Behind the Scenes
Money, Minds, and Hands
Everyone or nearly everyone knows the meaning of the term Information Revolution. The word "information" invokes images of computers and microchips. The word "revolution" suggests changes, drastic changes in both a political and sociological sense. Changes in the way we actually think, work, and play.
Most people will agree that this revolution began when personal computers became personal in terms of price, size, and power. Others might extend its life to the 1950’s when the solid state era of electronics was born. According to the general view, the Information Revolution started no more than 30 or 40 years ago, and it was due to a remarkable technological break-through in the electronic arena.
From the linguistic point of view, Information Revolution is a phrase, or slogan, borrowed from the term "Industrial Revolution" which was developed by Arnold Toynbee to describe economic, demographic, social, and political changes that took place initially in England between the mid 18th and the first quarter of the 19th century. During this period there was a shift from an agricultural to an industrial stage of development as a result of technological innovations.
The "futurologists" duo James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg, in their bestseller "The Great Reckoning", claim that "the Information Revolution, much rumored but little understood, is the third great revolution of the human life…". Certainly, there is no doubt that it is much rumored and very little understood. Precisely because it is rumored it is little understood. On the other hand, whether it is the third, the fourth, or the tenth great revolution of human life depends on Davidson & Rees-Mogg’s definition of a great revolution, human life, and the arbitrary point where they began counting.
The Industrial Revolution was "triggered" by a relatively sudden appearance of technical inventions which, within a few years, changed the world. The outcome of this Revolution was inevitable and unpredictable to their contemporaries since the causes were "natural", like an earthquake or an epidemic. When Richard Arkwright built the first cotton-spinning mill in 1771 which was operated by using unskilled workers (10 year old children) in a way that today we call "mass production", he probably didn’t foresee, apart from the obvious personal and immediate economic advantages, the scale and scope of his invention in terms of political and social consequences. Around the same time James Watt built the first "crankshaft" steam machine, adding a new "piece" to the Industrial Revolution puzzle.
The fact that Watt had problems finding financial support to produce his invention, in contrast with Arkwright who made a fortune in a short period of time, proves that during the Industrial Revolution its components where taking their place without any order or plan. Everyone was attempting to maximize the material or intellectual benefits of the revolution, but all had a partial – non systemic – view of the process. Peasants abandoned farms to work in factories, not knowing if this would result an improvement in their quality of life. Inventors struggled to find financial support not knowing the long term social consequences of their inventions. "Entrepreneurs", probably the better foreseers of the time, envisaged huge short-term profits. No one, however, foresaw the most important consequences of the process. This revolution was like a natural phenomenon driven by "natural" forces unknown to the people of the time. Science and technology where mature enough to cradle the inventions, and the powerful pull of offer and demand, the social equivalent to gravity, amalgamated the disperse pieces of the puzzle. The universal craving for textile products was the force that mobilized money, minds, and hands into what we currently call the Industrial Revolution like an ever-hungry black hole craves for matter and even light.
As we can see, the concept of Industrial Revolution has an illustrious father – A. Toynbee - but the Information Revolution has not. It started as a rumor. Nevertheless, the media adopted and inflated this phrase around the world establishing a "de facto" relationship between the concepts. The problem, or the advantage, depending on your point of view, of launching this new concept with a rumor is that it establishes an a priori relationship between the Information and the Industrial Revolution, thereby saving you the burden of analyzing and proving that both processes are really similar or analogous. I am not going to resort to the same trick of choosing a convenient name in order to spare myself from the task of having to demonstrate my assertions. I accept the weapons and field chosen to prove that the Information Revolution has, essentially, little in common with the Industrial Revolution and the development of information technology. I’ll demonstrate that there are other revolutions, besides the Industrial Revolution, that constitute better analogies in terms of genesis and outcomes, social, and political consequences, that the media’s innocent slip of associating both revolutions on the base that they are mechanical and inevitable is not so innocent, and that the Information Revolution is a planned one, it has clear aims and predictable consequences that become evident analyzed under the light of Systems Theory .
The least common of the senses, the common sense
The moral of the Industrial Revolution is that the people who "understood" it, even partially like Arkwright, acquired handsome profits and political power. Arkwright - who began as a hairdresser - became Sheriff of Derbyshire, his hometown. Unquestionably, nobody fully understood the ultimate consequences of the process they were suffering. This was primarily because there were no previous technological revolutions that had changed the world so radically and swiftly as the one they were experimenting with. Secondly, they didn’t have the help of modern sciences like psychology, sociology, systems and information theory to help them foresee the future, as do modern "futurologists". The effect of delays and time frames on feedback processes was out of their scope, and they are also out of the scope of the majority of contemporary (1998) people who doesn’t know modern Systems theory. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution had, without any doubt, an exceptional intellect and perception, but no one foresaw the worldwide social implications.
In general we say that two processes are analogous at a specific abstraction level if they are subjected to similar cause-effect relationships. The analogy between the Information and the Industrial Revolution suggests that a mechanical, anonymous, lineal, cause–effect process triggered by a succession of technological innovations such as transistors, microprocessors and PC’s is changing our life leaving us little margin to control, other than adaptation. The inherent idea is that we have no control over the emergence of new technologies, and much less control over the social influence of such technologies. The best we can do, therefore, is to adapt our life to the new social and technological conditions. The implicit assertion is that we have to behave like Arkwright during the Industrial Revolution in order to improve our understanding of the world and, concurrently, our chances of success in modern society. This philosophy encourages prompt action without thinking too much on why we act. The implicit message is to seize the opportunity, like Arkwright, make a profit without wasting time analyzing what is going on around us. Operating on a rhetorical level, the similarities of the phrases "Industrial Revolution" and "Information Revolution" infer a correlation between technological developments and social changes implicitly, and conveniently, discarding other factors of the process. This subliminal message suggests that unforeseen technological development produce the social changes we are experimenting with, thus the social changes are just the resultant of uncontrollable forces acting upon us. The aim of this message is to induce us to accept the notion that the social changes are the inevitable result of technological changes.
If we accept the premise that the Information and the Industrial Revolution are essentially analogous, then Arkwright’s attitude is the correct one. If it is not possible to predict what are the consequences of the process we are involved because they are driven by the random appearance of new technologies, the best we can do is to adopt them, learn them, and pray that a newer technology would not render these obsolete. We become, in Darwinian terms, a species adapting to a new environment in order to survive without any control over it. The corner stone of this reasoning resides in the axiomatic statement that both revolutions are analogous based only in the similitude of their names. I’ll demonstrate that despite the similarity of the processes, in the sense that technological developments and social changes are involved; the cause-effect relationship between them is not the same in both revolutions.
There is an essential difference between the Industrial and the Information Revolutions. Firstly, in the Industrial Revolution technological innovations were the spark which ignited the social fuel, while in the Information Revolution technology is merely instrumental. Evidence of this is the fact that the Information Revolution started last century, much earlier than any electronic device was even imagined as I will demonstrate later. Secondly, the Information Revolution is a planned one, while the Industrial Revolution was spontaneous. The Information Revolution and its outcomes are in the minds of the man, like the republic was in the minds of the French revolutionaries. If we have to chose an analogy from history, the French Revolution is much more similar in its genesis and possible outcomes. The Information Revolution is just the continuation of the process that produced the French and the American Revolution. It is much more a religious, political, and sociological revolution than a technological one. Returning to the Darwinian metaphor, we don’t live in a sociological environment subject to random changes that force us to readapt or die as in the 18th century. The 20th century social sciences allowed us to predict and manipulate the social environment. The changes we are suffering are planned and not a consequence of "natural phenomena".
To say that information technology is irrelevant to the Information Revolution appears to be an audacious assertion difficult to sustain in a world linked by the mesh of the global "World Wide Web". Despite the counter-intuitiveness of this notion, I will demonstrate its validity with the assistance of Psychology, Sociology, History, Information and Systems Theory, and using the less common of the senses, the common sense, seasoned with some good examples.
The News Revolution
"The Great Reckoning" is a good exponent of both the "official" point of view about the Information Revolution in the Western World, and marketing techniques applied in order to obtain maximum leverage. Despite the old Chinese proverb: "the man who knows doesn’t predict, the one who predicts doesn’t know", the writers of "The Great Reckoning" were promoted as, "…leading investment forecasters". The book was fancily packaged, interestingly reviewed as "an apocalyptic book" accordingly to The Sunday Telegraph, and sold on a bestseller scale which in turn (please note the feedback), will further increase the number of units sold even more.
It is pointless to analyze in detail Davidson & Rees-Mogg’s account of the Information Revolution phenomena. Suffice to say that they consider technological innovations the engine and the cause of the Information Revolution, as the spinning-mill was to the Industrial Revolution, in addition to "a new concept" called "megapolitics", which is no more than the use of raw physical power combined with a complete lack of morality in order to obtain your aims. Not a new concept, indeed, if you listen to Nixon’s Watergate tapes or if you ever read Plato, Machiaveli, or Henry Kissinger between other personalities.
There is a vast quantity of books "explaining" and /or "exploiting" this concept. The lure is not the promise of a beautiful Faustian woman, but power and economic gain. Some authors are prophesizing the shape and taste of the world along the following millennium based on a "correct reading" or interpretation of "the third great revolution of human life", the Information Revolution.
All these books have a common denominator in order to guarantee their commercial success. It is the axiomatic (fundamentalist, is the politically correct word) and unilateral assumption that information refers exclusively to processing information and not to the more obvious and natural meaning of the word information, which is news. In other words, the "official" analysis shifts the focus from the conventional meaning of the word information, as a synonym of news, to a "modern" meaning focused on the mechanical process of transmitting and codifying information. This subtle change guarantees that the ones who unconsciously accept it, which happens to be the majority of people, will eventually learn to operate a tool like the Internet, but will never understand the nature and the implications of the social phenomena labeled Information Revolution, or more appropriately, the News Revolution.
An old, shrewd politician used to cry from one side while "putting the eggs" in the other. The media and their accomplices play the same game. While they are literally creating and promoting the concept of Information Revolution that suit their needs, they claim to be driven by it. This claim is as true and honest as the canned laugher you hear in the background on television comedies. To demonstrate this fact and other assertions I made earlier I need to introduce some concepts from Systems and Information Theories: information feedback; reinforcing and balancing processes; leverage; delays; and time frames. Systems theory is a "holistic" (utilizing "New Age" terminology much in fashion these days) approach. It attempts to identify processes and to establish relationships between the components of a system. It pretends to "see" the system "in movement" in order to fully understand it. For this reason it is often necessary to use graphs. In the next sections I will use some graphs for which I will provide an interpretation.
Information… the "quid" of the
question
Do the general public know what information is? Well, if we borrow the definition from Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, which states that information is "a reduction of uncertainty" of the receptor, we can answer this question negatively. It is a cryptic definition for prosaic ears. Firstly, according to this definition, information is negative in the sense that it is a lack of something, like cold is a lack of heat. Secondly, it is also a probability. This means that it can be "measured" with a number between zero and one using the ubiquitous logarithm. For example, if somebody sends us an encrypted message three things can happen: a) if we don’t know the encryption code the content of the message is zero because we can’t understand it; b) if we can decode the message but it tells us something that we already know, the information content of the message is also zero; or c) if we can decode the message and it tells us something new, the information content of the message is greater than zero. How greater than zero the information content will be depends on "how new is news", in other words, how probable is the occurrence of the event announced in the message. For instance, if we receive the following messages: "a dog bit a man on the leg" and "a man bit a dog on the leg". Which message do you think contains more information? If you say the first one, you’re wrong! The second message contains more information because it refers to a situation more improbable or unlikely to occur, unless you are in a restaurant, in which case the result should be inverted. Can you see any reference to microchips, PC’s, or technology in this definition? Certainly not! On the other hand, the definition establishes that a message contains information only if it conveys new data with respect to the receptor. Then we can generalize that information is much closer to "news" rather than technology, which, coincidentally, is what our common sense suggests.
But our common sense also suggests that technology play an important role in the communication process. How does technology affect this? The fundamental problem of communication is to transmit a message from A to B without distortion (noise) otherwise the information content is destroyed. Here is where technology plays its role. It is a quantitative element in the communication equation. Better technology implies wider bandwidth (more messages per channel, less distortion, more speed), but it doesn’t affect the information content of a message. There is a famous adage in the systems community - rubbish in, rubbish out. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated our system is, if we enter rubbish in we’ll get rubbish out. There is no doubt that the new technologies substantially increased the efficiency of communication systems via a shift in coding techniques from analog to digital. This evolution was only possible using the new electronic paraphernalia, allowing machines to communicate much more efficiently in order to perform their tasks faster and quicker and to, note the linguistic recursion, build more efficient machines. Building better machines to build better machines seams a silly circular game of words. Nevertheless it is a key concept of the Systems Theory called Feedback, widely and wildly used in the Information Revolution.
Feedback means recursion. It implies the existence of a bi-directional relationship between components of a system. This concept was borrowed from Control Theory initially developed by Nyquist and Hazen in the 1930’s to analyze stability issues in servomechanisms. In general, feedback denotes reciprocal or mutual influence between system elements. This influence can propagate instantaneously or it can suffer delays. The primary consequence of feedback is that an action is both cause and effect. We’ll see that in social systems this fact obscures the ethical issue of responsibility .
Most of us have been chilled or burned under the shower trying to regulate the temperature. Well, the system defined by man, tap / shower, man – note the recursion - has noticeably, and sometimes painful, delays. The variable of control is water temperature. A man acts upon the faucet, this action increases or decreases the flow of hot or cold water, the man measures the temperature with his skin, if he is not happy (and not calling the ambulance), he will act upon the faucet again until the water temperature reaches an acceptable level. There are two ways to control this process, the quick and painless and the long and painful. I’m sure you would prefer the first one. The catch is that you have to understand how delays work in feedback systems in order to use it. Firstly you have to act in the faucet on small steps. Then you have to wait long enough until you perceive a stabilized change of temperature, and then you decide to act again or to stop. On the other hand, if you act roughly, making significant changes in the position of the tap or you don’t wait until the temperature stabilizes before you act again, most probably the system will start oscillating without control between hot and cold temperatures.
Above graph describes a story or a process and an important moral, if the driver doesn’t take into account the delay between the action of pressing the accelerator and the effective acceleration of the car it is very likely that the car will start oscillating, jerking around the desired speed. It will not only take longer to reach the desired velocity but he will be exposed to the risk of stall the car if he is running at a low speed or a crash if it happens at high speed. We will later see that social systems are characterized by long delays that can be skillfully utilized in order to manipulate them.
This is a balancing process since the driver is attempting to reach a set speed and maintain it. The forces at work tend to compensate each other working in opposite directions. In a reinforcing process, the forces at work, both the ones we see and control, and other forces even hidden to us are moving the system in the same direction, therefore we perceive an amplification of our actions.
The old Greeks use to describe fantastic events (special effects we would call them today) in the theater as “deus ex machina”, a god coming out of a machine, mysteriously. Of course the mechanisms performing that feast were hidden to the audience. At that old times, as it is the same today, it mesmerized the audience due to its unexpected results, apparent contrary to the laws of physics and common sense. The reason was the fact that there were hidden actions taking effect at that very moment.
Therefore, the forces opposing or amplifying movements in certain directions can be very well hidden, in fact when a system behaves erratically or unpredictably it is more likely that those forces are at work, and the task of the analyst is to find them, make them explicit in order to gain control of the system.
A god example is a gyroscope, a gadget we all played when we were kids, amazingly it moves in a perpendicular direction of the applied force always surprising us. Little kids cannot believe that a bicycle can stand very solidly on only two wheels if it is in movement, they slow down and fall when they are learning. Counter-intuitiveness is other characteristic of the feedback systems. Feed back processes are mysterious, surprising and extremely powerful for the ones that understand how they work, and this applies in physics and also in social engineering.
The reverse is also true, systems that behave strangely are likely to be controlled by hidden reinforcing forces. The more we push in one direction the more the system moves in another as when we try to stick to magnets of the same polarity together. The moral is that we need to start looking for hidden feedback forces we experiment this situations. Note that thee key is that they need to be hidden, otherwise it would no be surprising. A car flying is a surprise unless we see a crane holding it.
A modern TV program dear to my kids (2009) is a good example.
Apparently (I did not see the program myself) it risks 400,000 USD Ferraris performing stunts, but someone discovered that underneath the cosmetics they are in fact 50,000 USD Toyotas, an innocent lie to save costs and to manage risk, but in the media there are other not so innocent but even more deceiving stunts in place.
TV programs and other social systems are littered with hidden balancing processes and the trick is to identify them, but that chase have a wonderful reward, since there is another important characteristic of the feedback systems, there are very easy and cheaply controlled acting upon the right hidden variables thanks to the magic of leverage.
Using a mechanical analogy, when you push a car accelerator with your foot you are commanding the power of one hundred horses. Of course you know how to unleash all this power in a controlled manner due to the fact that the car was designed to expose the accelerator as the main speed control variable. In the same way a system can be designed to hide and dissimulate the key levers like child proof doors or hunting traps. Again, mechanical systems are relatively easy to understand in comparison to social ones. For instance, an astrologer might predict the winning horses if he knows in advance that the race was ‘fixed’. The same happens in the finance industry and the naïve laws penalizing inside trading.
So far we were analyzing balancing processes, feedback systems in which the parallelogram of forces work towards a set (could be arbitrary or deliberate) state or mark, like a jockey holding the reins of an over exited horse.
Now we will discuss feedback systems that produce growth, even the kind of growth that can easily wreak the whole system, perhaps the climate changes we are experimenting in 2009, more likely as a result of two centuries of industrial revolution. In a similar way that the French Revolution degenerated in terror, the industrial revolution might have degenerated in climate change, wars and oppression.
The best known example of a reinforcing process is the snow-ball effect. Once in movement it pursues invariably to its destruction. Nevertheless must qualify the word ‘destruction’ since it is not entirely correct. The system evolves irresistibly in one direction until other powerful balancing forces stop it, often with the destruction of the process itself. A snow-ball will stop either by running out of snow to swallow, the presence of a hill, or crashing against a wall. Social systems suffer the same fate, empires collapse, fade, disappear.
An interesting example is USA Today 2009. USA run a colossal deficit thanks to the leverage of the petrodollar. Debts denominated in USD, meaning that can be served easily just by printing money, combined with the artificial demand for USD due to the not innocent fact that nearly all contracts are denominated in USD gave the impression to irresponsible people that money can be printed, there was an infinite amount of credit at absolute no cost thanks to the detachment of the USD from gold by Nixon. The snow-ball started its run downhill up to the point in which it was opposed by even more powerful balancing forces, the trade deficit. Trade deficit started slowing down the huge ball of snow, and the sub prime mortgages affair was an impassable barrier for the all powerful greenback. The trade deficit was the boundary process that destroyed the greenback snowball.
The next step is to analyze the relationship between the USD and the military budget which in turn supports the USD, a fascinating feedback system with unpredictable results at this stage.
The problem is that we are trained to think linearly, it is common the usual illogical question posed to primary students: ‘if one apple cost $ 1, how much 2 apples will cost?’. A stupid question I could never understand ! The second apple could be free, more expensive or discounted. It depends of the marketing strategy of the man who sells the apple. This type of answer, as you may imagine, is not rewarded at school. Invariably the ‘right’ answer to this nonsensical question is 2. Why ? We do not know. The important aspect is that with this types of questions we are programmed to think linearly. Without been my intention to be pedantic, the correct question would be: ‘ assuming that the man selling the apples follows a linear marketing strategy, and one apple costs $ 1, how much 2 apples will cost ? The fact that the linear assumption is hidden, we are encouraged to think that it is the only and correct strategy. When we found in high school that most systems in physics follow quadratic, not linear distributions it sounds really weird. This is a very strange world ! No, we have a very strange way to teach our children.
This is probably one of the reasons that we think, in the very first instance wrong, we expect a linear behavior and we find something completely different. When we have a problem we invariably attempt to act upon the most ineffective forces, in the best case, or we achieve the opposite effect we expected.
To non-systemic trained minds the obvious place to act upon is the main reinforcing process. Systems theory shows that actions applied on the reinforcing process are the less effective in terms of leverage . For instance, in a bank run, if the manager decides to close the bank for a while, he will have many more people waiting at the door when the bank is due to open. Inadvertently, he is acting upon the main reinforcing process because it is the most obvious but it is the most inefficient in terms of leverage. To stop the bank run it is necessary to identify and act upon the balancing processes that have high leverage: public image; cash availability; and many others. Certainly the solution, if one exists, will be counter-intuitive. What is true is that any action taken on the main reinforcing process will produce a temporary relief for a short period of time but then the problem will require more medicine, which in turn will provide less relief. It is also true that at some stage it may not be possible to save the bank and the system will be controlled by one of its boundary balancing process, bankruptcy.
The following graph describes a typical reinforcing process:
This graph tells us the story of a social system in which the aim is to increase profit (growth is the euphemistical term used to add a sort of respectability). The media promotes gambling circumventing the lows limiting it by disguising them as sports.
Invariably, in the sports section trailing the footy there are some pages easily discernible by their tiny caps, the TAB, for the punters.
Everyone knows that is gambling except the editors of the papers (very naïve indeed).
This mix of information with advertising will generate revenues part of which are re-injected in the process in order to generate more of profit.
The process will continue until it reaches a boundary condition to stop it. Since financial and economic difficulties are said to be catalysts for gambling, the boundary condition would be the collapse of the society that legalizes these activities, or the appearance of limiting forces such as taxing (government intervention) or even prohibition.
In the previous paragraphs we described two types of feedback processes, balancing and a reinforcing. We also showed that this analysis is applicable to both physical and social systems, and, contrary to general belief, feedback systems are much more common in nature that open lineal relationships.
We will see that this fact is used by the entertainers to disguise the strings pulling the hidden feedback variables commanding the output of the systems they design.
The advantage for US, the rest of the mortals, is that understanding how the system works we will be able to avoid making crucial mistakes (such as buying toxic assets in the NYSE) or even increasing our capital buying real money, and by real money I mean an object capable to store and preserve value, not painted paper which is no more than a title of doubtful value against someone’s debt.
We are All Frogs
Systems analysts noted the difficulty of understanding slow motion processes and the effect of delays in feedback systems. Slow motion processes, with respect to human time frames, are difficult to identify. We can be standing for hours or even weeks on top of a glacier without noticing that it is an iced river, because the glacier’s time frame is enormous when compared with man’s time frame. From our perspective the glacier is motionless. The fact that we don’t notice changes doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. The scars left on the face of the mountain reflect the power of the glacier. If we take distance and we mentally fast forward the process we can understand it, but this analysis implies knowledge of feedback processes. Fashion, for example in clothing, is a human controlled slow motion process. Just take distance and think of the way we dressed two, ten, and twenty years ago. This process works on a season time frame, which is fast enough to notice. Let’s think now about our faith and moral principles. Do they change? Considered individually, probably they don’t change, but on a statistical basis there is a change. Think of the "public opinion" about abortion in a Western Christian country in 1998. This is also a human controlled process but it works on a generational time frame. Few people notice it, but like the glacier it will leave a big scare on the face of our society, and we won’t be there, our children will be.
It is time to examine the experiment of the frog. First of all, I would like to state that this is an imaginary experiment, like the experiments in which quantum physicists indulged by playing with hypothetical particles to prove or refute things like the Schroedinger’s cat’s paradox. If you want to cook a frog and you throw it in a pan full of boiling water the subject of the experiment will instantly jump out of it. But if you put the frog into the pan when the water is cold and slowly start heating it up, the subject of the experiment will stay happily there until the water reaches an uncomfortably hot temperature (in frog terms). At this stage it won’t have enough energy to jump out of the water and the frog will be cooked. Why did the frog stay put in the pan to die? The answer is that the frog didn’t know that it was going to die. Its threat perception is adapted to sudden changes in the environment. A gradual heating was not perceived as a threat until it was too late . Social systems have time frames that can be measured in human generations. The individual doesn’t perceive the changes until it is too late to reverse them or he dies. Fustel de Coulanges in his excellent book The Ancient City discusses some revolutions in the history of man that occurred without leaving any documentation, or being registered by historians. Further more, these revolutions were undetected by the generations that suffered them because they occurred slowly and insensibly, without manifest fights. They were deep and hidden revolutions stirring the bottom of human society without ever surfacing. Only by comparing two different epochs of the life of a civilization can one recognize enormous differences between them. These differences can only be explained by the existence of a vast revolution in between epochs.
The Information Revolution is a process that works on a decade-by-decade time frame . It is changing our social environment drastically but at a relatively slow pace. Its influence is also masked by the fact that society always changes. Without applying systemic concepts it is very difficult to differentiate between "natural" and induced changes produced by actions applied on balancing processes. Where feedback systems are involved it is very difficult to identify causes and an effects. Partly due to systemic delays, partly due to the fact that cause and effect are often separated in time and space, and partly due to the intrinsic definition of feedback, a mutual influence between components. The systemic approach is incomplete in the sense that it doesn’t include human will. The will of the components certainly includes an ethical issue, establishing a causality relationship between events. In the example of the car, there is no doubt that the man is t he cause of the car moving because he is the only component with will, and he is the one who chooses the speed. Nevertheless, when the car is in motion the man will be "controlled" by the difference between the actual and the desired speed making it irrelevant, from the systemic perspective, to define what is the cause and what is the effect. When there is more than one human component this problem becomes more complicated. One of the purposes of this essay is to examine social systems designed to obscure the issue of intention and responsibility, with the aid of this characteristic of feedback processes. Only organizations with trans-generation experience are able to handle these sorts of problems . Fortunately, knowledge of systems theory will allow us to identify them. The problem is still more complicated; we tend to see systems as something that exists outside us. Even if we are analyzing social systems that include us, we tend to think that we don’t participate in them. In fact we are components of the social system and our actions may in some way affect the output. Depending on where our actions are applied, the outcome can be microscopic or vast due to the effect of leverage.
Civilization Spoils People
Evidently the world society is suffering extreme changes over a short period of time and technology plays an important part in this process. The question is whether these changes are mainly caused by the rapid evolution of technology or whether these changes are product of the action of complex reinforcing – balancing processes where it is very difficult, if not impossible, to define a clear lineal relationship between cause and effect. If the second proposition is true then you may think that it is pointless to analyze these phenomena, as in the futile attempt to determine the precedence of the chicken over the egg. This is where modern analysis techniques came to the rescue. In a feedback system where the output is "connected" to the input like a snake biting its tail, it is of no use to define a start (cause), nor an end (effect). Nevertheless, this fact doesn’t stop poultry producers making a profit by effectively controlling the system "egg-chicken-egg thanks to the action of "balancing feedback" processes.
In nature, feedback (circular) systems are much more common than the ones that can be reduced to a cause – effect (lineal) model. Social systems are much better understood when analyzed as feedback systems. There is no point in defining cause and effect relationships in order to understand them. Identifying the balancing processes that produce leverage or limit growth are the key issues. I will use an example of a social feedback system in order to familiarize you with systems analysis techniques.
"Civilization spoils people," Rousseau said. As we are trained to think linearly, we automatically perceive in this assertion a cause, civilization spoils, and an effect, people are spoiled. In the back of our minds we reconstruct the statement "people are the victim of civilization". The structure of the English language, noun – verb – noun, conditions us to perceive nature in straight lines instead of curves. In fact most western languages follow the same pattern. The following graph describes the lineal (cause – effect) analysis suggested by language.
This graphic describes how an oversimplification due to the linealization of the system, suggests a cause-effect relationship.
It is evident that Rousseau’s statement is tautological. If civilization is made by people and civilization spoils people, it follows that people spoil civilization. Note the difficulty we encounter when trying to identify a starting point for the analysis. This is a clear indication that it is a non-linear system that requires a systemic approach to its analysis. In this particular case the feedback component is obvious, but in complex systems it is not. This is the reason that it is useful to draw a graph in order to put in evidence the system’s components and interactions. The main reinforcing process is composed of two actions, "people spoiling" and "civilization spoiling" affecting the variable "level of corruption".
The following graph describes the main reinforcing process of Rousseau’s system:
This graph describes a "story". It tells us that civilization and people are spoiling each other, and that there are no limits – balancing processes – to slow down this process. Systems theory forecasts that the system would soon reach its boundary balancing processes, as in the example of nuclear fission. The logical outcome is that every single person will be corrupted, and in that case it is difficult to think of existence in any sort of civilization. By "absurd reduction" we conclude that there is something wrong with the theory as it stands. The common sense, general observation, and the science of history, prove that that the world didn’t follow a lineal invariable path from good to bad, in fact there were ups and downs. This indicates that there are other processes limiting the reinforcing process. These balancing processes interact with the main reinforcing process producing either leverage – amplifying the growth of the variable, or limiting its growth.
In this particular example it is obvious that there are limiting balancing processes "breaking" the system and producing the evident "oscillation" on the average people’s corruption level along the life of a civilization. It is also true that civilizations dissolve and disappear, meaning that other balancing processes offset these natural limits, accelerating the process to its destruction or dissolution. Identifying the main reinforcing process, the balancing processes, the actions, and variables involved in a system is not an easy task, but the ones who can achieve this will gain the ability to control the system, applying relatively little force thanks to the "magic" of leverage.
The following graph depicts the main reinforcing process balanced by two processes. Note on the right side of the graph is a balancing process that limits the growth of the variable, and on the left a balancing process that leverages – amplifies – it.
It is not the purpose of this paper to solve the problem raised by Rousseau’s statement. Please note that this analysis is just an example of the use of system analysis techniques as applied to social systems. Nevertheless, it is good practice to analyze and discuss the "story" identified by this graph.
The "Butterfly Effect"
Reinforcing and balancing processes explain how very small actions in magnitude can cause huge consequences. The most famous example in modern literature is the "butterfly effect", mostly invariably used as an introduction to chaos and fractal theories. The butterfly effect postulates that the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon could be the cause of a huge storm in Asia four months later, due to the interaction of meteorological reinforcing and balancing processes. Despite my lack of knowledge in meteorology and entomology I think this is an exaggeration. Nevertheless I cite this example for two reasons. Firstly, despite its obvious inaccuracy, it graphically describes the power of balancing feedback processes. Secondly, this example is an excellent example - note the literary feedback - of how the notion of science is stretched and expanded in order to fit spurious agendas with the excuse of promoting "popular science".
The first question that comes to my mind is what would happen if an enormous butterfly produced very strong beats of its wings? Could this produce a world scale storm capable of destroying civilization? Again, Systems Theory comes to the rescue. Every reinforcing (amplifying) process creates a series of effects, some of them affecting the balancing process which, in turn, will slow down the whole system.
Every system has one or more balancing processes. This is not the same as to say that identifying the system balancing processes is an easy task. On the other hand, sometimes systems can be successfully "linearised", as Newton proved with his gravitational theory. He was, however, very aware of the oversimplification of the problem and he certainly knew that nature was "curved". This is probably the reason he regarded alchemy as a nobler discipline than physics.
Systems theory seams to be the discipline that generates better practical results when dealing with complex, non-lineal problems. The question is how to determine when the older, simpler, reliable methodology works and when a systemic approach is required. The systemic approach requires the identification of structures and relationships instead of components, and the analysis of dynamic processes rather than static "photos" of the system under study. This approach is much more expensive in terms of the effort involved in its application.
The question is how do we know when it is necessary to apply a systemic analysis or when the traditional one will suffice. We must have a demarcation criterion to determine which is the more appropriate method to utilize. A clear sign of the need of a systemic approach in the analysis of a system is when we get "strange" or unpredictable responses from it. This is a typical sign telling us that the traditional lineal approach is not the right tool to understand the system. Another sign is when it doesn’t matter how hard we push in one direction, we are stuck in the same place, we go in another direction, or we even retrocede. Obviously we are applying the action in the "wrong" place, but this fact is not evident on the lineal model we are using. In these circumstances, by performing a systemic analysis of the system, will find that we are acting on the reinforcing process of the system, and secondary effects acting on the balancing loops grow in a higher proportion to counteract our action. For instance, if the number of religious vocations in the Western World is declining, when we try to "push" harder in order to obtain more vocations our action will be branded as "fundamentalist" by the media, with a leveraged effect on the reinforcing loop, public perception, that not only counteracts our effort but will overcome it. The Judo wrestler implicitly knows that he acts on the balancing loop. He applies very little force which is leveraged – amplified - by the feedback system, allowing him to defeat his adversary by using his own power.
Note that the concept of leverage is not constrained to the physical world. It works incredibly well with abstract concepts. An "entrepreneur" investing borrowed funds, providing that all goes well, can make handsome profits safely returning the money, plus interest, in a process called "financial leverage". Mr. Nick Leason from Bearing Investment Bank can testify what happens when things don’t go so well, and the forces of feedback work in the opposite direction to that intended. This is the reason why extremely powerful and complex systems - societies and countries - can be controlled (manipulated) by a few people who have the systemic "know-how" and the right tools to exploit the magic of leverage. The draw back, as Leason perfectly knows, is that to keep all balls in the air simultaneously requires a constant hold on the levers of the balancing systems involved. Later we will understand why television and film producers have to add violence to their products, despite the fact that every one, including themselves, knows that violence is utterly negative in social terms, and noxious to children and less educated people.
But our topic is Information. Does feedback apply to Information? Yes, and incredibly well. If we consider that Information is the "amount" of "news" contained in a message, we will fully understand its real power and how this power is leveraged using feedback techniques.
The current spontaneous, or induced, confusion about the meaning and implications of information in our society is a clear indicator that systemic analysis is the best method we have at the end of the 20th century to better understand complex systems such as the Information Revolution. However, historical analysis is a traditional methodology that renders excellent results when it is correctly used. Somebody said that the one who controls the present owns the past and inherits the future. This is partially true in the sense that the ones who control the present pretend to rewrite the story in order to obtain the legitimacy and moral rights required to justify the present power. The systematic destruction of history as an objective science, and the reduction of the capacity of the individual to understand and utilize it to form valid conclusions, are capital characteristics of the Information Revolution.
I have already proved that information is more related to news rather than PC’s and microchips. Following this reasoning, in the next section I will summarize the history of the news in Europe during the last century. This decision is justified by the fact that the Information Revolution, as we know it now, is a product of European civilization. In later sections I’ll expose the reasons why I’ve chosen the 19th century as the starting point for the so-called Information Revolution. Nevertheless, the criterion adopted is in some way arbitrary. The Information Revolution when viewed as a system is like a living organism, it didn’t spontaneously appear last century in Europe, but is more likely the result of forces that existed since the appearance of human beings on earth. The Information Revolution didn’t develop earlier because technology was not mature enough, which is not the same as to propose that technology triggered the Information Revolution.
The Old Dirty Trick of Leaking News to the Press
When The Times finally accepted Reuter’s offer, his agency was distributing news to nearly all other British Empire newspapers and numerous continental, Russian, American (North and South) and Asian newspapers. In 1859, Reuter managed to convince the French government to hand him in advance a speech of Napoleon III, in which there was a virtual war declaration on Austria, in order to be distributed in "real time". Real time meant that Reuters distributed a translated copy of the speech to its subscribers worldwide, while Napoleon III was effectively reading it in Paris. This achievement is only comparable with the transmission by CNN of the gulf war from Tel Aviv and Baghdad. Despite the impressive triumph here is where the "Free Press" dies. Napoleon III and Reuter certainly knew that they were distributing propaganda instead of news.
Years later, when the tension between Prussia and France was at its peak, Reuter sent a letter to Bismarck offering the services of his agency, assuring him that the French news would be suppressed due to being considered unreliable by his agency. Obviously Bismarck couldn’t miss the opportunity and accepted the deal. Bismarck secretly desired the war with France, but he didn’t wanted to appear to the "public opinion" as the initiator of the conflict. He pulled out a little trick that shows the real power of the news and how they are manipulated. In 1870, Prussia and other German states were ready for war in order to obtain their unification and France represented the main obstacle to this project. The opportunity came when Napoleon III demanded that the Prussian king William I renounce his family rights of succession to the vacant Spanish crown. Bismarck "leaked" to the press a telegram to Napoleon III (the Elms Dispatch) rebuffing his absurd claim. The French public o pinion was outraged by the terms of the telegram and claimed for war. Napoleon gave them the war "they wanted". In a short campaign (Metz and Sedan), Prussia and her allies won the war leaving the way clear for German unification.
This proves that Reuter and Bismarck implicitly knew that the feedback concept complicates the ethical issue of responsibility, and how to take advantage of it. The news reflects facts but the facts, in turn, produce news obscuring the moral issue of responsibility. This is the reason that this methodology is often employed by people, or groups of people wanting to trigger events by remaining in anonymity, or in the worst case, allowing them to successfully argue their initial responsibility.
After this event the world would not be the same. The
incredible fact was that slightly twisted news could modify the map of Europe.
Bismarck, mastering a modern media propaganda technique called
"cueing", changed just the tone and not the facts of William’s I
written account of his interview with the French ambassador.
The real dangers are not the lies but only the half-truths
.
A Bit of History and the "Combination Ring"
When Julius Reuter started his news agency in London around 1850 and offered his telegraphic news service to The Times, the so called Information Revolution started, initially slowly like a train departing from a station, but with the powerful forces of leverage strongly pushing ahead. Reuter’s original idea, in all senses of the word, was to become a news mediator between telegraph companies and newspapers, in other words, a news retailer.
To fully understand the scope of his strategy it is necessary to recall the state of affairs in mid 19th century Europe. The old continent was at the peak of the "Telegraphic Revolution". Technologically, telegraph companies were entangled in a ferocious competition to integrate the whole world in an electric network similar to the contemporary battles of Internet service providers and browsers. Politically the map of Europe was completely different to the one we know in the late 20th century. Italy and Germany didn’t exist, they were a myriad of small states struggling to achieve their political unification. China, defeated in the Opium wars, was forced to confer Hong Kong to the British and in successive wars to open more ports to foreign countries. Japan, during the Meiji dynasty, opened itself to the international market and started behaving like a European power. The Turkish Empire was receding leaving a vacuum and the germ of religious wars in the Balkans. In 184 8 Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, and the Russian czar was oscillating between an internal conservative policy in order to maintain the "status quo" and an aggressive external one in order to win chunks of Poland and the Dardanelles strait. Great Britain was ready to go to war against Russia in order to avoid this. In summary, Europe was burning under the fire of Bismarck’s "Realpolitik" and the German Romanticist movement.
A successful marketer should view every problem as an opportunity, Reuter was a superb one despite the fact he didn’t have the opportunity to read any modern management books. Initially, Reuter tried to set-up an international news agency, without success, in his native country Germany. When the telegraph networks began to cover most of the European geography Reuter recognized the opportunity. Due to geographical and political restrictions, the main telegraph networks were isolated. Reuter’s tactic was to identify and "fill" the gaps between networks transferring news via trained pigeons, messengers, riders or by any means considered necessary. At this stage of his career it would appear that, like modern futurologists, he understood that the Information Revolution was a technological one. But he didn’t fall into the trap. He certainly knew that in the long run the telegraph networks would be integrated worldwide, and the mediator role would disappear. Most importantly, Reuter knew that the key to commanding the Information Revolution was not technology , it was the distribution of information . Reuter believed that, in the same way he could transfer telegrams (news) between two telegraph companies, he could become a "retailer of news" and distribute them to newspapers and journals.
When Reuter initially offered this service in Great Britain, the most important newspapers rejected it. Reuter then sold the news at a discount price to small newspapers, with the condition of quoting the name "Reuters" on the news itself. Does this sound familiar ? With this strategy in mind, intuitively though, Reuter applied feedback to gain leverage for the first time in the history of the Information Revolution , all this was conceived before De Bono’s lateral thinking techniques were published, and the existence of sophisticated advertising and public relations companies.
Returning to Reuter, that was not all, it was just the beginning. In 1870, he and two other international colleagues Havas and Wolff, based in France and Prussia respectively, formed an international monopoly secretly called "the ring combination", as a virtual defensive and offensive alliance against other news agencies. In 1909, these three agencies virtually controlled the distribution of news to the whole world (The power of news the history of Reuters, Donald Read, Oxford University Press 1992).
Free Press or Imperial Institution ?
In 1870 despite Reuter’s affairs "favoring" France and Germany alternatively and its German name, Reuters (the agency) was considered a virtual Imperial British institution. The reason for this according to Donald Read in his book "The Power of News the History of Reuters" was two things: a) Reuter always assumed the British cause to be "right"; and b) he sometimes suppressed very uncomfortable news. There is a difference between uncomfortable and very uncomfortable news. For instance, during the Boer’s War, even the first unsuccessful battles were reported accurately, but the fact that British factories sold ammunition to the enemy during the war was suppressed following a request by the British government. This is the practical difference between uncomfortable and very uncomfortable news, the commercial advantages of certain companies. By using combinatory analysis I would include a third reason: c) adding non-existent facts to the news, or plainly, inventing news. /P
Reuter’s systemic, or holistic (in New Age jargon), view of the news business couldn’t miss the strong relationship between information and entertainment . News regarding science, literature, and religion were frequently distributed by Reuters. Donald Read states that Reuter felt it was worthwhile to announce to the whole world that Victor Hugo’s play "Les Miserables" was selling well in Portugal despite the fact that the play was forbidden by the Catholic Church. This proves that Reuter was well aware of the interaction between art, religion, and politics. Matter of fact, one of his closest collaborators and friend, Sigismund Englander, was accused of being involved in British local politics as a leftist supporter, and of befriending a Prussian ex-army officer. When Englander was posted in Constantinople reporting on the Crimean war, he was simultaneously receiving a high salary from the British Embassy. Reader suggests that he was supplying the British E mbassy with valuable military and political intelligence. Englander even contacted a "very biddable" high Turkish official who "used to leak official documents". In order to avoid censorship he managed to send messengers through the borders or to transmit them using a code. In 1877 a "Political Code", including a French version, was developed for use by Reuter’s correspondents. "The Past Never Dies".
Reuters was a private company and the British government was a client, in particular the India’s Viceroy. However, in this strictly commercial relationship, the fees for the service were labeled in the contracts as subsidies. After 1870, the word subsidy disappears from the contracts but he colonial government in India was, still, the most profitable client of Reuters. Coincidentally, at the same time Reuter was negotiating with his partners-competitors Havas and Wolff the secret pact called "the ring combination". (The power of news the history of Reuters, Donald Read, Oxford University Press 1992). During the negotiations Reuter claimed "foul" complaining about the "official" support his competitors had obtained in their respective countries.
The West…The West of What ?
According to Shannon’s definition, information is a reduction of uncertainty. It is clear that the means by which we transmit and receive information are irrelevant to the information content itself. Imagine that we visit a web site containing the following message "President Kennedy was assassinated". This message contains no information to people who already know that President Kennedy was murdered. The use of the latest technology to convey the message is merely instrumental. Conversely, a message containing information about the motivations or identities of the people who committed or instigated the murder, could contain much more information, regardless of the transmission method or technology employed (Internet or smoke signals).
At this stage we have to agree that information is an abstract concept, more closely related to Reuter and CNN rather than Microsoft and IBM. Under this concept, information is leveraged using feedback techniques. The analysis of the impact of the Internet on the society, the use of microchips in molecular biology, and microprocessors driving intelligent bombs to their targets, will not help us to understand why and how our society is changing , and more importantly, how this process will affect our children when they become adults (systemic effect of delay).
In a democratic society we theoretically have our own say in the way we want to raise and educate our children, but due to the effects of the Information Revolution this right has became merely theoretical . The virtual effect of the Information Revolution is to render democracy obsolete, but the first victim is religion. One distinctive characteristic of the Information Revolution in the 90’s is the overt attack on the main Western ecumenical religions, Christianity and Islam, by the Western* media. Note the asterisk appended to the word Western. Its purpose is to denote the "new" meaning of the term. Since only one truth is possible, but many lies can live together, confusion is another characteristic of the Information Revolution. A very effective way to create confusion is to change the conventional meaning of words. Historically, the concept "Western Civilization" includes Islam, unless you remove Spain and Portugal from the equation. There are soc ial, historical, political, philosophical, and scientific, reasons that justify the inclusion. But the way the media use the term "Western" clearly excludes Islamic societies, as we will later see. If the world power equation changes, a "new" meaning will be defined to suit the latest strategic needs of media owners.
During the first part of the Information Revolution until the 1990’s, media attacks on religious beliefs were more or less concealed. The attacks were usually attributed to somebody else, such as artists, scientists, politicians, and a new category of personalities called "stars". At this stage of the Information Revolution process, the media usually took sides against them in the name of moral principles. Simultaneously, when exercising the sacred duty to inform the public, they make sure to convey their message carefully and as broadly as possible, reinforcing (in psychological terms) their "intelligent but controversial" attitude. Multiple appearances on media channels "ensure the right of the people to be informed". The media, like St. George’s dragon, is one monster with many heads. There are many tactics but only one aim. It can support contradictory positions simultaneously, as long as the resultant of the force points to the right direction, materialism.
As we later see, this approach changed drastically at the start of the 90’s, the media attack become vicious and direct.
Imagine that following a long trip on a spacecraft launched to study a far planet we are entering its orbit. During the voyage we have observed, with increasing detail, mountains, valleys, and empty seas. We have described and speculated the properties of these. Now it is time to descend and make contact with the planet and analyze the physical and chemical properties of its soil and atmosphere in order to determine its nature. This shining planet, generally know as media, can be seen by everyone in the sky, but not everyone knows its real nature. Some astrologers know part of its secret, but they greedily reserve their knowledge for their own benefit. At the same time, through a feedback process, they contribute to increase the planet’s shine obscuring, even more, its nature in order to protect their advantage. The majority of people, however, are too busy working to earn the money necessary to satisfy their real and induced material needs, leaving their kids in the h ands of the astrologers.
Let’s examine an example of an information astrologer in action. Helen Demidenko, a Ukrainian writer who described in her novel "The Hand that Signed the Paper" , her family involvement with the Nazis during the Second World War. During 1995, Helen won multiple literary prizes. The media loved the writer and her novel. She represented everything the Western* media promotes: youth (yes, stupid as it sounds); woman’s liberation; a minority social group (the daughter of immigrants); and enough courage to publicly confess the sins and shames of her family. Demidenko represented the prototype of a "star". The Western* media is not very exigent in terms of artistic quality, so I will ignore this aspect. They couldn’t miss the opportunity to promote this "star". Nevertheless, a warning light should have alerted them: everything was too good to be true! . It didn’t, so "they went for it"! Demidenko appeared "hundreds" of times in the whole combination of media channels. Every available Australian literary award at the time was granted. Then came the debacle! The entertainers, the owners of the media, fell tumbling from the Babel tower they had constructed. The Ukrainian community, deeply outraged by the lies written in the novel, found that the real name of Helen Demidenko was Helen Darville, her parents weren’t Ukrainian but English, and the whole novel was invented. The insistence of the Ukrainian community to inform public opinion put the entertainers in "damage control mode". Despite Darville’s claim that it was a fictional novel, such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (to choose one at "random") they found that due to metempsychosis or plagiarism, it was, nevertheless, "based" on a true story... Despite the media "un-covering", it was a huge embarrassment. The same enthusiasm of the Western* media in support of Rushdie and his "fictional" novel was put forward against Helen Darville.
Still in 1998, three years later, the media doesn’t forgive. The chairwoman of a judging panel who conferred an award to Darville complains about the low coverage the media gave to the 1997 awards ceremony. She attributes it to Demidenko’s "kerfuffle". Unbelievably, this lady, despite her high position, doesn’t understand the concept of the Information Revolution and how it works.
We are entering into the realms of a major component of the Information Revolution, the Western* media. The dictionary says that media is the plural of medium, and medium is an intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried. How this intervening substance relates to the Information Revolution is the matter of discussion in the following sections. Suffice to say at this stage that an intervening substance is something that lacks purpose, it is merely a support for something else. We will see that the media, in the Information Revolution context, is something quite different to a passive, inert, entity. In fact it is the opposite.
Media, the Plural of Medium
It is time to define the concept of media in the context of the Information Revolution: Media is the combination of means of communication designed to transmit INFORMATION , ENTERTAINMENT , and ADVERTISING .
The model for the media was the written language invented, probably, more than ten thousand years ago. In the 15th century, with the invention of printing, the author of a book could communicate with multiple individuals on a scale previously unknown. Not until the 19th century, with the advent of journals and newspapers, was a duplex (bi-directional) continuous communication established between authors and readers. Still, there was a limitation, the significant numbers of illiterate people. Other media components such as photography, painting, music, theater, and, not everyone will agree, sports don’t have this restriction. Plays, concerts, and sports have an extra psychological advantage over the other components, they are a communal experience. This characteristic would be inherited and exploited extensively with propagandist purposes by the early 20th century "star", the cinema. Radio, audio records, TV, video, telephone, and the Internet complete the list of components of the information system at the end of the 20th century.
With the advent of film and TV two things became evident. Firstly, that media was an ideal way to record history. Secondly, and most important, the capacity of the media to generate its own version of reality or even worse, to create its own "reality". These two characteristics made the media an exceptionally powerful socializing force. Combined with public relation companies the media generalized the "generation of an image for a product" concept to the generation of images for companies, individuals, ideas, countries, religions, racial groups, social groups, cultures, historical periods, historical events and every aspect of social life we can imagine.
Despite of the emergence of universities, Dante, and Gothic architecture, it is a common known fact, in the Christian world, that the middle age was the most obscure and "evil" period of the history of Europe, best summarized, for the people with short memory, with the slogan or "frame" (see …..) "the dark ages". It is also well known (1998) the wicked influence of a climatic process named "El niño" (Spanish phrase referring to Jesus Christ) responsible for every catastrophe occurred in the Pacific rim. A TV advertisement (Australia February 1998) for a "cultural" program hammered the following slogan several times per day: "Islam the religion of hatred?" proving that the bad image is not restricted to Christianity. Note the interrogation sign. It works like small letters in insurance contracts, as a tool for lawyers in case they are sued.
The first part of the media's definition refers to the combination of means of communication. The word combination can denote two things, an arbitrary juxtaposition of different technological means of communication; or an "organized" combination (see: "A Bit of History and the Combination Ring" in this book) between various means of communication. We tend to adopt the first interpretation because we think, and the media reinforce it, that media components are economic competitors, then it is difficult to think in a global understanding. Nevertheless this reasoning fails to recognize the fact that there is an understanding at a non-economic level as I will demonstrate later in this article. With this initial "confusion" the myth of the Western* "free press" begins.
Unequivocally, in the Western* world, different media components work in combination, in order to give an impression of the existence of a broad opinion on specific issues. Disparate sources hired with the same money agree that the best way to "avoid racial cleansing" in Kosovo is to bomb and kill indiscriminately Serbs and Albanians (1999). There were no Western* media components willing to inform objectively about the conflict. The Western* media, utilizing a curious effect that TV produce on viewers called "the shallow time effect" (see ) inverted the sequence of events suggesting that the "racial cleansing" started before the NATO bombing when in truth it was the opposite.
The second part of the media definition refers to the purpose of providing: a) information; b) entertainment; and c) advertising.
Let’s define press as the informative aspect of the media, the distribution of news. In a "free country" with a "free press", we assume "a priori" that the means of communication are independent, and we are forced to, there is no choice. Despite that logically it is a tautology, we have to believe that they are independent, at least independent from the government, otherwise how come they can "reflect" how "democratic" candidates "are" and "think" "objectively". Once watching a "scientific" program on TV "explaining" the origin of the solar system by means of the accretion theory The word "independent" also has interpretation difficulties. Means of communication can be technologically, economically, politically, or ideologically independent. Every honest person will agree that the press should be independent in every aspect. Obviously, advertising is not independent of economical interests. An advertisement slogan, "Vote for Nixon" is obviously not independent. If in a TV political affairs program an analyst, after a lengthy analysis, recommends to vote for Nixon, we may believe that it is an independent recommendation. What happens if we read a comic with a cartoon of Nixon portraying him as a lovable, reliable, person?
Is the universe discrete or a continuum? No, this question is not a digression. We defined three media purposes. Are there really three "independent" purposes, or is there just one continuum where information mixes with entertainment and advertising? If you believe in a discrete world, what about the 1938 Orson Welles’ radio program "The war of the worlds"?. A fictitious alien invasion of earth was reported, thousands panicked, sadly some people committed suicide. This fact proved that many people really believed that the broadcaster was performing an informative instead of an entertaining role.
Media components are, by definition, technologically independent, since technology was the demarcation criteria used to categorize them. But, what about the other criteria: economic, political, and ideological? Surprisingly, the open existence of worldwide cross-media monopolies such as Ruppert Murdoch’s and Kerry Packer’s suggest that political and economic interdependence of media components is not perceived as a threat to the free press by the public. On the other hand, free press is assumed as a cardinal virtue of the Western* media. How can these contradictory propositions live together? The reason is that people, in the Western* world, believe that man is fundamentally "homo economicus". The media subliminally reinforces this conception, associating the concept of monopoly to exclusively economical issues in order to divert the attention from the existence of ideological monopolies. The entertainers try to convince us that their zeal for profit overcomes any other desire, including power. Nevertheless, leaving the freedom of the press in the hands of the forces of the "free market" doesn’t seem to be a good idea. In fact it is a serious mistake. The systematic attack by the British, in particular, and the Western* media, in general, on Great Britain’s Royal family is a good example. Since the Soviet Union disappeared vanishing the specter of a nuclear confrontation, entertainers rely entirely on the United States political, economical and military power. Great Britain lost her privileged position in the media system, thus, the British media doesn’t need to be regarded as an "Imperial Institution" anymore. The British population become merely media consumers like the rest of the Western* world.
This is not the only change the entertainers fancy. Switching roles between information and advertising, through the bridge of entertaining, is a very effective technique to convey contradictory messages addressing different levels of consciousness. The entertainers know that their action on a conscious level won’t counteract actions on an unconscious level while, at the same time, they save face. Like a computer performing multitasking TV switches roles in microseconds. From a psychological point of view, a lie told wearing the mask of entertainer is much more effective that wearing the masks of advertiser or press because the viewer is psychologically defenseless. Media components like TV and film superimpose the roles of information, entertainment, and advertising making it impossible to discern between them. There is no doubt that if the Western* world legislators weren’t so dependent on the media for their election a significant amount of legislation would be voted to limit their abuses.
From the people’s perspective the media when playing the role of press should tell the truth, but in the role of entertainer or advertiser this is not required and the entertainers exploit this fact. The problem is that the roles are deliberately superimposed in order to indoctrinate people with ideas that systematically oppose their traditional values. For example, in Christian or Muslim communities, the entertainers subliminally promote the use of alcohol, sexual promiscuity, and abortion. In China, the entertainers will note the large number of males as opposed to females, thereby attacking the "one child" demographic policy of the government, apparently sustaining the opposite principle. Why does the Western* media defend contradictory principles simultaneously? The answer is that there is no contradiction at all. The Western* media simply and systematically attack the "status quo" of every society they don’t control. If they do control it, as in the USA, they try to divide it into as m any minorities as possible in order to increase their leverage.
Hollywood, and the Western* film industry in general, influence local producers, directors, and actors, to reflect Western* values and ideologies in their own films. They know that the maximum psychological leverage is obtained when the local media endorses these values. The lures are prizes (Oscars), good reviews, and the most powerful temptation for any media professional, the promise of becoming a "star". The same satanic promise of the title of an Erich Fromm’s book: "You shall Be as Gods". The following quotation outlines what the Chinese government "controlled press" writes about this issue in 1997
"Chinese film directors are mutilating historical facts and
serving up a potpourri of incest, violence and sexual innuendo in their search
for international prizes … the problem is that too many directors are
interested in winning international prizes, so they tend to exaggerate negative
aspects of China’s past, like feudalism, which they feel will win plaudits from
foreign critics…"
While the West* pretends to inculcate their "superior" set of values to China, the following example shows their understanding of Eastern history. In the 1963 movie "55 days in Peking" starring Ava Gardner, David Niven, and Charlton Heston, classified as a "History/War" movie with a review of three and a half out of four, the heroes are drug dealers. British and Americans opium sellers suddenly converted into defenders of the Christian faith. The bad guys are those who wanted to ban drug trafficking and fight for freedom. Obviously there is always an excuse available to justify the rig. As you see in the previous example Hollywood doesn’t pay much attention to ethical consistency. This is precisely the virtue of the free media, pluralism of opinions, the entertainers will cry in unison. The problem is that this pluralism is suspiciously biased, I’ve never seen Western* movies where the Chinese, Muslim or Christians were portrayed as good, for instance. On the other hand the Western* media i s extremely consistent defending the entertainers political and economical interests all around the world.
Another traditional line used to justify the obvious media bias is the old adage that the media gives the people what the people want. This argument goes in line with the concept that the owners of the media are basically "homo economicus". The economical whim doesn’t explain the strong correlation between the caprice of the people and a geometric political consistency. Curiously, people always "want" what makes the entertainers more powerful. Virtually they become the referees of every political, economical, religious or ideological issue. They always give their disinterested opinion. The truth is that the interaction between people and media producers is a feedback process where, as we already know, the ethical issue of responsibility is obscured by the fact that is very difficult, if not impossible, to identify causes and effects. People watch what is available, recommended, and, note the feedback, what other people watch. The initiative and the Will are always on the media side of the equation. Let’s put the system in motion. Watching Titanic (1998) is a must because everybody (except myself) has already watch it! Despite of the democratic confidence in the public taste the producers, always conservative, still spent a huge chunk of the movie budget in promotion.
What is the difference between information and advertising? Thanks to the Information Revolution, none! Here is where the term "combination", in the definition of media, plays a fundamental role. Newspapers, magazines, TV, and audio records, and every component of the Western* media will add synergy through feedback to the system recommending only "ideologically correct" works and censoring the "incorrect" ones. Media owners, like Hitler, don’t want ideological competitors. For them, the usual treatment is economical and intellectual isolation. This means: no financial resources available to producers; bad reviews; no prizes and; most importantly, no distribution channels available. The recommended therapy is: intimidation, starvation, and liquidation .
The Entertainers’ Oligarchy
Technology made it more affordable to individuals to produce a video, a novel or a film. In this sense we can say that the media is becoming more democratic. The problem is distribution. Reuter realized more than one century ago that distribution is the bottleneck of the Information System. This essential part of the information process combined with a Western* ideological monopoly allows the media owners to censor and eliminate every article that doesn’t agree with their aims. Even more, they strive to be the only censors in the Western* world systematically resisting any other competitor. That is the reason they emphasize the origin of news when they proceed from a non-Western* or government agencies. The motto: "free press" doesn’t reflect a set of principles, it is just a quality control seal meaning: ideologically correct . It is naïve to believe that "free" Western* media is not involved in any form of convenient "selection" of "foreign" news, nevertheless, we blindly trust Western* agencies with regard to the criteria adopted. This fact rises a few questions. Are we sure that they are really reflecting the truth? Do they deserve the "carte blanche" we implicitly give them? Are there control systems in place, which monitor them? The answer is no to all of these questions.
On the other hand the entertainers exploit this monopoly systematically attacking the institutions and organizations reluctant to be nose-driven by "public opinion" such as the Church in Christian countries. The following articles are concrete examples showing how the Western* media operates:
Take for instance a 1997 article of The Sydney Morning Herald written by Stephanie Raethel titled:
" Crucifixion, whipping: not at this school, thanks"
See: TV violence, simply a part of growing up.htm
The article starts with the following passage
"The traditional Eastern passion play, based on the trial and
death of Christ, has been banned in a NSW public school as being too violent
for children and in breach of State Guidelines"
Note the adjective: violent. There is a cartoon, as well, ridiculing a passage of the New Testament. It portrays a girl reading the following text
" And the soldiers were stern with Jesus, and made Him pay a heavy fine..." (italics mine).
Coincidentally, next to this libel was an article titled:
"Classes to learn gay tolerance"
Saying:
"A new program designed to halt homosexual vilification in NSW
schools – including the teaching of positive gay images through fiction – is to
be trialed from July"
Both articles appeared in the front page of the paper.
Based on the contents of these two articles you can deduct who is the master of the politicians and education bureaucrats in 1997, which are very concern about "violence" in school's Eastern Passion plays and very "tolerant" with violence in the media.
In the Daily Telegraph in May 1997 there was an unsigned article titled:
"Muslim dad attacks camp lesson"
"A senior member of the community has attacked a compulsory
(italics mine) school camp that taught his daughter sex education without his
knowledge"
Nevertheless, reading the whole article we found that:
"…also alleged some teachers were intoxicated at the camp" ,
and that:
"…girls were taught how to unroll a condom on their fingers
and were given details about masturbation and sex"
and that a member of Muslim the community said:
"Respect our culture. Don’t teach our kids sex. We will do it in our-selves, the polite way" .
Don’t you feel a cold shiver reading these three articles?
Most of the readers, ignorant of the propaganda techniques applied, will interpret the article as a sample of an intolerant (bigotry is the word in fashion) and anachronistic reaction to the modern "culture" and "education".
To readers, like myself, that understands that the Information Revolution is in fact a religious revolution, it is a clear violation of the democratic right of the parents to educate their children according to their culture and beliefs. Also is worth to notice the aggressive anti-religious stance of the government that makes this "classes" compulsory disregarding absolutely the opinion of the parents. Do not be confused by the fact that the entertainers promote tolerance through the media, they are absolutely intolerant and violent with the ones opposing them and they violate all laws of the land in which are dwelling in treasonous friendship with the natives in the process.
Some stubborn personages resist this censorship. Generally they are charismatic people who directly address the people directly, jumping the media apparatus. The entertainers know they have to live with Churches but not with individuals. In this case the recommended recipe is very drastic, just to kill them.
Malcolm X (listen last speech at DETROIT, "the same GAME going all over AGAIN"...) knew very well how the Information Revolution worked. If you carefully read his famous interview published by the amazing publication "Playboy" you’ll see what I mean. Curiously this article was freely distributed through the Internet in 1997. It is not the case in 1998.
The tip of an iceberg indicates the existence of a huge mass of ice below the water surface, the anti-monarchical campaign by the Western* media indicates the existence of ideological monopolies. Nobody can deny that the British media in 1998 is anti-monarchical. Although, the majority of the British people are not republican. The question is whether the media reflects what people believe, or instead, it "projects" what they want the people to believe? Despite the fact that there are many monarchists in England this fact is not reflected by the Western* media. If the Royal family exerts its influence in Great Britain to stop the publication of certain news, they will "leak" through other media components as it happened with the affair of Prince Charles and Princess Diana when the "leak" came through the American press. Conversely, if the British government requests the media not to publish some news most probably they will accede (see The Old Dirty Trick of Leaking News to the Press). Why this ambiguity? The answer is that the media exerts direct control over the British government, but not over the Royal family. This is the reason that the Royal families constitute an obstacle to the entertainers. Their rights to access power are based on principles that media owners can’t control (hereditary rights), while "democratic" politicians fundamentally depend on image, a variable that the entertainers control at their leisure. Thus, the strategy is to blackmail them through a media technique I named "Papparazzi therapy", which is no more than alienating and harassing them with over information. This campaign began last century skillfully managed by Reuter’s, when his agency was ironically considered an "Imperial Institution".
Who started the war, the one who leaked distorted news to the press (Bismarck) or the one who mobilized first (Napoleon III)? That was the ethical dilemma last century. Today the Western* media swears that Saddam Hussein hides lethal weapons in his palaces, a deadly (in terms of civilians lives) strike was planned to destroy them. Fortunately in March 1998 the UN solved the problem momentarily. Apparently, a UN commission has to determine who was lying. Let’s see if the media will follow-up and inform the results of this "investigation" or if it will left them fade and disappear. The fact is that the Western* media despite self-promoting a tolerant and pacifist image it endorses a gangster’s policy over the civilian population of Iraq in benefit of their economical partners.
Certainly, it is possible to argue that the media "reflects" what people think and believe. Objectively it is not possible to prove or negate it. We know that in a feedback system the ethical issue of responsibility is obscured, but we still have common sense. It is obvious that there are no complaints about media monopolies because nobody BELIEVE (in Western* countries) that ideological monopolies could possible exist for the simple reason that the media doesn’t report them . Ironically this happens because people have the image of the media that the media itself projects. The whole political, psychological, and economical power of the media is used in order to support this view. For the supporters of the British Monarchy, this fact will become evident when it is too late. The entertainers will became the new ruling class. In other words Jamima instead of Diana will reside in a corner of every simple hart.
The Pervasive Influence of TV
TV has free access to our homes on a daily basis. It is a continuous experience creating a special feeling of "familiarity" towards characters. Sometimes we know details of their personal life, and the fact that they are always friendly makes us believe that they really are our friends. If we address them personally, it doesn’t matter how polite they can be, we suffer a shock when we realize that they don’t know us. It is a strange psychological phenomenon, it is very difficult to distinguish between reality and the fiction of TV. We "believe" that what we see on TV is reality. Notably, in an interview with a man who served many years of a life term in prison, when asked if he wanted to be free, he answered no "because the world is too violent in these times" (Australia 1997). His experience of the world was, for many years, the television set. He viewed the outside world was far more violent that prison. TV addicts can have serious problems differentiating fiction from reality . This is an objective psychological characteristic of the TV without any moral connotation, but the media exploitation of this characteristic has a moral connotation.
I will discuss how TV works in combination with films and newspapers, by reducing the time horizon of viewers and altering the perceived sequence of historical facts, and how The Western* media fabricates reality on demand to suit their strategic purposes of world domination through materialism. Hollywood’s purpose is not only commercial.
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones once said in an interview,
"we’ve had their bodies…now we want their minds."
Let’s examine what media owners have created in order to exploit this phenomenon. A "new" genre was invented; the so-called docudrama. One example is 1974 "The Missiles of October", a hybrid between documentary and drama (How to read a film, Monaco, Oxford University Press 1981). The aim is to create more confusion between the three main purposes of the media: information, entertainment and advertisement . This maximizes the degree of TV addiction and intentionally blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. Here is where the effect of delay in systems theory plays a part. Parents and childcare centers also use TV as a drug to keep children quiet. Then the children become addicted and, in the long term (delay), TV becomes a life-long habit .
The average length of a TV image is one second. Some studies prove that the effect on viewers is to reduce their time horizon, thereby collapsing the past, present and future into a few seconds image. Apparently, these phenomena affect the understanding of the succession of historical events. This phenomenon is particularly useful when it is necessary to rewrite history according to new strategic needs. Hollywood, the most dominant ideological force in the film industry, shows reality as a dichotomy, "goodies" and "baddies". "People like to simplify", and "give people what they want", is the excuse. I claimed that in the movie "55 days in Peking" the "goodies" were the drug dealers, British and Americans opium sellers and the "baddies", the ones that wanted to halt drug trafficking and fought for freedom. Thirty years later in Al Pacino’s film "Carlito’s way" the equation is inverted. The "baddies" are the Colombian drug lords and the "goodies" are the former drug traffickers. Despite the apparent contradiction, there is an incredible consistency Behind the Scenes.
Oswald Spengler stated that liberation from the visual was the greatest achievement of the Western (note that I don’t use the asterisk) mind. Thanks to modern "TV therapy" our children are again constrained to visual slavery (see "TV Violence Simply a Part of Growing Up" in this book). Children will have more difficulties learning and using abstract concepts, developing their own opinions, making individual decisions and so forth. The entertainers will dictate to them how to dress, speak, VOTE, and buy.
In fact, mass media can inculcate a totally NEW SET of VALUES totally different from their parents' ones (religion, for example) with or without their consent and without them even NOTICING it.
The perfect "democracy" of the 21st
century will in fact be the entertainers’ oligarchy.
Brett Dellinger in his book "Finnish Views of CNN" refers to manipulation techniques used in Western* TV called: framing, cueing, and concision. Framing is a journalistic technique that consists of basing a story on "little tacit theories", or simple concepts that are acceptable to sponsors and broadcasters, and are easily recognized by the audience. These simple stories are coded messages instantly recognizable that prove to be very adaptable to use as a base for constructing more complex stories. When a civilian shelter was destroyed during the Gulf war, the Western* media claimed that Saddam deceived civilians into hiding in military targets. To believe this requires great naivety and also to know the frame that Saddam Hussein is an extremely wicked and cruel person. Cueing is some form of voice intonation a broadcaster uses in order to call the attention to certain phrases or sentences. It can communicate feelings of awe or intimacy. This is the reason that it is generally ut ilized to establish a special "one-to-one" relationship with the audience. The aim is to gain the viewer’s trust. Concision is a technique used to restrain an interviewed person to limit his speech to the exiguous modern TV time slots, forcing him to communicate with the audience by utilizing very simple ideas (frames) that need no further justification. This results in the practical impossibility of transmitting nothing other than broadly accepted ideas. Noam Chomsky sustains this view. The net effect of these techniques is the manipulation of the audience ideology. For instance, as Brett Dellinger stated, during the 1991 Gulf war (some people prefer to call it Exxon’s war) CNN reported the air bombings as "bloodless surgical" attacks. At that time it was known that fleeing civilians were targeted and illegal weapons were used such as fuel air explosives, napalm clusters, and antipersonnel fragmentation bombs, in violation of the Charters of the United Nation, the Hague, and Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Charter, and the laws of armed conflict. None of this news was reported during the conflict. Instead the "traditional" frames, such as "the fight for democracy", were used.
In other words Hitler and Stalin should die of envy if they were alive . This is the state of the art in propaganda at the end of the 20th century .
TV Violence, "Simply a Part of Growing Up"
People tend to imitate the behaviors they view. Violence on TV is a correlated factor to the increase of violence in the Western* world. Apparently, it takes approximately ten years to detect an increase of violence after TV is introduced into a society. This effect can be perfectly explained using systemic concepts of delay and time frames.
Remember Raethel’s article about censorship of the Easter Passion play in a school due to its violent content? (see The Entertainers Oligarchy) Let’s see how does the media report their own violence. The following article written by Adele Horin for the Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald describes how two year-old James Bulger was murdered in Liverpool, England, by two ten year-old boys after being exposed to high level of violence of a video called "Child Play 3" about Chucky, a vicious living doll. Note that the number three in the video’s title means that it was quite successful. Sadly this crime will probably trigger more versions of this venom, but this is the way the Information Revolution works.
"TV violence simply a part of growing up"
is the title of the article featuring Adele’s photograph. She "complains" that the judge unscientifically cited the influence of violent video films as a possible explanation for the crime.
"It’s just too simplistic to blame television for children’s
violence"
Adele indignantly claims. She also quotes one paragraph of some research carried out by a certain Doctor named David Buckingham from the Institute of Education at London University in support of her stance.
After that continuing in the scientific mood with an historical slant Adele added,
"Quite likely the kids in Ancient Greece pretended to be brave
and brutal Odysseus"
This is followed by the moral punch,
"Its a children’s rights (sic) issue, not a moral one. Kids deserve no less a range of TV fare than adults , including good dramas…" (Italics mine).
Like in a Faustian work, next time I read an article from Adele Horin in The Sydney Morning Herald she looked much younger in the photograph, probably that was the price paid for the article.
Adele
"Before"
Adele
"After"
But Adele could be a singular exception in the Western* media.
Here is another example, this time extracted from the Internet. Jane Horwitz, a Washington Post Staff Writer, in February 1998, recommends our kids watch a movie called:
"The Replacement Killers"
She describes the movie as:
"loud, fast and balletically violent, … and yes, teen
action-movie fans will probably enjoy the ride…Hong Kong's super-suave
superstar Chow Yun-Fat plays an immigrant who
makes his living as a hired assassin
for a Chinese-American underworld leader…"
Horwitz probably didn’t read Raethel’s article about the "violent" Easter Passion play in NSW schools. Nevertheless, this "contradiction" can always be explained as a consequence of the healthy Western* "free Press ". Note that these articles were written by women. This phenomenon suggests the absence of "female discrimination" in the Information Revolution. Also, note Horwitz’s super-adjective "super-suave superstar". Doesn’t it sound like Hitler’s super-race?
These two articles, plus the one about the Easter Passion play I referred to previously prove that the government has power and will to limit what they define as "violence" within schools but the media can add, use and abuse as much violence as they want. It shouldn’t surprise you because the Church doesn’t have any authority over politicians, but the media exerts a tight control over their election campaigns. In this way the entertainers became the arbitrators of modern life without any control or counterbalance. Schools are constrained from transmitting any religious message while the media systematically promotes anti-religious values.
Movies The guts of the media
Film is to a media analyst as an ultrasound is to a medical doctor, a tool to view an image of the guts. Film is the ideal instrument to understand how the Information Revolution really works. Hollywood movies describe the evolution of the ideology of Western* media throughout three-quarters of the twentieth century. Applying a systemic approach, with the assistance of history, psychology, and a critical mind, the face of the Information Revolution will be revealed in front of our eyes. TV, newspapers, movies, sports, even gossip magazines work in consonance to spin the world at the ideal frequency for the owners of the Western* media.
Information is transmitted in two modes or levels, consciously and subliminally, below the threshold of perception. On the conscious level multiple messages can be accommodated over one communication channel. We learned that the information content of a message is relative to the information the receptor already possesses. The state of the art of communication technology allows us to assume that the communication channel is virtually perfect. This means that the information content of a message is exclusively dependent on the receptor knowledge of the news carried by the message. Thus, the same message can convey completely different information to different people. So a message could be just information for some and, simultaneously, indoctrination for others.
Let’s analyze the following article from The Sydney Morning Herald published in March 1997 written by Quentin Curtis. The half page title reads:
"What makes an actor worth $20m? Sex appeal, presence,
sheer ability? Sure. But two of the screens hottest stars have something else
in common: religion. Quentin Curtis asks if this is the source of an inner
strength that translates into star quality. "
Then Quentin explains,
"It may be coincidence, but both are keen members of the
much-maligned Scientology religion."
No, it is not coincidence that Quentin has chosen just "the pair of positive thinking …Scientologists John Travolta and Tom Cruise". It is strange, indeed, that he didn’t see any coincidence in the fact that the majority of the Western* actors and actresses are Christian and the producers Jewish. Quentin’s motto seems to be: "If I can’t convince you by reason I’ll convince you by greed", then he "informs" us that:
"20m U$S is now the ongoing rate for movie stars to appear in
a film."
Despite the rhetoric Quentin shows that he knows the business very well because in the third paragraph of his article he writes:
"Hollywood moguls are not dumb. Craven, corrupt, philistine
and dishonest, maybe…"
But according to Quentin it seems nice to work with them.
This is a text book example of how the media manipulates "information" and people. It is pointless to analyze the obvious propagandistic aim of the article and its appeal to greed and the most basic of human cravings. What is not so obvious is the "riding" message, or meta-message, destined to another audience. The meta-message reads: "promote Scientology, or other non-traditional religions as this is the way to go". This is a global message destined to the few people who can understand it. This fact points to another issue, we are not subjected to propaganda only trough media channels , the entertainers also work on a personal basis at work; clubs; private meetings; and even Churches . This work should be coordinated on a worldwide scale in order to be effective. For example if someone in the office tells you that Titanic 5 is a wonderful movie and somebody else in the supermarket advises you that Titanic 5 is excellent, and the TV news claim s that the Titanic 5 is one of the most watched movies in history, you end up believing that you "must" see Titanic 5 (Titanic 5 is a must!). This is an imaginary example and message is obvious, but many other subtle meta-messages are conveyed through this method. Promoting pseudo-religions or non-traditional religions to debilitate the main ecumenical ones for example. A financial panic can easily be triggered in this way if it is convenient. Notice that the word panic betrays a feedback system, it derives from the Greek word "Pan" the god of the flocks. Many people who benefit in one way or another from the Information Revolution attempt to emphasize the latest "buzz word" or the latest or current news. In the office, for instance, colleagues may start a conversation speaking about today’s news for instance Clinton’s latest love affair or an "excellent" new program such as South Park. They trigger conversation on specific topics in order to reinforce the media message. If you pay attention to the topics people speak about in the office, on the street, or shopping, you’ll see that these are basically the same all around the Western* world. This phenomenon can be explained by the pervasiveness of news, but believe it or not, individuals also promote it. Woman’s fashion is other subtle example. I can remember the time when Christian women used to wear necklaces with a Christian cross. You’ll find that today, in 1998, women prefer to wear a horizontal bar instead. The producers and promoters of this "fashion" certainly know its psychological implications. They also know that the media will promote it, thereby leveraging their sales, because it is in synchronism with a worldwide strategy. As a prelude to this fashion, Paul Newman in the Hollywood 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, wore a necklace with a bottle opener. In the 1960’s he was an anti-hero, in a contemporary re-make of the movie he probably would be presented as a hero.
Individually analyzed, the previous articles seem just
innocent nonsense. Using a systemic approach and placing these scattered
"silly" articles in context, as in a puzzle, we might view these as
components of a feedback system. Basically they are coded messages to
coordinate strategies around the Western* world. For instance, the innocent
promotion of, say, baseball or Mc Donald restaurants outside the USA is not only
a commercial strategy, nor even a nationalistic strategy. It is, basically, a
global strategy summarized by the phrase
: "we
have to Americanize"
. Not because it is the best moral system,
nor to promote and encourage democracy (after all Kuwait is still a
totalitarian country, in Western* eyes in 1998). The purpose is to establish
the same social and political conditions as in the USA, at the end of the 20th
century in every country, thus allowing the media to prosper and dream with the
conquest of the world. The problem with this plan is the cost in terms of
principles and lives.
Not everyone will change
religion and principles in exchange for material goods. Not even in the USA.
Now consider a generic advertising promoting consumption of alcohol distributed via satellite. Backed by the moral right granted by the possession of technology the entertainers will distribute the advertising regardless of the moral or religious beliefs of the people illuminated by the signal. It is socially healthy not to promote alcohol to children and teenagers, and it is immoral to promote alcohol consumption to Muslims. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people will agree on this issue. Nevertheless, the Western* media do promote, "un-democratically", alcohol, smoking, sex, and drugs in predominately Muslim and Christian countries. All this is done in the name of "freedom of speech", "for the good of society". Apart from the strategic benefits obtained with this "democratic decision", the entertainers will fill their pockets and collect more slaves to exploit. Sometimes true and legitimate interests may collide and have to be compromised, but the example I’ve chosen clearly shows how the interests of a minority overcome the rights of the majority . The entertainers cynically will argue that the advertisements are legal, there is no law forbidding them to promote cigarettes or alcohol on TV.
In a multicultural global society the problem has to be solved in some way as it is not possible to accommodate contradictory interests simultaneously. The problem is that those able to solve this dilemma depend on the media for their election. The control the media exerts over the mechanisms for obtaining seats in Congress or Parliament makes it practically impossible to obtain support for a law that limits media abuses and power. Nominally, the Western* media defends tolerance, multiculturalism, fraternity between human races, freedom of religion, speech, and thought. In practice it promotes and supports exactly the opposite. The media systematically attacks every principle of the major ecumenical religions, subliminally promoting the superiority of certain races, hatred between countries, and ridiculing, if not silencing those who disagree with them. This occurs on a planetary scale.
How did the "World's Most Dangerous Terrorist" Become Nobel Peace Prize Laureate ?
The favorite psychological technique of the Western Media at the end of the 20th century is the dualistic classification of the world into "goodies" and "baddies". The basic principle of the propaganda is that the "goodies" always win and the "baddies" always lose . Every article, advertising, movie, or TV series in the West* follows this principle. The subliminal message is "if you do as the goodies do you’ll also win". Later I will show what should be done in order to be a winner, but certainly, openly showing your religious faith, if it is a major ecumenical religion, is strictly forbidden, the entertainers can’t tolerate it. In one way or another you must become a "loser".
Islam is an intrinsic enemy of the media because Muslim societies are not as permeable to this propaganda. While Christian’s today seem to be ashamed of their religious convictions, Muslims shows them in the way they dress, act, and behave. A woman dressing in a traditional Muslim manner on the streets of a Western* country destroys hundreds of hours of propaganda on TV. Her attitude is anathema and can’t be tolerated. The strategy is to confront Islamic countries and societies by placing Muslims on the "enemy" side enabling the media to attack them openly without running the risk of being branded as racists. The subliminal message propagated by the Western* media in 1998 is that Muslims support Saddam Hussein, Saddam is the enemy, thus, these people are collaborating with the enemy. After the fall of the Soviet Empire the West* suffered from a lack of enemies, and Saddam recklessly provided one. But materialism and not Saddam is the venom corroding Western* society.
We are entering the realms of politics. Saddam not always was an enemy of the West*. In 1980 he was a good friend of America, receiving substantial military assistance during his war against Iran. In turn, at that time, Yassir Arafat was promoted by the Western* media as a "dangerous criminal". But when sudden strategic changes urge to switch a "baddy" into a "goody", or vice versa, the shallow time horizon methodically induced by TV becomes a big asset . The Western* media, for decades, branded Yassir Arafat as one of the most dangerous world criminals. Suddenly it became convenient to promote Mr. Arafat as a "goody" on a world scale. The transformation was so complete that Mr. Arafat, and another "goody" converted into a "super-goody" (for some time) Mr. Rabin, were "laureated" with the 1994 Peace Nobel Prize. The media subliminally prepared the Western* public so well that nobody seemed surprised. The technique employed in this metamorphosis requires an explanation. The question is how do entertainers manage to spread a message on a world scale in order to instantly "build-up" a world "opinion". The answer is simple: they do it by stages conveyed through two levels of perception: subliminal and conscious. Subliminal level messages are destined to the general public in order to build public opinion with regards to specific issues. Conscious level messages embedded in special connotative contexts are destined to the entertainers providing the clues to identify the important topics mixed in the mélange of irrelevant news, entertainment, and advertising. This information will be used by the entertainers to interact with the public at personal level .
The first stage is the news. Ironically, news can alert the members of the club about important issues, but doesn’t transmit much useful information. A second stage is implemented through TV programs, editorials, and advertisements that have the effect of communicating required details. Normally they change on a weekly basis and can reflect subtleties and detail. The third stage is implemented to address mass audiences through movies and more sophisticated media channels such as novels, visual arts, science and music to intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. Additionally, these are lured by the most popular 20th century sin: the desire to become "stars" (You shall Be as God). Due to the inherent inflexibility of these media means they reflect long-term strategies, nevertheless they are surprisingly consistent through the time. The ideological consistency of some movie directors such as Woody Allen is amazing. His films reflect Western* media successive tactical changes throughout time keeping the strategy intact.
The media dualistically categorizes the world into "goodies" and "baddies". The only ones that have the privilege of being eternal "goodies" are the entertainers, the rest are bound to the history avatars being alternative "good" or "bad" according to media strategies. We saw that Yassir Arafat became Nobel Peace Price laureate after being branded as one of the most dangerous criminals in the world. On the other hand Saddam Hussein followed the opposite path, from American ally to world criminal. This is a graphic example of the ethics of the Information Revolution.
The "Paparazzi" Therapy or How to Alienate the Rich and Famous in Order to Control Them
The media tends to portray the world as a set of countries with competing interests ("divide and conquer") while they conceptually see the world in blocks: the West* ("mare nostrum"); Islam; and China. The west* is considered their territory. Since most of the Western* countries are Christian, the media attempts to weaken churches exploiting their doctrinal differences. This tactic has been used for centuries. The promotion of non-traditional religions is applied with moderation, because the entertainers are well aware of the danger of Christian unification as a side effect of their action. Their favorite "centrifuge" tactic is the promotion of atheism, agnosticism, nihilism, and materialism. The European Royal families are another threat. The recommended treatment against them is the "Paparazzi therapy" applied in order to alienate, ridicule, and isolate them. They master this technique like the fish in water, in particular on their attack on the British Royal family . It is interesting to see the response of the British loyalists in the excellent movie "Shallow Grave" where a lazy accountant (entertainer) represents the media and its tactics, and his flat-mates represents "John Bull" and the aristocracy. A sordid battle develops for the loot of a crime. I won’t spoil the movie telling you it’s end but it has a happy ending, the Queen is avenged. In real life this is not likely to happen.
Despite of the success of the entertainers in the USA and the British Commonwealth, the greater opposition to the Western* media Empire comes from the skeptical and undisciplined temperament of the Latin American and Mediterranean countries. People from these countries are extremely difficult to convince and if they are convinced, they are so undisciplined and individualistic that it is not possible to use them effectively. In these countries the "Paparazzi therapy" would seam ludicrous, so they apply other rather violent techniques, as we will see later. Simultaneously with the "projection" of the image of a Western* world divided by countries the media subliminally reinforce the notion of a "unified" Western* block generating friction with China and Islamic countries in order to campaign for unity in the West* against a common enemy.
Islam and China can’t be controlled in the same way as Western* countries, as they maintain a strict control over the media. The use of satellite dishes will allow some "de facto" access, but these would be used exclusively to undermine the religious faith or ideological unity in order to create confusion and division. To be effective the media needs a political system with public elections based on media campaigns . This is the only reason for the media to support a "democratic" system. This allows media owners to literally place and remove (ie. Paul Keating) politicians in and out from their posts, leveraging their control on a national and super-national scale. When the support of their candidates is through illegal or foreign communication channels, like in Islamic or Communist countries, or the authorities are not elected in a "democratic" way, the power of the entertainers is drastically reduced. Nevertheless, there is always a way to interfere by supporting somebody who is against the regime. In that case the support is extended to a group that violently oppose the legal government. Here is where the "free press" presents the "democratic fighters" as humanitarians and idealists performing the role of "goodies" to the Western* audience (as in 1972 Woody Allen’s movie Bananas). More often than not, these "goodies" have a few skeletons in their cupboards but the Western* media will protect them, suppressing very uncomfortable news from the public, hiding not only the skeletons but the cupboards too, in other words lying by omission.
One interesting characteristic common to these "idealistic" groups is the relationship between a "good" media image, and the ownership of modern, expensive, weapons. If these groups succeed there is no guarantee that they will form a democratic government, nevertheless it would be a tyrant under their control. President Nixon, for example, said of Nicaraguan President Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza "I know that he is a bastard, but he is our bastard" . Probably Nixon thought he was Machiavellian with this remark, the irony is that Henry Kissinger could have also said the same...
On the other hand, the non-Western* world doesn’t seams to be so permeable to media tactics. Islam is growing considerably. China and Japan seam to be immune to Western* tactics and the risk is that entertainers, confident in their grip on the USA political system and military power will attempt to produce a conflict between West* and East. They also have to ensure that the rivalry between Islamic and non-Islamic Asian countries reaches high proportions. In the mean time they have to extend their control over the more resilient countries in the West*, Latin America and the Mediterranean European countries. Have you noticed how many news and "information" trivia about Spain and "famous" Spanish folk have appeared in the Western* media during 1997 - 1998. Spain is the next target of the resilient group. The entertainers broke spears with the British Royal family, now they have switched their seduction (until they obtain enough local power to overthrow them) to the Spanish. Their situation in France is a bit cryptic but there is a movie that deserves analysis, it is Claude Lelouche’s Les Miserables. It is interesting to note that in Les Miserables, there is a reference to a high level executive from Clinton’s cabinet but not, it is not Lewinsky.
The block view of the world define three boundaries: the West* with Islam; Islam with China; and China with the West*. Each boundary is highly susceptible to conflict and at the same time represents an excellent opportunity to expand media power. The danger is that the media can instigate a conflict when it suits their own agenda. As occurred once when China was forced to open her ports to opium aided by superior weaponry and technology, in the 21st century the media can try to open Islam and China’s electromagnetic spectrum in the same way. The question is if this tactic is dangerous for the media owners? The answer is that they will certainly survive the conflict to take over the remains, because their task will be to "inform" and not to fight. Britannia used to rule the sea waves, but the entertainers, in the twentieth century, rule the electromagnetic waves .
Government Controlled Press, or Press Controlled Government ?
We tend to categorize the Media, for reasons we’ll analyze later, in two groups: free and government controlled. In the Western* world we believe, as though blindfolded, that "our" press is freer and fairer than in the rest of the world. This belief stands firmly even if I ask if the Western* press is free and fair, regardless of the topic is treating. For instance, consider an article "demonstrating" that there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that smoking causes cancer, or when the media analyze the influence of films and TV violence on our society. Would you believe these are un-compromised articles? Obviously not. Will you still maintain that the free Western press is fair and independent? Well, if you are honest and you think carefully about the problem your answer will be not. But nevertheless you still believe that despite the fact that some media owners are: "craven, corrupt, philistine and dishonest, …" as Mr. Quentin Curtis put it in his article, they b ehave honestly and reflect the "true image" of candidates during political campaigns. If you are an skeptic person cynically believing that they sell their support to the candidate whom pays more, you are naive! The entertainers support the candidates that accept the rules of the game proposed by the media and play in their terms regardless of the funds at their disposition. It is not an economic issue, it is an ideological one. This is the reason that charismatic people are considered "dangerous for democracy", for they can gather support without the need of the media.
Fustel de Coulanges noted in his excellent book "The Ancient City" that the old Romans never made a decision without consulting the oracle and the auspices. Clever and ambitious politicians know that the modern oracle is the media, it not only record the past and announce the present, it also "predicts" the future. Politicians will never make a decision without their approval acknowledging the existence of modern media Pythian priestesses.
According to Montesquieu, a balanced political system is the one in which the power is shared by three independent institutions ruled by a fundamental law. This is the system adopted by most Western* countries. In the United States there are three nominal powers: executive represented by the President or Prime Minister in the British Commonwealth; legislative represented by the Congress or Parliament; judiciary represented by the Judges; and a fundamental law, the constitution. But in a Western* "democracy" there are three powers plus a " wild card " , the media. The Media through electoral campaigns directly controls two of the main powers, executive and legislative. Presidents, Prime ministers, senators, etc depend on the media to reach the potential voters. Some of them will have a good image and others a bad one. At this point it would seem to the reader that I’m saying nothing new. The media itself treated this issue in many movies such as Peter Sellers’ "In the Garden". The common denominator of these movies is the shift on the focus of the attention from the media, portrayed as a victim of the candidate and his team of public relation experts, to the candidate himself that can be either stupid or unscrupulous. Clinton in 1998 proved that it is possible to get away from some dirty issues such as perjury, not to mention Vietnam and marijuana (at least) consumption, without losing "popularity" or even tarnishing his "image" applying policies in consonance with the media ideology.
Consider the O. J. Simpson trial (show ?) and you will see that "the most independent of the democratic powers" ceased to be independent long time ago . If we take into account that the average American watch more than four hours of TV on a daily basis assuming that a trial by jury can be fair it is an insult to your intelligence. On top of that, introducing TV cameras on courts will have the "beneficial" effect of creating "stars" from Judges, lawyers, and why not, even criminals. Summarizing, if we consider the power of the powers in a modern democracy, the only one without balance, control, and accountability, is the media.
In a democracy every person in the exercise of power is considered public. This means that, theoretically, they can, and they are, controlled by his fellow citizens. The problem is that in practice this control is achieved through the glass of the media or by other politician whom depends on the media for his reelection. This glass is more similar to a prism, not all the colors of the spectrum are transported with the same angle of refraction. The media is like my 5-year-old daughter who claimed to understand her 2-year-old brother, every time she was asked to "translate" she said: "he said that he wants chocolate ice-cream!". What do you think the media will account about people’s expectations of the media? "We want more freedom for the press" the Western* media ideological monopoly will swear at unison, survey agencies will confirm, psychoanalysts will diagnose and politicians will happily endorse. Certainly, people doesn’t want more responsibility, accuracy and accountability and less violence, sex, gambling support, and advertisement from the media.
On the other hand, from the economical point of view, the official Western* media owner is Mr. Anonymous. In the USA the media "belongs" to a few big corporations. Based on its ideological coherence it is difficult to believe that these corporations are managed and owned by an amorphous "cloud" blindly driven by self-interest and appetite for profits. The medieval mythology sustained that a giant sitting on the back of an immense turtle held the world in space. This explanation doesn’t explain where the turtle was standing. In the same way the explanation that the media is managed by anonymous "big corporations" doesn’t explain the startling ideological consistency of the Western* media that pervades frontiers and languages.
We can analyze the issue of ownership from the practical point of view asking the following question: who benefits?, Cui Bono, Cui prodest (who profits?) It is inevitable to conclude that Behind the Scenes there is a small group of people with a clear agenda. It is this agenda, pervading the disinformation mess in which we are simmering like frogs, denouncing a small club of people benefiting from it, namely the ENTERTAINERS CLUB.
Rich and Famous or Rich and Anonymous?
While media owners ensure that every people invested with
any sort of power become "famous", they enjoy the power of
anonymity. They are the ones that establish the strategy on a worldwide scale,
attracting people’s attention with entertainment, sane or insane, with art or
sex, with love or violence. It doesn’t matter how, the important factor is to
attract the maximum audience. Combined with leverage, the entertainers will
transform this universal audience into power and benefits for the members of
the club. This is the reason I call them the entertainers.
The media or more precisely, those who control the media
are becoming more powerful every second. Even the most independent of the
political powers, the judiciary, is affected. Judicial processes will become
more and more a matter of image rather than of justice. O. J. Simpson’s trial
is both a good example and a warning that the system went too far. The trial
was converted into a soap opera and transmitted all around the globe in the
name of free press. The real victim was not only justice, but also the image of
justice. With trials by jury it is absolutely naïve to think that the media
will not influence the outcome if it is interesting, important, or if there is
something for them to win or to lose. If the media can influence the most
conservative, and theoretically, the most independent of the political powers,
the judiciary, imagine what is happening with the most permeable. The problem
is that
the media is a virtual power without
balance, generating a n asymmetrically loaded political system
.
This system is promoted as a paradigm of perfection in the
Western* society in order to increase the multinational power of the
entertainers.
Democracy requires, essentially, accountability. Counterbalance of powers and information guarantees a fair system. The question is who counterbalance the media? The answer is simple, nobody. From the systems point of view it is clearly a Feedback process in which the media owners acquire more power precisely limiting and systematically eliminating any attempt to counterbalance their power.
The fact that the 20th century Media Empire commenced more than one hundreds years ago (see "A Bit of History and the Combination Ring") is a clear indication of the existence of a long term trans-generational strategy (delays) behind the scenes. Not many human organizations have the ability to deploy long term strategies across generations. This indicates the existence of a superstructure and an ideology behind the media phenomenon. It is not just the blind result of a Darwinian competition between media corporations. To the believers it is an indication of the work of the devil. To others, it indicates the existence of an anonymous multinational organization behind.
The ART of Creating the Problems They Solve
The political system is not the only one ideally suited to be controlled by a small club of people through the art of leverage. The economic system as rough and practical as it seams to be, is also an another excellent candidate.
Essentially the world economy is based on public opinion . Nobody could argue the fact that the world spins around credit. But, what is the meaning of "credit" ? I would resist the temptation to employ the economic definition of it for the simple reason that the result of this exercise would be misleading. Rather than resorting to the use of technicalities that will obscure rather than clarify the issue, I will address the problem from the etymological perspective. The word credit derives from the Latin's word "credere" which means to believe.
Controlling what people believe, it is possible to control the world through international credit thanks to the magic of leverage. The most difficult and crucial element of this operation is tempting victims to borrow more that they can pay. The old trick consists, as any pawnbroker knows, in gaining the guarantee and not the interest (Flaubert’s Madam Bovary is a literary example).
The first step in order to achieve this is to overvalue the country’s stock market emphasizing the " international confidence " in the targeted country's economy. This is an easy task for the Western* media. International investors prove this "confidence" pouring money into the local market. The stock market flourishes. Easy gains prompt more international investors. The latest to enter the party are the locals. In third world countries the local people is intrinsically skeptical about government and media, they are as avid consumers of violence and pornography (entertainment) as in First World countries but, nevertheless, they still have a healthy intuition against the media in their informational role. Their entrance signs, unequivocally, that the operation is mature.
Despite statistical analysis and the pragmatism of investors, the hard reality shows that the stock market is worth more than one hundred times the real economy. This should be a warning light for any sensible person. At this stage the media is wildly broadcasting "professional" analysis performed by "experts" "demonstrating" that this value reflects the "future" or the "expectations" of the economy and not present values in order to infuse public confidence on the system.
People start living from "future" profits . A large "private" debt in hard currency starts accumulating . The standard of life artificially grows "proving" that the system works, and the Western* media (ironically considered more accurate by the locals) welcomes "the miracle". This encourages timid local investors to "invest" which is the waited signal. If international investors suddenly start withdrawing capital on a huge scale by their own decision, or if the withdrawal starts after a "rumor" conveniently amplified by the media, this is irrelevant. We already know that the ethical issue of responsibility is completely obscured in a feedback system . The country is already deep in debt in hard currency. International investors start withdrawing the blood out of the country selling the local currency. The credit system is choked, the media start mining the confidence, and the market plunges towards "real" values.
The victim has to borrow the same money that has already gone out of the country but at a higher interest rate and with daunting social and political conditions . Then the government is blackmailed by international organizations . The main issue will not be economic but political since the operation is a modern form of invasion . It will be the discussion about foreign intervention in internal affairs and the "democratization" and internationalization of the local decision-making organisms, in particular the press. If the local government agrees, then the basis for domination through the media is set-up. It should be better for the government officials to start looking for a good "public relations agency" because their rivals are already being chosen by the entertainers to take over with "more sensible economic policies" .
"International" bodies such as the IMF and the Trilateral Commission control massive amounts of capital destined to finance "international investments" on the countries who "behave well" allowing the media unlimited access to their peoples minds and souls. This technique was successfully applied in the 80’s in Latin America in a more crude form. In an "operation", which should be the envy of Al Capone, the interest rate suddenly and arbitrarily quadrupled leaving all "customers" in default.
Around the 10th century the people of Europe panicked after seeing Vikings ships near the coasts, at the end of the 20th century people of Third World countries experience the same feeling when they see on the news IMF envoys crossing the customs gates into their airports.
The following graphs describe the process from a systemic approach:
a) The "problem":
The orthodox explanation is that the "problem" was triggered by a sudden "lose of confidence" in the country’s economy. The systemic explanation is slightly different. The market is artificially held overvalued with respect to its intrinsic values by "public opinion". Like in Escher pictures, the system seems to work thanks to the collaboration (gullibility) of the people, conveniently "cranked" by the media. Using a physical analogy, an airplane can flight apparently defying gravity laws thanks to its speed with respect to the air. To maintain its speed is necessary to burn fuel, if there is no more fuel the plain will gradually lose speed, thus sustentation, and will fall. An overvalued market is like an airplane in flight, it needs fuel (people’s credibility and credit) to maintain its prices artificially high.
Credit and credibility are variables easily controlled by the Western* media. Countries that play this game without having huge reserves in metal (like China) are virtually mortgaging the country and their people’s work. The entertainers could cut the "fuel" at any time producing the collapse of the market dragging the local currency behind.
b) The "solution":
Note: this graph was developed in1998(Feb 2009)
The "solution" implies the participation of international organisms which in exchange for international investments - the money that just went out - the government has to apply a "sound" economical program, which includes opening the electromagnetic spectrum to Western* media, and a "democratization" of the country. In other words the replacement of the local ruling class by the entertainers in the command of the levers of the country.
I have already discussed how the entertainers control the political system through political electoral campaigns and "image". An economical system based mostly on public companies registered in the stock market is virtually under the entertainer’s control. Experts with preferential access to the media will "inform" about the "best" shares and investments, and also about timing issues, such as when is "better" to buy and to sell. The media has the enviable privilege to report what people are doing (the market behavior) simultaneously reporting what people have to do. A country with an economy based on this model will be eternally exposed to the caprices of the entertainers. The media will direct the herd psychology of the investors in their benefit in order to accumulate more capital and power .
Speculation on the currency parity is unavoidable, but the wealth of a country is its reserves. If China wasn’t affected by the Asian crash of 1998 if was because of their immense reserves. The modern economical theories encourage governments to mortgage the country, exchanging reserves for USA bonds. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the USA is the preferred place to hide entertainer's reserves because of the social and political control they exert through the media on the government and the improbability of a nuclear attack . They don’t need the Swiss banks anymore. This was probably the main reason for the media attack on the Swiss banking system in 1997.
In the 80’s the USA raised the interest rate and left scores in default. To save reserves in USA bonds is to do the same stupid thing. It doesn’t matter if USA bonds are more profitable than gold. The main issue is that essentially by doing this, Third World governments will be mortgaging the future and freedom of the country. One fatal day the bonds will suddenly fail leaving the country in default and at the mercy of First World countries, or more specifically, at the mercy of the small group of people that controls the governments of these countries.
The essence of capitalism is the raising of capital by sharing risk in return for potential profit. The main concept is risk. For the media owners the risk is negligible since they control the trends with propaganda, they tell us what is happening, what will happen and what we have to do according to that, simultaneously, a small group will do the opposite cropping handsome profits. If everyone knows which horse will win the race, who will make a profit ? If you want to become a millionaire the best thing you can do, provided you have the "right contacts", is to write a best-seller (yes, an "a priory" best-seller) of "how to become a millionaire". Despite that common sense, the less common of the senses, cries that this strategy is self defeating since such a best-seller will produce hundreds of thousands of millionaires which in turn will trigger inflation, which in turn will impoverish millionaires, etc, etc, etc, this recipe works thanks to hidden balancing processes. With worldwide outlets and a distribution system at your disposition, plus liberal amounts of capital for advertising, fame is secured, thus success is "achieved".
This is the reason why neo-liberal economic theories are becoming very popular, again! (1998). They are powerful tools to deceive well intentioned people of the benefits of "sound" economic policies, and an excellent excuse and argument for the willing collaborators. These policies have to be "explained" as much superficially as possible to the general public in order to built the frames used by the people responsible of their implementation.
I've previously stated that feedback systems have balancing processes sometimes very difficult to identify, but their existence could be anticipated by strange or erratic behavior of the system subjected to stimulus. For instance, consider the unprecedented decline of the price of gold. At this stage of the analysis of the information revolution I recognize a strong relationship (correlation) between the low price of gold (1999) and end of the cold war due to the fact that USA became a secure place to store reserves since the risk a nuclear attack vanished with the additional advantage, to the entertainers, of having a strong grip on the government and media of the country.
The Mass Media Reinforcing Process
Above graph depicts the main reinforcing processes of the information system. In a Feedback process, as in Relativity theory (it is not a coincidence), there is no privileged position that can be associated to a cause or a starting point. I've previously noted that this fact obscures the issue of responsibility. It is strongly related to the concept of freedom supported and endorsed by the media and superbly defined by the Simone de Beauvoir's 1947 essay titled "Pour une morale de l'ambiguite".
Who started this process ? Is the media the creator and driver or it is just an opportunistic user of it ? These questions will be answered in following articles.
Arbitrarily, I’ll start the analysis on the action where the media promotes itself as a mirror of reality.
Promote Media as a Faithful Mirror of Reality
As in Escher’s drawings, where the water circulates indefinitely in a loop defying the gravity law, the so called public opinion and the world itself, gravitate in a magical and precarious order, lifted and held by the universal law of gullibility .
These drawings remind the entertainers that a) the system is on a precarious equilibrium; b) that the system works thanks to geometrical tricks; and c) that it is necessary to keep moving and mutating constantly because when this system falls, it falls well. Keeping all the balls in the air, as the acrobats in the circus do requires skill and constant effort.
I have already labeled film as the right tool to analyze the Information Revolution. It is like the stethoscope is to a doctor, or the screen is to a computer programmer. I will use films and plays as analogies of the Information Revolution.
Information can be conveyed in two different manners: denotatively; and connotatively. An image of a red rose in a film establishes a relationship between sign (the image of a red rose ) and signified (its meaning). This process is called denotation. But the context in which the red rose appears conveys infinitely more information and meaning. For example, the image of a red rose in a Richard III play connotes the house of Lancaster, whereas in Romeo and Juliet it connotes love. To understand the connotation of a red rose in Richard III it is necessary to know the history of the war of the roses. The context is given by a story assumed to be known by the audience (technically called frame). In the same way, the entertainers intend to establish a set of cultural connotations, around a set of ideologically correct proto-stories, in order to be able to convey multiple messages along the same channel, and to address different audiences simultaneously. This technique, called framing, allows them to easily "construct", based on frames, much more complex arguments with the additional advantage of automatically obtaining coherent ideological stories. It is the old Ford’s production line concept applied to information .
The system is not only an ideal tool to generate vast quantities of ideologically correct stories, it works well in the opposite direction, making it difficult to produce ideologically incorrect stories rendering censorship obsolete . In fact, trying to convey complex messages that are not in "tune" with these sets of conventions or frames through the broadcasting media is a daunting problem.
Here is where another important technique called concision becomes handy. In broadcasting media, messages have to be delivered in extremely reduced periods of time, in other words, it has to be done between commercials. This restriction works leveraging the effectiveness of framing.
Virtually, the media speaks in different languages, conveying multiple meanings simultaneously. The same TV program connotatively (by context) appeals to the groups who understand this specific connotative language. This means that completely different messages can be transmitted simultaneously over the same channel, each of them addressed to a different group of people. In practice it allows program producers to transmit messages to your own children without you even noticing it .
Building connotative conventions is a fundamental task assigned mostly to TV and film. Unfortunately, the conventions established by the media are not based on Shakespeare plays, as in the previous example, The Spice Girls are more likely to be the chosen subject. In the future (systems delay) these early-learned frames are going to be used to manipulate adults.
When frames are apprehended they become mental templates that we unconsciously use to validate the truth. Subjected to frames influence our logical and commonsense system will be automatically skipped. The net consequence is that regardless of the logic of what is displayed or stated by the media it will always seem to match our criteria of truth demarcation.
In this way the media becomes the mirror of reality because, as illogical as it sounds, the reflection becomes the reality. In fact the reality will be what the media shows. There is a known psychological principle which postulates that we tend to change the way we think in order to be consistent with what we act and say. People tend to use the frames promoted by the media unconsciously assimilating their ideological content. For instance, despite the fact that our common sense tells us that a marriage of people of the same sex could not be a real marriage because it won’t be possible to procreate, to TV addicts this will sound geometrically logical because we are trained to think (thanks to the use of frames) that a husband and wife are partners and not potential fathers and mothers.
The same process is applied in order to promote politicians. The politicians with greater appeal are the ones who use the frames already established by the media, in other words politically correct politicians. In this way the entertainers achieve two goals: firstly to control the politicians, and secondly, control the audience through them.
Politicians with different ideas or agendas will have "an image problem". They won’t have "frames" available to convey a clear message to the audience. Adding concision, the technique used in broadcasting to constrain a person to convey a message between commercials or on an extremely reduced time slots, these politicians won’t have a chance to convey their message.
It is no surprise that "public relations" companies prosper in this sort of democracy. They master the exploitation of media frames and, if you are useful enough to the entertainers, they will gratefully sow specially designed frames for you to crop during the next campaign. For example, if the cross-media system stresses the fact that despite the reduction in the number of unemployed people the youth unemployed figure remains high, just only a few month before the election, this is certainly sowing a frame for the opposition to use in their next campaign.
These irrational "templates", or frames are "distributed" disguised as tolerance, political correctness and even science. Every aspect of the modern life is constrained by them: sports, film, TV, magazines, science, and the Internet. The media have even converted scientists into stars in order to control them. I don’t know if Paul Davies fully understands what he writes, nor if he believes it, but he certainly knows what has to be said in order to "succeed".
Now we have "popular" scientific theories in the same way that we have "popular" and "unpopular" illnesses, such as homosexuality. Originally considered an illness until homosexual groups lobbied a "medical" congress to extirpate it from the DSM-II (USA diagnostic manual of psychotic disorders). Every meaningful social change in Western* society has to be able to be scrutinized and "approved" by the media, including scientific theories and illnesses. The fact that the entertainers are not consulted in the decision of maintaining celibacy votes, or electing the Pope, makes the Catholic Church a mortal enemy of the media.
This is the reason why the media welcomes everything that contradicts the doctrine of the main Western (without asterisk denoting the inclusion of Islamic societies) ecumenical religions. The Information Revolution is basically a fundamental change in the way man relates with god, the state and the family . It is fundamentally a revolution of power.
Advertise "Winners" and Hide or Attack "Losers"
I have already discussed how the media classifies the world in a dualistic or Zoroastrian way, good and bad. It is unnecessary to stress that good is essentially represented by the entertainers themselves, and their conscious or unconscious collaborators.
Most of the conscious collaborators are "paid with spices", they are Stars (reach and famous). But the media also have to deal with talented and successful people who don’t agree with their set of values, Mother Teresa for example. This people contradict or cast doubts on their partial view of the world.
The media model is under threat if a "loser" wins, so the tactic is to ignore or even hide those winners. If it is not possible, then they attack them on their values. Resorting to this tactic is always possible because as already discussed the media doesn’t promote an absolute, but a relative set of values. Then Mother Teresa, for example, can be blamed for being "too religious". In media standards being too religious is a demeaning fact if the victim of the attack is a Christian. Being "too religious" if you are Scientologist is perfectly compatible with Western* media standards and you are entitled to become a legitimate "winner".
The purpose of this practice is to boost collaborators and to reinforce the media model. I have already said that in a feedback system it is not possible to strictly define causes and effects, every action is a cause and an effect simultaneously. The net effect of this process is to generate artificial consensus on the "new" set of values. It is an artificial consensus because the media shows values held by a minuscule minority as widely adopted by the whole society. The Greek god of the flocks, Pan, will do the rest.
The winners personal life has to be known by the public. The fact that they don’t share the values of traditional society (in the initial phases of the media attack to a society) has to be promoted. Gossip magazines are fundamental components of the media system in this regard, their task is to show and promote the life style of the "rich and famous", letting us enter into their homes to share their happiness, even after their fifth divorce. This action constitutes a strong psychological motivation. As in a rite, people think that imitating "winners" behavior will automatically obtain the same rewards.
International prizes are another fundamental component of the media system . They are the public recognition of success. We said that the media owners categorize the people of the world into "goodies" and "baddies". There are no eternal "goodies", except the entertainers, and no eternal "baddies". Since the "goodies" are useful, they can switch categories as soon as they stop being useful or due to strategic needs. Arafat not only changed his status and image in the Western* world, it was also ratified by the Swedish crown by means of the Nobel Prize (see The world most dangerous terrorist is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.htm ).
There is a strong correlation between media "goodies" and Nobel prizes. What sort of control does the media exert over the Swedish Royalty in order to achieve this? I have to speculate about this issue but I’ve noticed how seldom the Swedish Royal family appears in the Western* media in comparison with the British Royal family. May be this is the price for privacy, a tacit defensive-offensive pact. This could explain the weird criteria sometimes exposed by Nobel Prize judges. For instance many people in the Spanish speaking world consider that the literary distance between Borges and Gabriel García Márquez is the same as between Plácido Domingo and Julio Iglesias in music. Nevertheless, Gabriel García received the Nobel Prize more likely because he has the required attributes of a "true" Latin American "Star", he is extremely anti-religious .
Assigning prizes is an important feedback process to validate what the Western* media inform-advertise through entertainment. TV addicts with a shallow time horizon , a blurred boundary between fantasy and reality , and a numbed capacity to generate abstract concepts , will accept without doubts that the prizes: Oscars, Nobel Prizes, Olympic medals are a real recognition of true quality. It doesn’t matter if Rocky won the 1975 Oscar for the "best" picture and, Mother Teresa (who saved thousands) and Rabin won the same Nobel Prize, or if teenage female swimmers have broader backs than world champion boxers. The show must go on!
I suggest giving Peace Nobel Prizes to "Stars", Chemistry Nobel Prizes to modern athletes, and Oscars to politicians in order to clarify the issue!
Include People Who Publicly Adopt the "Winner" Set of Values (anti-values)
I have emphasized how the entertainers indoctrinate people with a set of values carefully selected to antagonize prevailing values in order to reduce the power of the ruling institutions in a country they don’t control, or to "atomize" the society in a country they do control as in the USA.
A set of prizing systems are implemented worldwide to advertise the success of those who display "winners" values. But nothing is free in this world. The "goodies" in order to achieve success have to adopt a new set of values (which necessarily means to relinquish the old ones ). Then the media ensure that this "act of faith" is publicly known with the help of innocent "gossip" magazines and TV programs. They are not just frivolous pastimes, they are fundamental components of the information system .
In ancient Greece the Minotaur waited for the annual sacrifice of young people in order to maintain the "status quo" of the society. In the modern world we are sacrificing young people in order to maintain our "status quo". This modern Minotaur denotes sex, gambling and violence, actively promoted by the so-called "free press" through the movies, TV and radio, written media and the Internet.
This Escherian world requires "free press" to guarantee "democracy", but at the same time demands a massive audience to be commercially viable and psychologically effective . As soon as the quality of the information increases (for instance reducing the level of violence) the audience decays proportionally, thereby placing at risk Western* values. Thus we allow the media to devour our children in order to maintain an audience, which in turns support the media who guarantees our democracy and standard of living . We are sacrificing our kids in order to protect our standard of living .
The media defines a social paradigm: fame equals success . The fallacy is that success without fame is not considered valid by the ones who adopt this model. The entertainers have full control of fame, the left term of the equation, and by extension they manipulate us into believing that they control the right term, success.
Each person convinced of this fallacy, is a person under their control. For instance when the "artist" Andres Serrano (note that he is Hispanic) exhibited the picture titled "Piss-Christ" he gained fame and, in media terms, success. His success has to be sold as something desirable. The message is: if you want to succeed you’ll have to gain fame at any cost, even if that means prostitution or treason to your values.
Note that fame is a relative rather than an objective value. A world composed only by honest people is theoretically possible because honesty is an objective value. On the other hand, it is impossible to think on a world all composed by famous people because being famous is not an objective value, if everyone is famous the concept of fame vanishes. Conceptually, relativity is a common denominator in the entertainer's system, using a physic's analogy, electrical power is proportional to the differential of voltage. The power the entertainers exert over the population is proportional to the "differential of fame" between them. This is the reason that fame has to be administered properly allowing only a few people to get into the system and making a false promise of inclusion to the rest.
Promoting "Stars"
The previous sections describe how the media establish a set of values that systematically oppose and contradict the predominant ones of the society under attack. The next media action is to promote as broadly as possible the fact that stars possess a completely different set of values than the rest of the population. The discrepancy between the current values of the society and the values endorsed by the media are relative to the grade of indoctrination within the society. When the media starts operating in a society these values seem awkward and eccentric. Gossip magazines have a central role in the process of correcting this view. They are specifically designed to destroy the family promoting sexual promiscuity and family dissolution. They enter home through the mother and they are available to the whole family in particular children. Psychologically children are defenseless because they assume that something brought to the family by their mother can’t be deceitful or even dangerous. But the aim of these magazines, also distributed through newspapers, is to establish a strong subliminal relationship between "success" and way of life. This new way of life implies the destruction of the family, the basic element that can counteract the entertainer’s strategy.
These magazines rarely use the words husband and wife. Partner is the fashionable word. It is more appropriate because the word partner doesn’t have any religious connotation and also it is "unisex". Nearly all "successful" people (stars) have multiple marriages and this fact it is not shown as a painful social accident to be avoided, on the contrary, the magazines are strongly biased in support of divorce as a natural process.
The family presents the main opposition to the entertainers because it competes with them in the battle for indoctrination. Parents can teach that there is an objective set of values on top of what is promoted on TV and cross-media apparatus. Parent’s authority is challenged through "teenage culture". Ironically, even adults desire to be teenagers to share this culture. But this is not the only threat families pose to the entertainers, families tend to form groups in parishes. Note that I’m using the term parish in both senses, as a religious congregation and a neighborhood. Firstly, neighborhoods are a threat to entertainer’s anonymity, in a parish everyone knows the others parishioners who they are and how they live. Secondly, parishes constitute centers of political power. That is the reason that a "modern" democracy allows parties to present candidates without residence in the local community. Like public companies and corporations where ownership anonymity is the rule modern politicians are only images presented by the media, not real people. The neighborhood proves that it is possible to have a successful life without subscribing to the values the media promotes. It also can prove that the ideal life of the stars is not so ideal. This is the reason that media promotes family mobility. Essentially it is the inculcation of a nomadic way of life on sedentary people in order to uproot them.
There is no such thing as silent winners apart from the entertainers themselves. A "winner" has to be famous in order to be able to be controlled. They also have to be well known in order to be a role model to the public. The concept of "star" was initially created in the artistic arena, predominantly film. We tend to associate actors with the concept of star, but not all actors are stars, and not all stars are actors. For instance James Monaco in his book "How to Read a Film" states that Humphrey Bogart was a star but Liv Ullman was a star and also an actress. David Helgoft can be a star but he is not a great musician as is presented. This interesting concept was generalized in order to encompass art, science, philosophy, and religion. Scientist labeled as stars is a contradiction in terms but logic is not a threat for the media, in fact they defy it every single day and in infinite ways.
To become a "star" you must resign the preposterous values and traditions you where taught as a child. The real stars in the Western* world are sophisticated and suave, they don’t believe in their parents religion. They can be Scientologists like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, or Buddhists like Richard Gere in Christian countries. Let’s see what Philip Mc Carthy wrote for posterity in a February 1998 edition of The Sunday Herald:
" after all this time, it seems Richard Gere is still the only Hollywood star who is comfortable with wealth, stardom and spiritual beliefs ".
Obviously Philip didn’t read Quentin’s article about the scientologist stars, and probably he doesn’t know he is fulfilling a global strategy. I congratulate Gere, if his faith is sincere and not a promotion of his latest 1998 film "Red Corner". This film is set in China and apparently there are references to Tibet. This article is a text book of media tactics: a) it promotes a non-traditional religion, Buddhism in a Christian country, b) it mixes information, entertainment and advertising promoting a TV series called Law & Order, c) it promotes non-traditional values by stating that he just divorced but he already has another partner who coincidentally acts in the TV series Law & Order, d) it uses cross-media techniques promoting film, TV, and newspapers probably belonging to the economic monopoly; and e) the article contains a message destined to a different audience expressed by this cynical sentence: " Today, like an ultra-cool proselytizer, he’s happy to talk about the prayer beads; but somehow one senses that bringing up the Rolex might break the cosmic connection ".
This cynical comment not only casts doubts on Gere’s sincerity, but also stresses the incompatibility of a true religious life and the "magic" life of a star.
Hollywood politics: "China out of Tibet"
An article published by The Sunday Herald shows how science uphold the "modern" conception of family.
" Popular TV doctor Kerryn Phelps confirmed to The Sunday Herald last night details of her lesbian marriage to her long-term partner " (italics mine).
The article, unsigned, also "informs" that Dr Phelps appears regularly on Channel Nine in a current affairs program called Today, and that she also writes columns for The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, and a daily newspaper which is not named (probably a pseudo-competitor). Here we have the traditional mélange of information-entertainment-advertising in an article that only a few years ago would appear in gossip magazines, but in 1998 is good enough for a newspaper. This cross-media article stresses the fact that Ms. Phelps is a doctor. This fact makes the "marriage" more credible, in other words scientifically proven. The media owners master the manipulation of science and pseudo-science to support "modern" views and "new" trends in our society. Media competition in the Western* world exists only in an economic but not ideological sense. Reuter showed the way with his "combination ring" more than a century ago. Ideological competitors are systematically eliminated.
The entertainers know that people don’t read newspaper articles. I commented previously that society is becoming visual, thanks to TV training, with the additional advantage of reducing their capacity to generate concepts and to critically analyze information. This is the reason that the article’s titles become so important. The poison should be inoculated through the title or through a photograph with a caption in order to reach busy readers, less educated people, teenagers and children. The following article’s titles are examples:
This is a title of an article from a 1998 edition of The Sun Herald. Imagine your 9 year-old daughter asking you about the meaning of oral sex.
"Don’t be scared of the money"
recommends Richard Jinman in an article. Apparently members of the band U2 were concerned about their manager’s (a former TV director) over spending on special effects.
"Money is just the diesel that gets us to the next stage…"
Was his explanation. Very true indeed.
The message conveyed by the media is that the ones who accept their set of values will succeed, and became "winners". The ones that retain their values and traditions are anachronistic and are essentially "losers". Which do you want to be? This is the question every teenager, in 1998, has to answer. There are not many choices as the media promotes that to be famous is the way to succeed.
Success is the product of fame . A very convenient arrangement if you manage the levers of fame. Those that do what they are told will have the opportunity to become famous, the others will not, regardless of their talent. This conspicuous arrangement explains the flooding of mediocrity, and lack of talent currently in the art world. The "Condom Mary" sculpture, for instance, is considered art by the entertainers not because of its inherent artistic quality or the talent exposed by the "artist" but because it is anti-Christian. On the other hand, the public doesn’t know that only a few people become stars, and that most of the stars are "shooting stars" lasting only seconds in the media firmament, and then disappearing. But, even still, they are a useful lure for the next generation of "shooting stars". Nevertheless not everyone is convinced, the British singer Cat Stevens broke the entertainer’s trap probably best summarized by the words of his song "The Wind":
"…I swam upon the devil’s lake but never, never, never, I’ll
never make the same mistake…"
Media artists are not the only pawns in this chess’ game. Fame is a magnet to philosophers, politicians, scientists, and artists. Every domain of human expression is influenced. The tactic is the stick and the carrot. The media reinforce, in psychological terms, every idea that supports their tactical views and discourage the opposite. This is done regardless of the truth. For a start, faith is not considered a valid way to find truth. With this move religion is out of the way. Philosophically, the current fashion is nihilism: if there is no truth and reasoning is not the right path to know the truth, what is the purpose and meaning of life? To gain power is the answer. Everything is validated in order to gain power, but not everyone plays the same game. This is a crucial advantage for the entertainers.
The problem is that power for the entertainers means slavery for consumers. It means intellectual and economical slavery. Intellectual slavery, because the entertainers expect everyone to applaud the ludicrous nonsensical theories and "facts" they promote. Economical slavery, because the system is designed to discriminate against those who don’t accept media rules. The Western* world is free only if you do and say what is allowed by the Western* media, it is not a tautology it is a fact. Publicly expressing contrary opinions social discrimination or even death.
An American psychologist, Paul Vitz, wrote that “psychology is deeply anti-Christian and it is extensively supported by taxes collected from Christians”. In the same way the victims of the Western* media system, the audience, support it. The virtue of the system is that it is auto-financed. The victims, like slaves, maintain the system which is healthy and well funded. For instance, the money collected by the movie Titanic will be "reinvested" in an even worse, and more expensive movie. By analogy, the immense financial resources managed by the media will be reinvested in order to reach a larger audience with better propaganda techniques through more media channels. This constitutes one of the main important balancing processes in the Western* media system. From an economical point of view, this process tends to generate media monopolies and to accumulate enormous mass of capital. From the political point of view, its grip on the political and legislative system prevent the emergence of anti-monopoly legislation, or even the application of existent legislation. From the ideological point of view the Western* media is just one single monopoly.
Islamic groups in the USA learned that it is necessary to achieve financial independence in order to be able to succeed in the propagation of the faith. The entertainers need us, our children, and our work and our money. As Malcom X explains, none of the programs designed to assist black Americans teach that the real path to moral and religious independence is through economic independence. People intensely religious and spiritual tend to underestimate the power of money. Satan controls the world through money and, since the economical game is a zero sum game, the money gained for the faith is money and souls lost by Satan and his partners, the entertainers.
China is a favorite target in the Western* media, but their relationship is ambiguous. From one point of view China is a huge market and a formidable military and political power. On the other hand, China knows how to handle the greed of the entertainers by keeping them under control inside their territory. The entertainers don’t know how to handle this society that seems, for some reason, impermeable to traditional treatment. Woody Allen marrying his own Chinese stepdaughter seems to be trying to send a message.
A Social Paradigm: Fame Equals Success
Success means achievement of something. It implies an aim and an end. These aims are individual, every person consciously or unconsciously has them. There is also a hierarchy of aims, for instance we can assume than the aims of Mother Theresa are morally superior than Rupert Murdoch’s. Paradoxically, in spite of the promotion of social ultra-individualism the media intends to establish a single universal social aim, this is fame. Fame is closely related to material prosperity, achieving one leads to the other. Additionally, fame is "democratic" in the sense that anyone can achieve it being only required to do something extravagant enough to attract media attention. The trick is that fame is a variable under absolute control of the entertainers. Here is where the feedback system closes. Modern society is converting in a crazy race to achieve fame at any cost. This is the reason that the Guinness book of records has so much publicity and, of course, fame. In order to impose this idea the society is targeted in two different ways. Firstly, by attacking and neutralizing the established structures that defines the traditions of a country: culture, religion and social system. The entertainers challenge the essential values of the predominant faith and ruling class in order to become the moral arbitrator of the society replacing them. Secondly, establishing an a-priori link between success and fame in order to be able to physically manipulate people towards their aims.
To become famous is what the young most desire in the Western* world. Even parents won’t hesitate to utilize their children in order to achieve fame. The media puts infinite means at the disposition of people in order to achieve this. Children’s beauty contests are one example. Parents will do anything to obtain a contract to display their octuplets on TV. Teenagers will endure pornographic sessions in order to become famous. In the mean time, politicians are considering reducing the age of consent for homosexual relationships. Why not, homosexuals constitute another high-income minority that can be easily exploited by the media as a target for stratified marketing techniques and for political purposes. In addition, this attitude pays well in terms of political "image" for sensitivity to community issues. The entertainers know that to succeed requires talent and work, attributes over which they have no control. Establishing a virtual connection between fame and success based on the brutish formula of repetition through cross-media channels simultaneously overcomes this problem. This is the reason that Western* art at the end of the 20th century is a competition of anti-Christian nonsense. "Piss-Christ" and "Virgin Mary in a condom" synthesizes "successful" contemporary art. The best artist is the one who becomes famous in the shorter period of time, in order to achieve this they know that attacking and ridiculing the established religion will attract the maximum attention from the Western* media.
It is not a coincidence that most modern artists know the right recipes for fame and "success" established by the media. Salman Rushdie not only insulted Muslims, the faith in which he was raised, he overshot by insulting Christians. He wanted to be sure of acquiring success. He certainly received the fame he was after, with a little help from his friends. The prison wardens that held Martin Briant, who killed 32 people by shooting at random at Port Arthur in 1996, said in an interview that they don’t want him to feel that he is a special person. In fact he is a special person because he is famous, and being famous in a Western* society means to be successful. He probably believes that he has succeeded. It is an irony that the media virtually can’t report this event without giving him a certain aura of "success". But it is impossible to avoid it because the whole Western* media system is designed to produce this effect and can’t be voluntarily switch it off.
Ask a Western* teenager what he or she wants to be. The answer will be to become famous because being famous symbolizes success. It is not a mystery why religious vocations are declining in Western* countries and increasing in non-Western* countries. I do not believe the explanation that the high standard of life in Western* society is the cause. Human nature doesn’t alter so much as a result of material changes. The reason is simpler, it is the effect of a systematically organized and implemented propaganda campaign of the Western* media against the major ecumenical religions.
The media endorses a new set of values. Such values are shown as absolutes, and are carefully selected in order to antagonize the fundamental ones held by the main ecumenical religions. There is no coincidence, no mistakes, every central value is systematically challenged.
The following articles extracted from Australian newspapers (paradigm of both, Western* "free" press and economical monopoly) graphically describe how main ecumenical religions are attacked with impunity and ferocity. A Sun-Herald article appeared during February 1998 with the following title:
"Let’s humanize abortion"
Sue Williams, the journalist who wrote the article, criticizes Mother Teresa for being too religious. Sue recognizes that Mother Teresa would be much more effective if she had forgotten her religion. She argues:
"Mother Teresa would have been a much more effective
campaigner against poverty, oppression and general misery around the world if
she’d been a lot less religious".
After reading this paragraph it was difficult to contain my indignation. I would reply: Sue, dear, why don’t you go to India for, say 50 years, and show us how to do it? Later
Sue quotes Mother Teresa’s words:
"the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion"
and "informs":
"such nonsensical scare-mongering set the cause back years.
For even in Australia, where one out of every three women has had one or more
abortions, the whole subject is still shrouded in guilt, shame and
misery".
Subtlety is not one of Sue’s main virtues. The direct attack on Christian doctrine is evident, but it is not the central point of the article because the abortion debate is conducted in the political arena where the entertainer’s have absolute control over politicians. The article is not against Mother Teresa as a person, because it implicitly recognizes her work. But it is against Mother Teresa’s image. What concerns the entertainer’s is Mother Teresa becoming a paradigm, or a model of virtue. The metaphysical, the religious aspect is attacked and ridiculed because this is what the media fears. They deliberately misinterpret the fact that Mother Teresa’s work was consecrated to God.
The entertainers well know that most people don’t read the articles, but nevertheless the venom has to be inoculated. In order to achieve it, selected photographs with "catchy" captions are used. The article cited above features a "specifically selected" photograph of Mother Teresa with an interesting caption. The editor certainly chooses the worst available photograph of Mother Teresa to portray the act of demand.
The caption reads:
"DEMANDING: Mother Teresa preached
hope before practicality".
On the other hand the "journalist" is portrayed:
"Cool Sue"
Understanding how the media operates allows you to identify "goodies" and "baddies" just by the photographs in newspapers. It is very difficult to attack a person like Mother Teresa with impunity. So the tactic is to attack her image. These are the kind of people we are dealing with.
Every main ecumenical religion is attacked, not only Christianity and Islam. In India the media enemy are the Indus. The same day The Sun-Herald published the following Reuters’ article written by Sunil Kataria (don’t trust the name, could by an emulator of Demidenko)
The title reads:
"Spice Girls in hot water over heritage temple show"
"A reported proposal by the British pop group the Spice Girls
to perform in front of a 1,000-year-old Hindu temple known for its erotic
sculpture has sparked outrage among Indian artists and conservationists".
This is followed by some advertising:
"… the all-girl quintet, whose songs have topped pop charts in
31 countries, was expected to perform in October and November".
A photograph of the girls was added in order to be sure
that even the laziest reader would read the title with the racist and cynical
caption:
"Currying
criticism…"
Don’t think that only the entertainer’s provide material through which to attack religion. Unaware members of the church can also provide ammunition against themselves. The title of an article that appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald in 1997 reads:
"Pope’s letter is good news for all women".
Then explains:
"The Pope’s apology for the Catholic Church’s mistreatment of
women is a great moment and one of hope for the future, says Sonia Wagner,
Deirdre Rofe and Bernice Moore".
The article concludes:
"It could be argued that this letter has not changed anything
because it has not changed everything".
The article states in italics that Sonia Wagner is a congregational leader of the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, Deirdre Rofe is congregational leader of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Bernice Moore is NSW Co-ordinator of Women and the Australian Church. A cartoon portraying the Pope’s miter topped with the masculinity sign instead of the cross conveys the message to lazy readers.
Note the miter topped with the masculinity sign and the italics at the end of the article stressing that the interviewed people are active members of the church.
To divide society and unify the government is the media strategy for countries under their control. With this purpose in mind "feminism" becomes quite useful. The message is that the Catholic Church was "against" women before the apology. After the apology, if it really was an apology, the Church is still against women as it didn’t change "everything". The point is that it doesn’t matter what the Church does, its mere existence is a threat to the entertainer’s project. Every single doctrinal issue will be challenged because the Information Revolution is basically a religious revolution . The irony is that there is no one feminist who can match Mother Teresa’s achievements, even evaluating them with cherished feminist values such as worthiness, productivity, equality and independence.
Let’s consider an example where "flexible" media values are so flexible that they can become contradictory, in order to suit their strategic aims In this particular case the entertainer’s portray the "arbitrary" attitude of a Muslim government (Indonesia) towards women. In a 1997 article from The Sydney Morning Herald Louise Williams reports "Ugly row over student’s beauty contest exposure".
"Indonesia’s representative at the Miss Universe contest has
arrived in disgrace. She is accused of degrading Indonesian women by exposing
her body in a swimsuit in Las Vegas and she faces a new Government ban on
participation by Indonesian women in overseas beauty contests".
Now it is the turn of a Muslim country. Despite the fact that feminists consider beauty contests degrading and that the media support and promote feminism in Western* countries (as a new useful minority), in this case the entertainer’s judged it convenient, in apparent contradiction, to support this contest for two reasons. Firstly, it was performed in Las Vegas, an entertainer’s paradise and the prototype of the 21st century Western* world. Secondly, it is an effective way of annoying and dividing an Islamic society.
Indonesia’s representative, a law student (the article doesn’t specify for how long) defends herself citing:
"… the wider criteria of the contest as brain, beauty and
behavior".
Certainly, in a highly cultural city like Las Vegas there is no doubt that talent and brain should be one of the most important criteria for beauty contests, but the Indonesian’s Minister for Women’s Role (which ironically happens to be a woman) is not so convinced:
"the winner is measured by the size of her breasts, I’m sure
of that".
I must confess that I tend to agree with the Minister.
Gene Simmons (ex schoolteacher!) bass player of the band KISS was interviewed by John Encarnacao (I ignore if it’s his real name) in February 1997 for The Sydney Morning Herald. Mr. Encarnacao asks Gene if they are still playing with the same enthusiasm as when the band started
"Oh, God, yes, so much more so now. Scaling the highs of Mount
Olympus is beyond anyone’s expectations. To be the great it once, but to have
happen again… Now I know why that Jewish kid from Bethlehem, Christ, wants to
keep coming back – the second time is better. Now I get it"
was the unbelievable answer, but don’t stop reading because the best is still to come:
"So
you could tell Christ a thing or two about staging a
comeback
?" (Italics mine)
Encarnacao asks again, and Simon replies:
"From one Jew to another, yes" (Italics mine)
was the answer. Don’t you fill a cold shiver on your back after reading this?
Note that Encarnacao means incarnation in Portuguese.
Let’s consider a 1997 Sydney Morning Herald article signed
by Bob Beale titled
"Sisterly brothers"
. The
article is about The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
:
"This strange group of openly homosexual men (and now some
heterosexual men and some women) who dress as nuns – and adopt names such as
Sister sit-on-my-face and mother Inferior – would surely have been strongly
repressed, formally or violently or both, a few decades ago."
You might ask why do they dress like nuns?
"Religious intolerance is one of his targets, but
tackling aggressive male stereotypes within gay male society was just as much a
founding reason for the group’s emergence" (Italics mine).
is their answer!
The caption reads: "Founding sister … the Most Irreverent Mother Abyss" .
Bob Beale explains that Lo Schiavo, the group founder, suffered badly in the 1970s when he underwent "aversion therapy" and as a consequence of this he decided to form the group. This immoral nonsense, supported and promoted by the Western* media and complacently tolerated by media controlled governments, ends with the following phrase from Lo Schiavo:
"I have that feeling we’re on the edge of something, and if it
tips over we’ll be the first to go".
Note that when there is an overt attack on Christian religion in the Western* media it is always attributed to a person that seems to belong to a traditional Catholic society. Madonna ("the material girl" and "Like a virgin"), is Italo-American, John Encarnacao (if he’s not someone else, because encarnacao means incarnation) seems to be of Portuguese descent, Lo Schiavo (the founder of the sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) seems to be from Italian descent. The fact that the names may be just pseudonyms is irrelevant. What matters is what is reported, and the unconscious message conveyed is that people from Catholic countries are the most un-religious, which in fact is the opposite to reality. This is the reason why Antonio Banderas (Anthony Flags in Spanish) and Almodovar became so famous and adored by Hollywood. The entertainers love people who, like Demidenko, publicly reject their religious and cultural values, humiliate their country, friends, and family to become real "Stars" . If they don’t do it publicly by themselves, the gossip magazines (a fundamental and effective component of the entertainer’s system) will help.
These examples where taken exclusively from newspapers. I already stated that the function of the media is to INFORM ,ADVERTISE and ENTERTAIN. Newspapers are essentially considered information sources and these articles inherit that status in the eyes of unaware readers. Gossip magazines are generally considered an entertainment rather than an informative media but, nevertheless, they are substantially powerful propaganda tools, in particular when used against a group of people that challenges entertainer’s supremacy because the source of their power (birth) is independent of media scrutiny and validation, I’m referring to monarchies.
While the entertainers protect their anonymity very carefully they lure (pay is the prosaic term, sometimes can also be called bribe if the service required is more selective) Paparazzi to poke their noses into the royal lives. Just think on the symmetry of the system and you will see who is in control.
There is second purpose in publishing private life secrets of the "rich and famous", it is to create collective connotative meanings (frames) that can be shared by many people. The media will use them to convey ideologically biased information. There are frame structures built around Clinton and Saddam by the media on a global scale. Clinton is a Don Juan and Saddam a criminal. They also connote other concepts. Clinton is the President of the most democratic and free country in the world while Saddam is a tyrant of a Muslim anachronistic society, these frames will be used by the media to build other "politically correct" stories.
A third purpose can be defined. While the media pretends to convince Christians that a divorce, promiscuous sex and abortion is quite normal, the same occurrences in the British Royal family (for instance) is put out of context exaggerated and showed in a negative way. This is a favorite tactic widely used, in particular treating historical events. They take an event out of context and proportion in order to attack an institution in a very subtle way. For instance, the Western* cross-media published innumerable articles and produced countless movies and TV programs about the Inquisition. It is often quoted as an iniquity of the Catholic Church and a symbol of intolerance. Without making a judgment about it just putting it in historical context, avoiding the "shallow time horizon" effect that TV produces, it is evident that the number of people sentenced (less that 2,000) is not comparable with the number of people who died during hundreds of years of economical exploitation o f African slaves, for instance. It was needed an extremely sanguinary war to free them in "the country of freedom". From an objective point of view this is probable the worst crime committed by the Western* civilization because it was driven by greed, it lasted for a greater period of time, children, and the children of their children, were kidnapped, raped, exploited, tortured, and killed. If Western* society is in debt to somebody it is with to the descendants of the African slaves. Immense masses of capital where made with this shameful traffic. Where is the profit obtained with their sacrifice? What is the responsibility of companies like British South Sea and Rothschild? Who were responsible? Is there any investigation in course to identify them? Is there any reparation? None of these questions have answers. As you can see, the media shows an event that happened more than 400 years ago as more "actual" than one that ended nearly 100 years ago with the consequences still burning. Why does this happen? It happens because African, and African Americans specifically, don’t have any control over the Western* media. Justice and the image of Justice are two completely different things, even in "the country of freedom".
The media "changes" the story according to their needs. It converts drug dealers into heroes and heroes into criminals. Like the Boxers in 1860’s Opium wars, the American Indians fighting for their land were savages and the white man, who exterminated them, were the "goodies". The tactic is to present events out of proportion using visual rhetoric, sentimentalism, mixing reality, fiction, past, present, and future. The basic problem is that there is no truth for media owners, only relativism and utilitarianism. They attack any institution that offers fundamental and basic values that are not susceptible to "validation" or "approval" through a "democratic" process controlled by the media. The entertainers task is to rule the world, and history is just another tool for manipulation. With this attitude and tactics, the Western* media pretends to be the "faithful mirror of reality" and to set-up a universal standard of morality.
The main variable of the media system is public opinion, which is the number of people who adopt media values. Think of those people that attend mass but still think that homosexual marriages are possible, or those who accept abortion. The media is changing our minds, drastically for some people, and subtlety for others. It can also physically infiltrate churches themselves. In the USA, even a person who prays every day is subjected to infinite more hours of propaganda through the media (TV and newspapers). Ortega y Gasset wrote an essay called The Revolution of the Masses. A new essay has to be written and called "The Revolution of the Media through the Masses".
The favorite tactic of media owners is to divide the society into as many minorities as possible to leverage their own. The smallest and most vulnerable minority are you alone. Modern society alienates people through the usurpation of basic human needs such as love and acceptance. They promote divorce and home mobility in order to destroy the family and the community. Promoting the cult of individuality they aim for the smallest possible minority, yourself alone. The objective is to have a majority of sole parent women working 40 hours per week whose children are raised by strangers watching Bananas in Pijamas on TV, and men struggling to obtain material possessions such as cars, computers, and TVs, without a stable family, community, friends and church. In other words to alienate parents and educate children via TV. This is the ideal human material for the entertainers to manipulate and exploit, and this is what the media consistently indoctrinates.
This explains the cult of individualism and selfishness overflowing through the pores of every "modern" "successful" piece of art. Madonna and Andres Serrano, perpetrator of the "masterpiece" Piss-Christ (a picture of a crucifix immerse in urine), are two faces of the same coin. Faith should be eliminated to control the mind, if it is not possible, then mimesis will be used. The aim is to promote a new faith to replace the previous one. Any faith that opposes the doctrine of the prevalent one creates division and confusion generating as many minorities as possible. This guarantees that each minority will hold a minimum amount of power. It is even better if people join more than one minority. Then loyalties will be divided further, weakening their power.
I have already written about the pervasive influence of TV. But the venom has to be administered constantly to be effective. The entertainers infiltrate the church, schools, and politics through the bridge of psychology.
The entertainers are very conscious about the powerful need of the man to relate to god, in order to make their attack on the ecumenical churches more effective and permanent they implemented two strategies: mimesis and the promotion of psychology.
Using mimesis the strategy is to promote pantheism in monotheist countries, and monotheism in pantheist countries. Pantheism has to be packaged for Western* consumption as Lutzer and DeVries stated. Animal rights and environmentalism are the suitable packages.
"When you come back as a whale you’ll be bloody glad you put
Greenpeace in your will"
States an "environmentalist" card.
But the entertainers know that the human need to establish links with god are powerful, then to overcome this problem two strategies are used, the use of mimesis and psychology.
A wide range of options are offered in replacement of true religious experiences, but the truth: reincarnationism, channeling, transmigration of souls, a metaphysical interpretation of the Darwin theories, modern pseudo-science, relativism, rock music and "modern" art, esotericism, drugs, horoscopes, and occult powers. From the philosophical perspective the entertainers systematically promote that there is no such a thing as an objective truth and reality is just what is portrayed by them through the Western* media.
A 18th century philosopher said that psychology is the asymptote of materialism. And it certainly is! With the promotion of psychology the entertainers try to isolate the individual from other people who can bring them back to rationality. But, to justify the existence of "doctors" it is necessary, first, to have illnesses. This is the reason that the media systematically promotes the myth of mental illness and the psychiatric and psychological industry. Mental illness is just a metaphor used to gain economic and political power. Paul Vitz, a professor of psychology at New York University wrote:
"psychology as religion exists…is deeply antichristian… it is
extensively supported by schools, universities, and social programs financed by
taxes collected from Christians".
In the USA there are psychologists for pets! It is outrageous that children are dying from famine in Africa while people in America hire psychologist for their pets. But there is no contradiction. In a materialistic world a rat and a baby are the same thing. You can kill a baby in the same way you kill a rat. It is equally valid to claim: save the whales! Simultaneously supporting killing babies in the uterus.
With the division of the society, media owners try to unify the government of the Western* world based on the USA model, the one they can best control .
In 1998 you may ask who really governs USA, Bill Clinton (while is not running after a lady around the oval office) or the "team" composed by Albright, Cohen, Ruby, Greenspan, & Co. They promote global citizenship and interdependence of nations, the creation of a world electronic currency , world disarmament under the control of the media owners; atheist governments; and multinational consolidation of commercial and banking interests . The media attacks every human organization that is not already under their control: religion; monarchies; countries; intellectual, political, social and economic groups. Since most Western* countries are Christian, the attack by the media to the Churches is continuous and ferocious.
At this point I would like to establish what it is my position with respect to the media and I must confess that I have two approaches, one theoretical and another practical.
Establishing an ethical hierarchy of media functions it is evident that the most important is information. Why information is ranked first? It is because it is intrinsically associated to truth, if the media doesn’t reflex the truth it is producing disinformation instead of information. Philosophically it is possible to argue that truth can’t be known nor achieved, but in that case the notion of information is useless, and the purpose of this essay and your own life is meaningless. Thus, assuming that truth objectively exists and it can be known or obtained, information is essentially the transmission of truth between human beings and it is independent of any other factor, including self-benefit. Entertainment follows in this ethical hierarchy. The purpose of entertainment is neither to transmit the truth nor to necessarily obtain a benefit from it performance, it is ethically neutral and this is the reason why is used as a link between information and advertising. From the three functions of the media, advertising is ranked third in the ethical scale because it is performed with a clear intent to move the audience into action regardless of the truth or even their own interest in benefit of at least a third part. From a theoretical point of view it is evident that the three functions are intrinsically incompatible. Allowing the same group of people or organization to perform all three functions simultaneously with any sort of controls or limitations it is simply just to voluntary reject the right to know the truth.
From a practical point of view it is impossible to split all three functions because they are superimposed and intertwined very tightly, any attempt to split them up would be unsuccessful. For instance, it is true that it is impossible to the whole world to know that an earthquake occurred in Italy by direct means, but it is also true that the Western* media is an ideological monopoly and it will certainly treat quite differently for instance a slump in the Indonesia’s stock market than a slump in the USA’s. The reason is clear, with the end of the cold war there is a minimal risk of a world nuclear confrontation. Thus the USA became the safest place for the entertainers to store capital. This is the reason that the "experts" are recommending to third world countries to exchange national reserves by USA bonds. The interest paid by the bonds will be the price for the loss of economical sovereignty. The point is that it is naïve to consider that state controlled press agencies are always wrong and the "free" Western* media is always right, as we tend to believe in the West*. Both can be wrong and right depending on the topic they are reporting. Some issues such as media laws the non-Western* media could be more accurate and honest. On the other hand, government controlled media could be less accurate reporting on its own governments. The Europeans, in general, consider government controlled media as much more accurate and reliable than the American, despite of the 1993 Bangemann recommendations to the European Council proposing the "liberation", market-driven revolution, of the media in Europe for the next millennium. If this plan is implemented it would be the triumph of brute force and a disgrace to humanity. This is just an example of the degree of pervasiveness of the Western* media owners and their model. Uncensored, multiple, independent, media is the best guarantee for the public. That means the destruction of Western* ideological and economical media and cross-media monopolies through comprehensive laws, and more important, the implementation of a program to promote healthy skepticism of the media. This program can only be successful if it is implemented by the prevalent religious organizations of each country, resisting the attempts of the media to obtain control.
The media works on an ideal world of images. The entertainers are the creators of those images and they put themselves in outstanding positions in this imaginary system. With the leverage provided by the control of the media, enormous masses of capital, and the aid of propaganda techniques, they try to replace the real world with the imaginary one. But the magicians can perform magic only with the complicity of the auditory, it is necessary for a voluntary suspension of incredulity by the audience to successfully perform an act of magic. In the same way, the entertainers have real power only with the complicity of the audience, which is the whole Western* world. The fundamental issue is that this fantasy world exists while people believe in it. The world spins around credibility. Politicians are elected because they are credible, shares are bought in response to imaginary trends, credits are assigned based on credibility, confidence in the economy is based on reported facts we believe correct, prizes are granted based on image and sales trends, and people believe that prizes represent true quality. We don’t perceive facts directly, all of them are processed and filtered by the media. There is a gap, or delay in systemic jargon, between when something happens and it is reported. This "gap" is used by the entertainers to take advantage of facts or to distort reality according to their model. It is basically like a geometrical trick in Escher’s drawings, this giant schema is waiting for somebody with enough credibility to exclaim: the king is naked!
At the end of our journey we discover that the Information Revolution is not a technological revolution, it is neither irreversible nor unchangeable like the Industrial Revolution. It is the prosaic work of well-organized group of people with clear aims and objectives. It is a religious revolution in the sense that it intends to substitute faith in God with a more manageable faith, that of fame equaling success. It is also a social revolution, like the French Revolution, because it is a revolution of power. Political power gained controlling people’s minds, which in democratic societies simply means demagogy.
Adam and Eve vs Garry Linnell
OR...
The Theory of Evolution is not a Joke
Reading Garry’s article in the Good Weekend Magazine of the SMH (24th
February 2001) I was mystified to discover that there are still people who
believe in Creationism instead of the well-proven law of Evolution.
I believe that it is my duty (a compulsion in the words of my analyst)
to enlighten those poor minds that are still living in the Dark Ages.
Since it is obvious that the Creationists are impermeable to logic and
common sense I won’t attempt to follow this path to convince them of their
error. Instead I will use an analogy that, I’m sure, will clarify their minds
ipso
facto
.
The process of creation is analog to the process of drawing or
painting. We need an operator, an artist, an idea (software) and, voila,
we have an entity that came from nothing.
Let’s create something simple like a horse.
Creating a horse is very easy if you follow these steps:
a) Start with block
shapes.
b) Add sticks.
c) Get the proportions
right
d) The tough part has been done, the rest is easy. Just show where the horse’s muscles are, add ears, lower legs and hooves, nostrils, mane etc. I’ll leave this trivial exercise to you, I’m sure your horse will look very similar to mine if you followed the steps specified above. The final result is displayed in pictures below.
The law of Evolution
I’ve already demonstrated how easy it is to create a horse, now we will see how the whole universe was created following the same method.
a) The primeval soup. After the great Big-Bang and a rather esoteric sequence of events, earth’s primeval soup was ready to give birth. Like in Shelley’s Frankenstein, a mixture of non-living components was ready to produce the first living (self reproducing) cell. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that experiments in the lab consistently refused to reproduce this phenomena, it is more likely to be due to the incompetence and negligence of our scientists.
b) Suddenly, Pop! The first unicellular living entity, potentially a person, popped-up from the primeval soup. Let me introduce our relative the amoeba. Despite that he/she may be one of our earlier ancestors, he/she is incredibly modern in the sense that it is bi-sexual. There is no Mr. or Ms amoeba; they reproduce themselves just by cell division. This means that when the amoeba is about to split in two, it first makes an exact copy (or quasi exact copy) of the set of chromosomes to give to the duplicate. If the duplication of the chromosomes is not exact we are in the presence of a mutation. The halve that received the modified set of chromosomes will be slightly different from the original one. This will be reflected in changes (morphological and/or functional) of the new amoeba. These differences (produced at random) can be beneficial or detrimental for the new amoeba. The environment and the law of the survival of the fittest will filter them out. If the change (don’t forget that was at random) was detrimental, the new amoeba won’t survive to reproduce and the change will disappear from the evolution line. If the random change was beneficial, the new amoeba will be able to reproduce and multiply the improvement. Below is the picture of an amoeba giving birth, a process called fusion.
c)We have already created life! Now the evolution is unstoppable! The amoeba’s descendants, thanks to random changes and the survival of the fittest quickly developed the faculty of moving through the environment. They developed cilias, some sort of hairs connected to muscles that allowed the paramecium to move across the environment. A mouth and a prototype of a digestive system were also developed. Considering that all these organs were developed at random without any plan, coordination, or intelligence it’s a real miracle. Below there is a photo of our great granddad the Paramecium.
d) It’s all done! Now comes the easy part, a few more random changes and we arrive at the human being. Nevertheless, reaching this stage was just a matter of time.
Conclusion
In short, the law of Evolution is no more than a blind exercise of trial and error without any plan or meaning.
Theoretically, if we live enough, we can write all possible books just combining the letters of the alphabet at random. A patient reader will eliminate nonsensical books (acting in the role of survival of the fittest) and the remaining will be the set of all possible books.
This approach is theoretically possible; the problem is the time involved in the exercise. Is the universe old and resourceful enough to indulge in this profligate process?
Believing in Evolution doesn’t exempt us from relying on faith. We have to have faith that it is possible to create life out of no life without divine intervention. We have to have faith that random changes (mutations) can develop extremely complex systems such as sexual reproduction that involve multiple organisms. We have to have faith that there was enough time in the history of the universe to try and discard the vast amount of failures. We have to have faith that probably nature tried animals with wheels instead of legs or wings. We have to have faith that we can obtain a primeval soup out of nothing (the big-bang just defers the question a few steps further away).
You are required to trust far too much without any proof from scientists, such as Ian Pilmer Professor of Earth Sciences at Melbourne University, who loose their temper when they are contradicted without adding any value or logic to the argument.
There is no doubt that the theory of the Evolution is just a myth that has to be carefully learned to pass State designed exams.
The Evolution theory affair is an ideological one and it has nothing to do with science, it has anti religious connotations and in this context is wielded.
The fundamental question can be formulated like this: Is the Evolutionary theory plausible? Can it be demonstrated?
The answer, despite multiple attempts to deviate attention to other fields such as religion, is a rotund no to both! A reassignment of resources and changes in the official syllabus are long overdue.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario