Guarding Input
by Phillip Day
How to pitch the odds in your favour

It's a jungle out there.

What we focus on becomes our reality.

What's going on in Equador?

Who cares? I'm not focused on Equador.

What am I focused on?

And what is it doing to me?

'One study involving more than 700 families found that 14-year-old boys who watched relatively more television were more likely to have assaulted or committed a serious act of aggression against someone by the time they were 22 years old. A similar pattern was found among females, but the relationship was much weaker.

Another study found that violence in the media can have a profound effect on the behaviour of children and teens and that TV violence is associated with aggression among children as young as 4 years.

Preschoolers who watch television violence and play violent video games are more likely to show high levels of aggression and antisocial behaviour than those not exposed, according to another study.'

Yet another example of neuro-associative conditioning. TV can work for good. Mostly it works for our undoing.

Input
… is everything we allow to enter us.
What we consume
What we see
What we hear
What we experience
What we touch
What we smell

Output
…is our reaction to the above: our deeds, thoughts, patterning and emotions.

The more positive the input (placebo), the more positive the output, the more positive the patterns, the more positive the performance. And, of course, the reverse is true (nocebo).

The Danger of Media
Media includes advertising, news and entertainment. Media is input and changes the way we interpret the world. Media chooses what we see. Constant repetitions override and re-write opinions and patterning. Media is neuro-associative conditioning on steroids. It can be a force for good. Then again, through selective reporting, all Roman Catholic priests can become paedophiles. All dark-featured, moustachioed Middle-Easterners can become terrorists. All felons in Los Angeles are 5' 10", 160 lb black males in their early twenties not wearing a shirt. You get the picture.

Televised imagery affects real-world behaviour, the ad industry depends on it. The brain on a sub-conscious level cannot distinguish between what it experiences and what it is shown. Bad news brings pain. Good news brings pleasure. The Six O'Clock News is almost all bad news, which means The Six O'Clock News = pain/nocebo. Most of what is covered is none of our business and does not affect us directly, yet we subconsciously take on the pain.

How does a constant tide of bad news affect the way you view the world?

Constantly misrepresenting the scale of a threat keeps the populace in a state of mental siege. Relentless coverage throws the spooks into everyone. Consider:

"To get the nation healthier we must have more vaccinations, more hospitals, more doctors and nurses, more drugs, more donations for more research, and higher taxes. If we don't, continued disease poses a survival threat."

A lie repeated loud enough, long enough and often enough is still a lie. Professor Chris Bulstrode, US orthopaedic surgeon turned medical lecturer, is not the only member of his profession to make the case for less doctors for better health, not more:

"More doctors just means more illness. If we want a healthier and happier country, we should get rid of a lot of doctors. I cannot have been the only person who was absolutely incensed to discover that when the Berlin Wall came down, the military strength of the Eastern Block was an order of magnitude less than we had been led to believe. I want to try all the Western generals for lying to the public about how strong the Russians were. These generals have done three things over the last thirty years. They have frightened the hell out of the Russians, they have frightened the hell out of us, and they have stolen a huge amount of money from the budget that could have been used elsewhere. As I was thinking about this, I realized that this is exactly what we as doctors do in healthcare."

Heavy on Our Heart
TV has a strong 'conforming' effect on us, even if we think it doesn't. One in five under-fifteens in Britain is obese. Obesity in America causes 300,000 deaths a year with the total healthcare costs for overweight amounting to a hefty $100 billion. 7.3% of Americans officially have diabetes, amounting to more than 10% of the population if the undiagnosed cases are considered. If one totals the number of American citizens weighing between 10 - 30lbs over their average weight for height, 65% of the population falls into that category.

So, what do we see advertised on American TV every night? Junk food, slurpies, pizza, chocolate - constant repetition installs the pattern to choose the food we're told will bring the greatest pleasure.

Consider by the time a child is 16, he will have seen 300,000 acts of gratuitous violence, torture, mutilation, suicide and murder on television, at the cinema, and now on his PC. The Comedy Channel has us laughing at euthanasia, adultery, religion and death in a way that makes it all funnier than hell. Hollywood taught us how to enjoy the 'buzz' of sin without the aggravation of accountability in much the same way Ray Kroc showed us the Big Mac without the aggravation of the abattoir.

What a Turn-On
Media distorts our world-view with excessive focus on events we have never personally experienced. Newspapers gather up all the bad news around the world and dump it on our breakfast table. Terrorism. Disasters. Live sex acts occur in Mediterranean nightclubs, young female holidaymakers taking part while their admiring mothers look on. Drunken brawls in city streets. News of abuses of the young. The killing of little children by other little children. A British father rapes his own daughter then murders her. What was once unthinkable has now become commonplace. Or has it?

Dysfunctional input can help society fulfil the prophecy it constantly witnesses on TV. In 1976, the number of reported child abuse cases in America was 670,000. By the early 90s, this figure had risen to nearly 3 million. Movies, soaps, teen magazines and social-climber periodicals across the world deify sex, promiscuity, adultery and drunkenness. Drug abuse is now so widespread in the world's conurbations that when London's Metropolitan Police randomly searched a large cross-section of club-goers in the King's Cross area in 1998, 100% of them were found to be carrying, or under the influence of 'controlled' drugs.

Upwards of 25% of the videos rented in the US each year are pornographic. One Pentagon telephone audit showed $300,000 of taxpayers' money had been spent on 1(900) sex lines. At the last count, within a few blocks of the Department of Justice in Washington DC, there were 37 'adult' bookstores, 8 X-rated theatres and 15 topless bars. No pain, apparently, in the world's superpower capital.

The Double Mind
British TV today is a smorgasbord of Big Brother ogling, Celebrity Love Island shenanigans, the hate-filled faces of soap opera, Sex and the City, an autopsy performed live for a Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-munching public. We desire pleasure no matter the consequences, happily divorcing cause from effect, what everything is doing to us.

Thus arises the double mind, a society able to moralise in the newspapers about rape, murder and sex abuse, while having no problem accommodating the latest Kill Bill movie advertised on the very next page. England wept like babies during the serial run of the program Hearts of Gold, seeing ordinary folk doing good deeds for one another, dissolving the nation into sentimental goo. But the following day it was 'Hearts of Lead' as we cussed out the kids, gobbled down the porridge and carved up the grannies on our mad dash into work.

There's one thing at which we [Britain] DO lead the world. And we should hang our heads in shame: Britain has the highest rate of unmarried teenage mothers - nine times worse than Japan. Why is Britain so different? Not because we don't teach children about contraception. Just the opposite - we teach them too much and in the wrong way.

The more sexually aware our children become at too early an age, the more they are tempted. Tragically, it has become unfashionable to drum into children the word 'No'. We are paying the price in wrecked lives.

This from The Sun, page 8. Turn five pages back and drool at the daily half-page photograph of a teenage girl stripped to the saddle in provocative pose, earning some pin-money as she breaks onto the 'modelling' scene. Is The Sun doing its bit to prevent our youth from being sexually 'tempted'? Hardly. But such hypocritical rubbish passes us by with nary a blink.

"I want to be famous!" the school children chorus.
"Famous for what?' asks the teacher.
"Just famous!'

The double mind: "A mind profoundly at war with itself and ignorant even of that fact."

The Twenty-Third Channel
The TV is my shepherd,
I shall not want,
It makes me lie down on the sofa,
It leads me away from the fridge,
It destroys my soul,
It leads me in the path of sex and violence
For the sponsor's sake.
Yea, though I walk
In the shadow of social responsibilities,
There will be no interruption,
For the TV is with me,
Its cable and remote,
They comfort me.
It prepares a commercial for me
In the presence of all my worldliness.
It anoints my head with consumerism,
My coveting runneth over.
Surely laziness and ignorance
Shall follow me
All the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house
Watching TV forever.

Learn More About Yourself
What sort of input am I willingly subscribing to?
What effect can I see this having on me?
Is the double mind in evidence in my life?
How do I reconcile my hypocrisies?
Does this bother me?
Has media usurped my right to make up my mind based on my own experience, or am I given my opinions?
Do I think media is a force for good?
Do I think media is a force for ill?
And the question they'll take you out and shoot you for asking:

DO I REALLY NEED MEDIA AT ALL?

Based on your answers, try switching off the TV for fourteen days. If you break out in a sweat and can't, at least total up the time you spend in front of the box, reading newspapers, listening to the radio, etc., and consider what you could have done with the time instead:

· Played some sport and made myself healthier
· Got a university degree
· Started a business
· Written a good book
· Read a good book
· Organised worthwhile activities for my children
· Saved the £40-a-month cable fee and put it towards a college education for my child instead
· Created something
· Served someone

Moral of the story?

Pain in, pain out.

Pleasure in, pleasure out.

Guard your input like a pit-bull.

Practise good thoughts (I'm not sure pit-bulls do this).

Copyright © 2005 Phillip Day
Extracted from The Little Book of Attitude
www.credence.org