Most of these things are so obvious I don't see the need to talk about them. But some people can't see too well when it comes to something so familiar.
Nothing is static, nothing stays like it is. That's universal. Especially something like television, which dropped in on the family less than a hundred years ago, you can expect rapid and dramatic change with that, in it and around it. And because of it.
There's guys around who are older than me, who were teenagers before there was a TV in the house. That right there leaves most people vague. Kind of a "Huh?" followed by a "So what?"
But any thought at all would tell you what, it's got to be hugely different. You just won't be able to know how. Unless you're one of those rare kids brought up without one.
This isn't about TV though, it's about who's there, inside the TV. Whose personalities are being broadcast, whose template's being used to shape the next generation; and especially, once that starts, who's riding that huge wave of transformative energy.
Those guys that didn't have one, they went to school with the people who started their careers in the industry, people born in the late 1930's, early 1940's. They know those tones of voice, those faces. And there's those faces and voices beaming out unto the land. And writing and directing, and making corporate decisions about what to air.
Millions of people, hundreds of millions now, getting their lives shaped by that central station. And the guys I'm talking about were cooler than who showed up on the box. That's the main point. Most of them were real uncomfortable about letting their kids have unrestricted access to the TV. If at all.
It is a tool of leadership, and instead of human leaders we got shepherd's crooks and barking dogs, and mediocre in-betweens. And I don't mean to be denigrating all the decent folk who worked in broadcasting and did the best they could. But it wasn't the best of us doing their best, that's the point.
You had a tool that reached virtually everyone; and instead of it being used to lead, it was used to control. To herd, to trick and beguile.
The big question is - by who?
And it's the same with the psychic environment created by the real-time surveillance auditors today. You have this consciousness permeating the atmosphere around the entire human landscape - it's a rare place in the US now where you don't have that 60-cycle hum and its unblinking gaze. And the minds there, the watching minds, are mediocre, infirm, innocent in some ways, but whatever else they are they are not in any way leaders. They are not guides.
They are not paternal, in the fullest most human sense of paternity; and they are absolutely not maternal, in no way are they anything like maternal. Just as with the television and its minders. A maternal television would heal and teach, strengthen and shelter. A paternal television would teach and guide, and listen. What this current instance of the universal link does is trick and deceive, shock and cajole, browbeat and intimidate, and indoctrinate. It lives with the family, in the home, but it doesn't act like a member of the family.
The technologies of surveillance are an extension of the television's attachment. And employed to the same design.
What we have is a steady progress toward the paddock and corral. Toward the milling herd, waiting in its own dust.
What I'm saying is that these tools were not employed for the betterment of the human race, they were employed to control. Subtly and with a lot of incompetence, but the direction is pretty clear, if you look back far enough with an unprejudiced eye.
Too much of the common relationship with television goes entirely unremarked. There's so many layers of familiarity that have to be stripped away first it's impossible to even point the obvious out to most normal people. Like the rhesus orphan with its scratching-pole mother, we were isolated - then given a substitute, which we accepted because we've never known anything better.
