by Phillip Day
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.’[1]
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 (which it views as ‘experience’). 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.[2] 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 how to scoff a 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 seems to have 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. [3]
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 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.”[4]
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 really 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:
·
Joined a gym 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.
So
guard your input like a pit-bull.
Practise
good thoughts (I’m1 not sure pit-bulls do this).
RESOURCES
The Little Book of Attitude by Phillip Day