Tuesday, February 5

Pure Conditioning

There are so many places that pride themselves in being the same as everything around them We seem to have this idea, especially in the land of free expression, that everyone has the "right" way and then we accept everything else. And this explanation really closes off other possibilities, even though it may seem that we are being open. I think language is really what is evolving here, the terms are the same but the language is different. This shift, this almost evolution of language is largely attributed to the booming impact of the Internet. The overflow of information has reduced our mental stimulus to that of a sound byte. It's peoples willingness to give up opportunities to some mental distraction that may be most easily described as a con-artist. This entity that is the media is a system of complacency, of control. Almost daily there are people that celebrate sin and licentiousness, and I certainly don't think that it is something we should ignore or overlook or even not embrace as a culture; but we seem to all to often lavish in it. To be fair most of us don't know what is going on, I certainly don't claim to. But that only tells us that what the media is doing is working. It is making us feel small, feel frightened teaching us that it is better to live in the moment instead planning for the future. Showing us, over time, that perhaps those in power should just stay there and we, the rest of society, should all simply hope for the best.

This environment of hyperreality that Baudrillard describes is one of pure conditioning, if you ask the average person how to meditate or what it means to be abducted they can tell you because they (we) are conditioned to know things that we haven't necessarily experienced. To take people out of these places where they are bombarded by the media they subsequently begin to become de-hypnotized. A lot of them would be unable to coup very well because it is not how they are used to existing. On the other hand if we follow what Socrates teaches we discover that learning is remembering and you begin to give up the obsessions of what it is that you think is controlling you. Everyone has the power to objectify themselves, but sometimes, and in fact most often times in western culture it is easier and very much acceptable to let those decisions get made for us.

If you give up the obsession of what it is that you think is controlling you. Then you begin to see the cracks in the system and that most of are not falling into them, but are rather swept into them. The basis of social hypnosis is that we, in western culture, tend to limit ourselves, we tend to think of ourselves as so fragile that the only way for us to obtain greatness or being better is this feeling that we cannot attain anything unless it is very difficult.