WHOSE
FANTASY IS IT,WHOSE
FANTASY IS IT,
ANYWAY?
It's happening all over the country. Every day our 'news' programs bring us more reports of violent, seemingly senseless outrages directed towards ordinary people by others. Teenaged killers remorselessly killing friends, parents, or family members on a whim. Quiet neighbors suddenly and unpredictably going berserk (quote from neighbor: "He was always such a gentle guy!"). Total strangers committing acts of incredible violence against people they don't know. Disgruntled office workers quietly showing up with an assault weapon and slaughtering colleagues, supervisors, peers, exacting heinous retribution for fancied slights or hasty words. Sexually depraved predators abducting innocent children, ravishing them and finally leaving their bodies mute and violated alongside some lonely roadway.
The usual reaction to reports of this type of behavior is disbelief. How can this be happening in one of the most economically favored, technologically advanced nations of the modern world? How can our socially sophisticated culture have come to the point where things of this sort are regarded almost as casually as eating and sleeping? I find myself asking these same questions each of us silently pose to ourselves virtually every morning, while reading the local paper over coffee (or scanning news on the internet).
The answer,
unfortunately, is neither as inexplicable nor as unfathomable as our slack-jawed
disbelief would suggest. It has everything to do with the sea change being
undergone by an America held tightly in thrall by the forces of modern,
capitalistic economic marketing. It has everything to do with the massively
persuasive subtleties of a system which has progressively substituted hard-edged
imaginative fantasy for reality and supplanted sober reality with indulgent
illusion for one central overall purpose: to sell products in a society that is
gradually, inexorably being turned into a slavishly obsessive culture of
material consumption.
The mechanics of the process are not difficult to ascertain, nor are their antecedent roots obscure to intelligent, reflective inquiry. They originated in the need to orally pass along history, learning, and/or survival skills. With the invention of moveable type, fantasy found a home in fictional literature. Imagination and wishful daydreams have existed side by side throughout the same period of time, but have never before posed a threat to the higher ideals of civilised society as they do now; whereas story telling has heretofore been a positive, often important aspect of human culture, in its present highly sophisticated form it now constitutes the gravest threat to the human race the planet has ever known.
The difference between former, simple story-telling, the whimsical and dreamy indulgence in imaginative wishfulness and the blurring of reality with fantasy which now threatens us is the remorseless application of technologically enhanced creativity by forces of capitalistic materialism to sell products. Advertising, in league with visual media (television), is engaged in a soulless effort to massage our minds into a continuously receptive mode wherein the beginning and end of every waking day is spent thinking about acquiring material commercial products. Every trick in the marketing manual, from vague subtleties of deception through egregious, outright distortion of truth, is willfully practiced in this campaign to turn us all into a nation of endlessly consuming robots. Sad thing is that very few people even pause in their daily fits of consumptive frenzy to reflect on the process they are all so thoroughly caught up in.
Technology, aided by common belief in the power of scientific, technical development (that is virtually replacing traditional religious faith), is the principal tool of America's present undoing. Unfortunately, the average American citizen of today has been conditioned from birth to look upon science and technology as positive modern tools of present civilization and is no longer able to exercise sound critical judgment in determining the overall effect of this misuse on our lives. Lost in this rush to worship at the new alter of technical advancement is the fact that instead of being used merely as the tools they originally were conceived to be (for purposes of enhancing and improving the human condition), science and technology are instead being completely co-opted by the marketing forces of our economy to promote blindly enthusiastic consumption of material goods. Most of these material things we are told we must have are not needed and are certainly not necessary for the attainment of a normal, balanced, reflective life of reasoned personal fulfillment.
This effort to create habits of endlessly and unquestioningly acquisitive behavior in individuals is achieved to a great degree by employing the powerful forces of fantasy and imaginative wishfulness in a process of distorting our capability to perceive reality. By blurring our critical ability to discern factual reality from day-dream like fantasy, all manner of deceptions become possible. Outright lies become truth, suggestions of fact become fact, innuendo becomes actuality, and illusions assume hard substance.
This is best demonstrated by the practice of today's motion picture industry to make and promote films which portray unrestrained indulgences of a highly sexual, overtly violent, and bitterly vengeful nature. Known as 'action films,' they cater to the wishful fantasies of a mass of average individuals who seek release from social pressures they do not understand nor are able to isolate and identify. The themes of sex and violence are unrelenting in these films, videos and computer games because corporate media magnates know that such subjects appeal broadly to all people, but most particularly to those who refuse to exercise intelligent reflective in assessing the quality of their lives and to those who lack the basic intelligence to do so. Unfortunately, these two groups together comprise a majority of the American population. Further adding to their impact, these products of the entertainment business are selectively aimed at younger individuals--those who through sheer immaturity lack critical reasoning skills.
As if this weren't insidious enough, supposedly older, wiser and more mature individuals are constantly barraged with messages (through advertising, primarily) that convey the impression that young, sexy and reckless immaturity are culturally superior qualities to the wisdom, knowledge and moderation that age and maturity create naturally, thus using peer pressure to reduce higher aspirations to the same level as popular, base and immature ones.
The sheer power of visual advertising and the irresistible nature of the immature, youthful spirit of adventuring overwhelms us through our daily exposure to visual entertainment, since one of the by-products of our highly technologised society has been to reduce our desire to seek amusement to only one or two distinct options: the watching of television or computer/video gaming. By saturating our senses with such purpose-created images, we unconsciously suffer loss of our reflective capability; before long, the fantastic action scenario of impossible feats and extraordinarily exaggerated adventure becomes irrevocably blurred with our personal identities, accomplishments, aspirations and wish-fulfillment functions.
It is important to pause amidst all the social duress and confused realities of our present high-tech lives and realise that all these manipulations of our awareness and understanding are being carried out with remorseless fervor for one reason only: to generate profit on a massive scale for corporations that produce consumer products. Not because creating confused concepts of reality is inherently fun or productive in and of itself, but because we as a sociopolitical system have lost sight of any higher guiding moral precepts we might have traditionally had in the sheer, obscenely mad scramble for money and material excess that runs our economy
My favorite descriptive term for this collective state of mindlessness) that plagues us is "Disney-isation." Whereas in earlier, simpler times Walt Disney and his genius for cartooning provided us with pleasant, harmless fantasies for amusement, today the corporation that his successors operate is powerful beyond belief. The ability of the Disney Corporation to turn real life into a contrived morality play whose message is solely to buy 'things' is in itself perhaps one of the deadliest threats modern America faces, as ugly and unavoidable by-products of our technologised civilization (increased casual violence, callous disregard for human life, heightened disrespect for other individuals with different beliefs, customs and values, to name but a few of the effects) rise menacingly to further degrade the quality of our lives. As the tentacles of the Disney Corporation spread throughout the world (just as all multi-national corporations do), immensely augmented by the power of media and electronic communications, it is not just our own nation which now faces the threat of collective social schizophrenia, but the whole planet. Again, ironically, the average individual, mindlessly caught up in the behaviorally reactive puppet dance of life created by the corporate string-pullers, still regards the Disney Corporation with a sort of benignly nostalgic fondness—a response prompted by recollective remnants and remembered fragments of the harmless cartoon fantasies experienced in youth, decades earlier.
As but one of the massively
influential entertainment industries centered in Hollywood, California, the
Disney Corporation is simply another example of a movement which is dedicated to
distorting our ability to differentiate reality from fantasy for the sole sake of
selling material goods. The important and proper concern we as a nation ought to
emulate we are told, both consciously and subconsciously through advertising's
brain washing conditioning, is image, not substance. In the same manner that
Hollywood movies feature store-front settings with nothing behind the visual
exterior, we end up carefully cultivating an identity that is equally
superficial in both construct and quality. Everything that is important, the
message comes across, is found on the exterior of our identity--how we look,
what we say, how we appear to others. Those qualities which lie inside
(i.e. non-
Social isolation, one of the principal effects of our modern corporate economy, simply fragments us even further into insulated pockets of humanity without common bonds, interests or mutual cohesiveness, and it also heightens our need to rely on televised media in an effort to recapture that which has ironically been taken away by the capitalist economic activity of modern globally oriented business. Thus, the subtle suffering induced in each of us by our being conditioned to buy into the process of substitution of fantasy for reality simply furthers our addiction to the very mechanism that hastens our compliance: televised advertising, media and entertainment.
Thoughtful individuals, irritated by what they readily perceive to be globally applied, consumer-oriented, massively abusive social conditioning, dare to stand up now and then to call out a challenge to the economic power cartels which control our society and criticize this process that encourages substitution of fantasy for reality for blatantly commercial purposes. The response, depressingly predictable, is that '...people are just being given what they want.' If one accepts this argument, the broad mass of people all want nothing more than copious and unrelenting amounts of sexual excess, gratuitous violence, unconstrained power and influence, obscene wealth, ethnic hatred, and generalized chaos in their lives. Yet this is the predictable reply.
The greater question, however, remains un addressed by those who foster and perpetuate this subtle, yet extremely damaging social philosophy (i.e. the corporations, whose continued misuse of the tools of science and technology keep America enthralled): Whose fantasy is it...and more to the point....why?
C2 / March 2004
[NOTE: This was originally put to paper several years ago, but I reprint it here due to my discovery of an excellent book titled The Unreality Industry, by Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis, Oxford University Press, 1989/1993, ISBN 0-19-508398-9 (softcover). Reading many of my ideas addressed in such depth by the authors of this book prompted me to repost the original commentary. It's always very comforting to have one's basic hypothesis substantiated by academia. Makes one feel a little less like some sort of wild-eyed, straggly-haired maniac, walking around the streets with a "The End is NEAR!" sign, also (a definite benefit in an age in which sanity and reason are often mistaken for their opposites...)]
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