Memes by Themes #13: The Media
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too—in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory? The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen.”
—George Orwell, 1984
I’ve chosen The Media for this Memes by Themes in honor of the recently published Gallup poll indicating “Media Trust Hits Another Historic Low”—or, as Matt Taibbi delicately states, “Gallup’s annual confidence survey shows 69% of Americans will not relieve themselves on a journalist in flames.”
As I wrote in this Note:
This is what I’m talking about when I say people are waking up, one by one, Charles-Mackay style:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
—Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of CrowdsOnce the philanthropaths, tyrants, and other cruelites lose their ability to propagandize, menticide, and manipulate the public mind through the media, the curtain will be shredded and they will be seen for the psychopathic charlatans and vicious murderers they are. This is why I focus so much on awakening people to the mechanisms of mass control and mind manipulation.
It turns out you can only deceive, con, manipulate, gaslight, psychologically abuse, gag, and arrantly lie to the public for so many years before even the staunchest of Stockholm-syndrome victims begins to catch on.
The unprecedented escalation of tyranny over the past several years would have been impossible if the media’s fear bombardment tactics had fallen on a sea of ungovernable Bartlebys who would prefer not to rather than comply with coercive, unethical, inhumane, and illogical edicts.
The magic word is NO. It instantly dissolves the illusion of their power, as Gustave Le Bon describes in The Psychology of Revolution:
“The importance of [the storming of the Bastille] lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable.
“When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.
“The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show symptoms of mutiny.”
Just as fear is contagious, so is freedom.
Just as hypnosis spreads, so does awakening.
Just as defeatism circulates, so does Apocaloptimism.
It’s as easy as putting on a pair of sunglasses.
This Memes by Themes is about a thrashing dinosaur on the brink of extinction after it has irrevocably demolished its credibility.
The media sits at the center of the Venn diagram of propaganda, psychological manipulation, and censorship, so those entries complement this one nicely:
The propagandists have manufactured the illusion of authority to prop up the illusion of “reality” to project the illusion of consensus to control people’s beliefs and behaviors, and all those illusions are being shattered like a hall of domino mirrors.
As Paddy Chayefsky’s Howard Beale proclaims in the requisite Network:
“Television is not the truth. Television’s a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.…
“You’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house.
“And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he’s gonna win.
“We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear.
“We deal in illusions, man.
“None of it is true!
“But you people sit there, day after day, night after night—all ages, colors, creeds.
“We’re all you know!
“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here!
“You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.
“You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube.
“This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion!
“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I’m speaking to you now.
“Turn them off!!”
But first, on with the show! Incoming: 157 Mockingbird Media memes + five videos …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.