The average American watches eight hours and fourteen minutes of television per day
by Hereward Lindsay
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
“The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.”
He didn’t get any defiance from me.
The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot.
I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors.
(Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato’s dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2367", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.There are many, many reasons that can easily be recognized. Others are not so easy to see and there are probably many causes we cannot imagine.
One cause that is obscure but which I think is an extremely important factor in the collapse is the decline in the number of self-employed people. This factor ties into the role of television in the collapse and is not unrelated, as shown below.
Only four generations ago a huge percentage of Americans — perhaps even a majority — were self-employed. Today I think the percentage is less than 2%.
The largest number of self-employed people in the past were farmers.
Farmers are routinely the butt of Hollywood and New York ridicule as rubes and primitives. Such jokes to the contrary notwithstanding, while farmers may not be “hip” or “hot”, running a farm requires many times the independence of thought and judgment required of someone who is a paid employee of someone else.
Four generations ago a self-employed farmer had to plan what to plant, when to plant, from whom to buy his seeds, how to maintain his mule in good health, how to pay his creditors, when to fertilize, when to harvest. He had to reach an agreement with someone to whom to sell his produce. He had to do his own repairs to his house, barns, equipment.
Such tasks required a much more active mind than someone who performs a routine task for his employer and whose employer takes care even of such matters as withholding the right amount of taxes and paying them to the government, tasks that require mathematical calculations that the atrophied minds of the brain-dead zombie employees can no longer handle.
We are considering here the most important aspect of the difference between the self-employed person and the employee — the huge difference in the level of mental activity and independent judgment required.
It isn’t necessary to delve at length into the other obvious negative in the decline in the percentage of the self-employed — the fact that an employee is never actually free because he does not have independent resources for his support. Regardless of constitutional prohibitions of governmental coercion of free speech, an employee dares not write a letter to the editor that would upset his employer. An employee may be free de jure but he is a de facto serf. This situation is one that professional thought police like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center find highly to their liking. It serves bullies like Abraham Foxman and Morris Dees well to be able to make a telephone call or write a letter to someone’s boss revealing that their employee is a thought-criminal and an embarrassment to his employer.
Our hypothetical independent farmer ties directly into the negative impact of the television. He had to do his OWN thinking. He did not get it gratuitously supplied full-blown from the mind of Hollywood, i.e. the television set.
As Senator Tom Watson of Georgia once remarked, “A farmer does a lot of thinking behind that mule.”
Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand would find this remark hilarious.
Nevertheless, one does not have to adhere to the Jeffersonian idealization of the farmer as a sturdy, independent yeoman to know that Watson was right.
It is highly instructive to read election debates and speeches in the era, say, of Tom Watson (1856–1922).
These debates took place in public venues attended by thousands of voters.
Today most college graduates would not be able to handle the references to ancient history, classical Greece and Rome, our cultural and legal heritage from Mother England, the names and ideas of leaders before, during and after the Revolution, banking practices, poetry, literary figures and so on.
These long-ago debates and speeches were attended by thousands of rural Georgia farmers who apparently had little difficulty following the speaker’s line of reasoning and arguments.
Modern “intellectuals”, of course, will immediately shout down the discouraging conclusions about the diminished level of modern public intelligence that ineluctably flow from this fact by asserting that the farmers and other voters attending the debates and rallies, of course, did not understand what was being said. However, common sense tells you that if this had been the case, candidates for public office who made such brain-taxing speeches would have been defeated by cleverer opponents who would have conducted civic discourse in the manner of the current batch of candidates for President.
But back in the early decades of the 20th century, in Tom Watson’s day, apparently a candidate who was as inarticulate and dumb as, say, George Bush, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, would have been dismissed by the electorate as unworthy of public office.
Television is a brain-ravaging medium.
Even if the cultural and intellectual level of most television broadcasting had a higher tone, there is an inherent and unavoidable danger in the medium itself because it absorbs and stultifies both the eye and the ear.
A reader of the novel Gone With the Wind must conjure up the image of Scarlett O’Hara. He has to create a picture of her and her world from what he reads in the text.
On the other hand, a viewer of the movie version of Gone With the Wind doesn’t have to use his mind at all. Scarlett O’Hara is Vivian Leigh. That’s all there is to it.
[It adds a more startling dimension to the subject of the mental passivity of modern Whites to remember that the British aristocracy historically was suspicious of READING (!) on the ground that readers were passive and not learning from living life itself. One of the Mitford sisters — I forget which one — quoted some titled relative as remarking that he never read a book. This was not quoted to show what a buffoon he was but to show the suspicion that overhung a lot of book reading. The relative was an active and successful person, not a jerk. Obviously, this is an extreme example. Giving up reading would be a disaster today. But it does show just how much more independent judgment and activity were prized only a short while ago. Oh, for a world in which the problem was the passivity that might result from reading books!
The average American watches eight hours and fourteen minutes of television per day.
The brain-numbing nature of this cannot be exaggerated.
All of us know relatively bright people who watch this garbage.
Garbage indeed!
Most of what is on television not only requires no mental activity because of the nature of the medium itself but also is entirely predictable.
There is no suspense. The conclusion of the story is obvious from the very beginning. The characters are all stylized. You know who the hero is and who the villain is before a word is spoken. The lines are hackneyed. Much of the dialogue consists of retreads from other programs. Laughter must be supplied to nudge the viewer and let him know that he is supposed to laugh.
It is impossible to exaggerate just how devastating to the mind watching such pablum hour after hour must be.
It’s simply crippling. Devastating. Deadly.
To conclude these comments on the negative impact of television, we need to consider next what an enormous weapon it is in the hands of the establishment.
Before the end of World War II no government, no establishment ever had the power to put instantaneously its propaganda into virtually every home in the nation.
As someone once remarked it is very difficult to recognize enormous changes.
This power to saturate every home with the party line is something that one should really stop and ponder. It is a huge change.
http://theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Lindsay-Decline.html#Lindsay-1