Television and the Group Mind

Earlier today I had a conversation with someone who mentioned that they did not watch television. I run into many people who feel that television is one of the world’s great evils. Who can argue that television isn’t filled to the brim with crap? But later I ran across a quote from Napoleon Hill that made me think of television from a different angle. The quote is:

“Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity.”

What could be the opportunity that springs from the adversity of traveling through the television wasteland? I’m not talking about the rare gems of “quality programs” in the fields of garbage. I mean: what greater purpose could be served through the saturation of the populace with junk programming?

Speaking as a civilian, I think it’s possible that an answer can be found in what happens at boot camp when people join the service. From what I understand, a lot of emphasis is placed on seemingly pointless things like making your bed 100% correctly and marching around in formation all day. Now, anyone halfway familiar with war movie cliches will recognize that although the recruits may gripe and moan about these things, eventually they will realize that the old drill sergeant was just trying to get them prepared for the real deal, by instilling in them a maniacal level of attention to detail and team discipline.

So, if we are repulsed by the senseless images, sounds and thoughts being dumped into a billion human minds, let us consider that this is merely boot camp. The ability to affect consciousness by technical means on this scale is an extremely recent phenomenon. Why should anyone be surprised that:

a) the early attempts are crude and tasteless,
b) humans need to be trained to be receptive to information injected into their minds in this way, and
c) training needs to begin with the basics, literally meaning the basest human needs such as sex/power/fame

Continual refinement of the means by which human attention is aggregated and focused should lead to a point where all minds can be set to operate in near unison. When this occurs, the television and mass media that we see now as being utterly without value, as pointless as making a bed perfectly, can be seen as a blessing and a gift, a power to be used when the time is right, by the right wielder, and for the right purpose.

The question naturally arises: what is the right purpose? Maybe the creation of the hive mind is itself the goal. We won’t know until we try.

Written by Parker on August 24th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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