I’m convinced that the constant focus on pornography and violence is a distraction from what is really wrong. A subject that the media, owned by those that benefit most from peddling the false porn and violence narrative, refuses to speak on. Inequality, and every social malady it drives, that is the real problem. I’m not going to try to convince you that your focus has been pointed in the wrong direction.
There was no social media, no Pornhub, no internet, when the ripper was active, or Ted Bundy, or the Wests. I watched the Simon Schama documentary series on BBC iPlayer, The Story of Us. In it is footage of an anti-pornography protest from 1971, depicting people acting and talking as if sexual awareness and voyeurism would be, or were already, the fall of western society. Pornography is not new, Pompeii is littered with pornographic imagery, yet it was a volcanic eruption which doomed that great city of pleasure. It’s not my job to point out that pornography is not harmful, nor is that entirely my position. Pornography is harmful to those that it is harmful to. I merely feel compelled to point out where an argument, a reason given, is obviously in error. We all should be up to this sort of thing, pushing over what is shaky simply because it is shaky. Pornography is a performance, like a play or a drama, if you come to believe that this is reality you will be influenced by it. If that were the case though you are deficient in the first place, you seek it so that it validates what you already think, it does not seek you.
As long as there have been people there has been desire, some acceptable, some not, and this is per the times. James Bond is a misogynist to us now but was a beacon of masculinity at the time. As for violence, according to Stephen Pinker, a professor of sociology and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, we live in what can be proven to be the most peaceful, least violent, epoch in history, but one where fear is still a great motivator of decisions and clearly understood to shape how folks use their political capital. It has always been so, people as a mass are compelled by their fear. To compel the mob, the people, into supporting the military wishes of the ruling classes, a certain amount of fear generating is necessary, this was the same in antiquity as it was for Tony Blair in 2001. The term is ‘Wolf Devil’ and it means a suggested enemy presented by a social movement or ambitious political power. The wolf devil is often the young with their strange haircuts and their lazy entitled nature, it was the same in my day as it is now, or changing sexual practices and beliefs that threaten to derail our Abrahamic archaic morality as we understood and interpreted it, acting as we the previous generation. But what harm could it do me for others to feel and act differently than I do, what harm occurs because of a thrupple, or an orgy, or wife swapping, or promiscuity, if these acts are performed by persons who can handle them psychologically and safely? I say none, I’m honestly more bothered by noise pollution and inconsiderate parking than I am by anyone’s sexual habits.
A violent society is certainly something worth worrying about and taking action over, but I believe the answer lays in understanding the reasons behind such behaviour, not in coping with the behaviour itself. Why are young people carrying knives they are willing to use, why does this present to them a solution to whatever problem they face, and how has this situation arisen? Since there is a distinct correlation (correlation does not always mean causation) between inequality and criminality, I would assume (and I may be wrong) that studying the effects of inequality on social cohesion and crime would yield some useful data. The TV series The Wire, set in Baltimore (USA) depicts a society where, for the criminal, it is very hard to escape the social conditions they are born into, because there are no opportunities to flourish or realise the potential of the individual. Using this example, can we find where young persons are forced to be the way they are, or at least encouraged by inequality to act the way they do? Fear of the other persons in the same circumstances, competition with them for the available opportunities that may have diminished, or bleak hopelessness that mobility on an upward trajectory is even possible, may drive persons toward what they see as opportunities to make good, and that may mean criminality.
I do not suppose that most people are criminally minded, but I assume that given the correct circumstance then anyone is capable. For persons of power and wealth, they tend to make the social fabric, so they often make it so that their theft is not a criminal offense. So when a politician makes a deal ,using public money, with a person that they then benefit from financially or in power terms, no legal crime has been committed. Yet when a person from a background of poverty commits a crime because they have much less choice than our aforementioned rich person, then they are a criminal. What we can learn from this is that criminality, debauchery, anti social behaviour, are all judged according to who it is that is falling to them, and we can illustrate this with examples for you to consider…
A man kills another man because he is competing for the same territory within a criminal business endeavour, so the man is punished. At the same time a group of political figures sanction the armed forces to kill tens of thousands of persons, perceived enemy and civilian, in a foreign land, to protect the need for a resource to continue to be available at the prices our politicians think should be paid to get access to it.
A young woman steals a box of fish fingers from a supermarket because she has no money. At the same time a political figure has claimed government expenses for stationary to send greeting cards to their friends during a holiday period.
One is two kinds of Murder, the other is two kinds of theft. Yet the crimes I describe are only crimes if they are performed by those we can identify as ‘criminals’, and this description seems only to apply to the persons with the least wealth and power.
The media never seem to focus on social inequality as a explanation of the current problems within society, and we should question why that is and who does it server? Each one of us can view before us the problems of the country and our towns, we are all touched by criminality at some point in our lives unless we get really lucky, and each of us feels the shrinking state in terms of provision for money (services), so why do we never talk about those as being the ills of the day? We are smart people are we not? The answer is simple, yet hard to accept, because we do not feel, or more accurately we strongly wish not to feel, like we are a victim of propaganda and manipulation. A person feels smarter to themselves than they might actually be in reality, none of us likes the idea that we are being programmed. In fact, when you point it out, most people will argue against the postulate that they are vulnerable to programming. People believe that TV advertising is for everyone else, that it doesn’t work on them. So why would TV advertising exist if everyone knows it doesn’t really work?
The reason is that it works, and spectacularly, it works so well that it appears to not work at all. If you know you’re having medicine you can choose to stop, but if you think you are not, and you are, then you cannot start to think that you have the choice not to. This is the way influence works, not the Instagram version where you sign up and tune in, but the nefarious version that looks like an offer, but in reality is an imperative. Fear drives imperative action, and only in positioning any choice other than acting as advised, as unwise or foolish, does it contain the semblance of choice at all. What psychologists know is that if one person feels that everyone else is leaning toward the adoption of an advisement, then they will wish not to miss out, or be left out, from the benefits of the obviously wise choices their contemporaries have made. It does not have to be true that everyone else has made a conscious decision, all that needs to happen is that the mass body of people act as a directed mass, by thinking that they are making individually rational evaluated choices based on the information that they have come to believe as factual. This information is not a fact however it is suggested, and at no point is a lie necessary, the suggestion will work well enough.
We can see this in a simple toothpaste advert, where the suggestion is that a group of experts will recommend that you use X-Brand toothpaste, after 15 seconds of claiming it as having the properties that enrich your oral hygiene (which may not be false). What is happening here, what is not the suggestion, is that someone is saying that a toothpaste, this toothpaste, would be recommended by a dentist. That is likely true, dentists recommend that you brush your teeth, with toothpaste, the rest of the advert is flannel, suggestion. This works because psychologist know how to present a suggestion and have it adopted as a belief, the same can be said for governments. When a politician suggests a policy, they are not making a promise that outcome X will derive from action Y, they are gambling that their suggestion will get people to vote them into a position where they can then discard this suggestion a just that, your misunderstanding of what was not actually stated, and then do whatever they intended to do in the first place. They have not lied, but that is a shallow defence, they have led you astray.
Politics is a distraction in this way, and so is media. While we the people chew the insignificant stuff, the important stuff is presented as merely a necessity. The insignificant stuff is presented as that which we have choices in, like corporate work from home policies, what bathroom does a woman with a penis use, should the TV celebrity be allowed to be cheeky to the staff, who is breaking up with who, what movie has the correct amount of people of colour in it to satisfy our false guilt, etc etc? Social questions are at the forefront of our thinking and it is not accidental, especially concerning perceived rights, and although there is legitimacy to these I am sure, they are not what really matters in the grand scheme. If we were to evaluate the focus of persons on aspects of their own existence, we might find that they accept the suggestions of the media on what to focus on, what to be upset about, what to think is important, and most specifically what to just accept without thought. But how do people who we might assume once set out to reveal truths and do proper journalism, end up being megaphones for this nonsense? I think two factors are at play, the first is that they fall victim to the same propaganda and bullshit as the rest of us do, they come to be focussed on social truths and what sells copy. The second, again this is just my theory, is that consistently reasonable journalists do not make it onto mainstream public platforms because of the subject matter they stick to, being not what the owners of those platforms wish to be at the forefront of the public consciousness.
I think it’s deliberate, it’s nefarious, it’s ever been so, and it likely ever will be…
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