Remember Archie Bunker from the 1971 TV show All in the Family? In it’s stride, it was a number one show and drew viewers from over 21 million households.
By the Hollywood standards of then and today, Bunker was a authoritarian, racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobic “Nazi.” He used nearly every religious and ethnic slur you can think of. For example, he noted that black men or “spooks” were natural athletes because, “It’s in their blood… inherited from the time their forefathers were in the jungle running barefoot through all those thorns and thickets with tigers on their butts.”
The show was meant to be a liberal morality tale and condemn Bunker’s backward prejudices. President Richard Nixon described All in the Family as “that show that makes fun of a good man.” Meanwhile, critics argued that it glorified prejudice because the character was well written enough to be relatable. Over time, they feared, the subtlety of the message would be lost.
But Bunker was also pro-union worker living in Queens, NY in the 1970s. By that standard, he would have indisputably been a Democrat. At the time, every real-life working class man of Bunker’s position and temperament was a Democrat.
Why Norman Lear, the show’s producer, wrote Bunker as a Republican is a mystery to me, but I suspect that as a lifelong Democrat, he simply couldn’t stand to criticize his party which was in intense opposition to the hated Nixon. It was absurd to make him a Republican, but it was also prophetic, because in the 50 years since, Bunker has become Hollywood’s preferred image of a white, working-class, middle-age male.
So which came first, the reality or the image? Perhaps they came into being together.
This relationship between image and reality wasn’t lost on Lear who started the Lear Foundation, which now lobbies to insert progressive story lines and messaging into television and media productions.
The Lear Foundation receives funds from the government as well as private foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, ClimateWorks and other organizations which are well known to conservative critics. The Lear Foundation and others like them use grants to promote political ideas on TV like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). They lobby to insert plot lines or characters into popular shows relating to nuclear weapons, cyber-security as it relates to alleged Russian “collusion,” inclusion of minorities who are culturally indistinguishable from everyone else and more.
Is there anything wrong with what they do, aside from being inauthentic and a bit underhanded? Maybe not, but I’ve always resented this method of reality shifting.
Like advertising or music in a news piece, “idea placement” and emotional manipulation is an assault on the autonomy of the individual. It doesn’t matter what the message is, or whether I agree with it or not, it’s the mere attempt to subvert my reasoning that bothers me. However, there is another problem with all this centralized manipulation and messaging though. It undermines our personal perception of reality and this can have long term effects.
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It’s been long understood by central planners of the past that when you change the language, you change the discourse. Changing or eliminating language alters the way those ideas spread. This was discussed at length in George Orwell’s 1984, where altering the language creates a mental block which prevents ideas from being expressed or even understood.
Today’s social engineers believe that in an image based society, its not enough to change the language, successful societal change requires changing the image. Over the last 50 years, popular images have been manipulated to create the illusion of a parallel society, which for many, is more real than their own lives.
For the benefit of advertisers, this kind of micromanaging of TV images is usually aspirational, promoting an image of a prosperous middle class, with gigantic homes and brand new cars. But they also promote action on man-made climate change, the use of vaccines, and the acceptance of marginalized groups. The plan is to create an image of the society they want on TV, and wait for reality to bend and match it.
You might be skeptical about how much of this influencing actually works, but televisions, like God, are omnipresent. More than 99 percent of Americans have a TV in their homes and the average individual watches 4 hours of TV a day. TV functions like hypnotism or sensory deprivation, blocking out the dominant reality and focusing all attention on the image, which gives their messages even more weight.
Umberto Eco once wrote, “Mass media do not transmit ideologies; they are themselves an ideology.” In an image based society, images supplant individual experience.
Jerry Mander, author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), writes:
“Knowledge that television programs were fictional does not prevent one from ‘believing’ them anyway, or at least gaining important impressions which lead to beliefs.
“You see Archie Bunker or the Waltons solve a family problem. You find yourself in a family situation which is not dissimilar. The image flashes past. You may reject it, but… if that’s the only imagined instance you have available to call upon for such a situation, you are somewhat more likely to be influenced by it. You don’t interrupt your behavior to say, ‘Wait a minute; I’ve got to keep straight my bank of television imagery from my bank of real-world imagery.’ The mind doesn’t work that way… All images are real.'”
While you and I may feel that we are wise enough to recognize their ham-fisted attempts to reshape reality and ignore it (in much the same way we’ve adapted to ignore advertising), there is still a disconnection between experience and reality.
Un-realism is an inseparable component of modern living. Our town centers have become what James Howard Kunstler calls a “Geography of Nowhere.” Our roads through them are merely utilitarian transit passages with the same 6 or 7 cube and rectangle shaped stores repeated over and over again. Many jobs produce nothing of material value and provide no personal meaning. As a society, we are massively over-socialized with meaningless rules that require us to behave counter to our true feelings.
It’s reasonable to suspect that the result of all this unrealism would cause bouts of depersonalization, a psychological disorder in which a person believes he or his surroundings aren’t real. An individual’s very sense of self is threatened, and as we’ve established countless times before on this site, identity problems lead to violence. In the most extreme examples, mass shooters depersonalize both themselves and their victims prior to their attacks, often as a diagnosed side-effect of their medications or withdraw.
Socialists, social justice proponents, and central planners generally are always trying to redefine reality to shape public opinion, but they rarely seem to get what they want. All they end up doing is exposing that reality isn’t real. It’s all a malleable illusion, a green screen without boarders that fewer and fewer people are willing to accept.
(*As a side note, Sociologist David Riesman once noted the prosperity of the 1950s had made Americans “other-directed” and concerned about their public image. The resulting hyper-conformity created an extremely stable and secure, but also highly neurotic population. This lead directly to the counterculture rebellion of the 1960s and eventually to today’s post-modern rebellions. Now we have much more freedom, but no security that comes from belonging to a group. Hence, the rapid increase in groups attempting to create a new identity.)