to bind them to their State. The reader is left to judge for themselves whether Mr Bernays was correct, when, at the age of a hundred, he mused on whether he had created a monster with his new fangled 'Public Relations'.

It was he who promoted the notion that the population was best served by being distracted from political thought by being induced to believe that their real choices lay in what they choose to consume. The fact that his life was devoted to linking consumables to the deepest fears and hopes of mankind lends this insight a sense of mordant irony. What Bernays did with uncle Freud's work was to promote the elimination of choice, by developing techniques of anxiety manipulation that actively stimulate the mark's self esteem. He was expert in directing the anxieties of consumers whilst being careful to promote a sense of empowerment in the act of purchasing. By cleverly directing the desire for freedom towards the burgeoning marketplace, he produced a template for a form of subtle coercion that continues to be improved upon.
All one could want, eventually, is all that is on offer. In our times, almost a century on, it seems to some absurd that we would have cause to complain at all. States such as ours offer an abundance of cheap consumer goods, a variety of flexible working options, and endlessly available credit. Yet the concept of a free lunch, of something for nothing, or out of nothing, persists as a knowing skit on naive demands. At what price does all this abundance come?
Of course, the price is freedom.

There are those who would claim that freedom to purchase is all that matters. Bernays himself thought that States would eventually be replaced by businesses - more direct generated-wish fulfilment mechanisms. It is important to consider what else, if anything else, remains of freedom than the falsehood of choice offered in identical shops across the 'developed' world.
They Don't Call it Programming for Nothing
The mere term "developed" recalls a photograph. A fixed image of the world, that, in this case, comes to take the place of the world. Just as freedom becomes the freedom to buy, the experience that members of such "developed" countries have is chiefly of images - not of things, nor of events. The implications from neurosemantics alone are quite arresting. We have enough difficulties in communicating with one another, in rendering sensible the dendritic matrices of correspondence logical, magical, irrational and accidental that constitute our personality, without having to contend with the Baudrillardian simulacrum. This second-order reality, which can and does cascade into an infinite series of similar fixed images, is the composite structure of all the representations of the world made public. The strongest messages, the biggest brands; often these are, like what one calls 'thoughts', most consciously recognised as the mainstays of the digitised diorama that one often mistakes for 'reality'.

It is no accident that these virtual worlds reflect the order of our own minds. It is almost deliberate, near-accidental, and in that approaches necessity. How could it be otherwise, when mass media chiefly exists to sell, and its techniques are intended to draw on the deepest fears and hopes of individuals. It appears that a second mind has been created, an entire second-order consciousness complete with its own mythos, values, language and beliefs. What is interesting about this from the point of view of this essay is that this second order consciousness, the Self of the consumer, has achieved its goals and is firmly established as a viral parasite upon the consumer's personality. It may not be stretching the point too far to opine that in a literal sense it is the consumer who is consumed.

Eschatology and Afterfun

The notion that one should work to achieve the synthetic dreams of the consumer mythos is a mutation of Abrahamic eschatology - the belief common to Christianity, Islam and Judaism that there is an afterlife, and that is to this that one must direct one's conduct and aspiration while alive. This trick has worked so well for centuries in assuring fealty to religious laws that it seems natural that the current model of consumer politics would appropriate it to promote a work ethic whose promise is that, at the end of the month, one might spend a little time in the Paradise of the Adverts.

Of course, the game is not as simple as that. One finds oneself rubbing up against the inability of events and things to match their idealised selves - the product, place or promise as image is perfect, garlanded in dreamlike special effects, bringing increased status and a sense of achievement in its train. As with the gulf between the idealised Self and one's actual personality, this is an abyss that is not meant to be bridged. Indeed, the gulf between promise and fulfilment, flattery and actuality, image and object is so vertiginously deep that one's instinct is to shy away from its yawning edge, and reify the very broken promises that brought us there. Persons willing to accept that they are easily duped, because they easily dupe themselves, are sufficiently rare to ensure that this tabu is one that remains largely unchallenged, even unacknowledged. The relationship between consumerist disappointment and personal dissatisfaction is well known to those who would have us buy more. The happy make for poor consumers. They are happy because they have begun, at some point, to determine their own desires through a capability to question their emotional responses as a valid basis for action. The ideal consumer is a person so disorded internally as to be desperate for any exit, however temporary. When so proven, the tenuous and momentary satisfaction that is stymied by possession of an object or experience inferior to the image can be dismissed as the possession of an obsolescent item. The search is renewed, for a rarer, fresher, more desirable object/experience. The governing system of behaviour, as with the personality, is never authentically questioned.

At the base of these repeated self-deceptions, this determination to have yet more 'satisfictions' at the expense of one's time, dignity, freedom of mind - is the fear of a meaningless life leading to an inevitable death. For centuries the possessing classes have learned and taught fear of the poor, erecting prisons and passing laws to legitimise their fear of expropriation. In times to come, as the populations of the developed countries become proportionately older, we will come to fear the young, and they shall be victimised in kind. The process has begun, in a relatively benign fashion, through the extension of that fantastically successful marketing fiction 'adolescence' into the twenties, thirties and forties of two generations of 'kidults'. The appearance of simplicity of mind, flippant dismissal of political and social issues, and the need to be ever more apathetically shocking are among the memes spread through this new mutation of the consumer Self. PR professionals wish their targets to recognise nothing but satisfiction as their goal in life. To reflect on the process by which this has been engineered is to be uncool, perhaps even to be envious of the types who profess themselves happy to snatch at the shelves for the shortly obsolete desirables of the day. It is a totemic substitute for the greatest fear of all: that one is oneself irrelevant, largely already obsolete - that with no Great War or Great Cause to participate in, one simply does not matter and whatever one does will eventually disappear. If we taught children to face these facts early in life they would be largely immune to the overtures of an industry seeking, through the stimulation of appetites for the useless, to needle incessantly at the hypersensitive membrane of anxiety that surrounds this deep truth.
In our culture it is horrendous to contemplate death. Jokes about death superabound: the news is largely a form of macabre entertainment, assisting in its way to insulate the viewer from their own inevitable end. Of course, the only message of television is "keep watching" - and therefore the tendency of even 'good' news programmes is to reduce their reportage to easily digestible soundbites, repeatable bylines, and to present a rapid and parodic version of international events that remains forever distant from the viewer's experiential world. One disaster comes to resemble another -occasionally, those of sufficient magnitude elicit some response, but there is rarely any interest in the underlying causes of these catastrophes. Small disasters - local wars in Africa or Indonesia, Iraqis exploded by 'martyrs', floods in Bangla Desh - these elicit a well-bred satisfaction, concealed beneath either indifference or faux concern. Large disasters may result in appeals, donations of cash - expressions of pity which once again allow the viewers to feel detached, 'lucky', superior, gratified by their largesse and by inference, pleased that their often horrendous working lives have gifted them the opportunity to buy into the theatre of magnanimity.

The result is identical as it is with 'ethical' consumerism - to place a barrier of credit between oneself and the finite resources in the account of life. Consumerism as a credo promises 'eternal' distraction. It is my contention that no-one escapes the reckoning of the death bed. It is this, the sammasati of the passing of life, that people fear most: the dread suspicion that life has been wasted. Constant distraction is the tool employed to deter the consumer from ever contemplating the consequences of being remote-controlled through clumsy emotional stimuli to buy - it is obvious that such an insight could prove incredibly galvanising to the most committed consumer.