Technology Invades Our Mind
More insight from Meerloo
I was stuck today by Joost Meerloo writing about the ills of technology back in the 1950s. The post-war economy was booming, technology was rapidly invading homes - at the start of the decade only 9% of households in the USA had a TV, but by the end of the decade it was around 90%. No wonder Meerloo, writing around 1955-6, had much to say about the impact of TV on society.
Meerloo was primarily concerned with encroaching technology taking away our capacity to think independently, meditate, play, think creatively, and deal with the difficulties of life head-on rather than being possessed by technology that shielded us from such natural things. It made me think about the ‘safety culture’ we have developed where kids are better off staying safe in their virtual realities than actually getting out and doing stuff that could be potentially dangerous1 (those things are reserved for others in documentaries that are better viewed from a distance rather than engaged in personally). The world is inherently dangerous and we are all going to die - just in case you missed that bit of news. The world is also about direct engagement which, in turn, can lead to a healthy self-awareness and development. It’s about reflection and dialogue. As Meerloo points out “Radio and television catch the mind directly, leaving children no time for calm, dialectic conversation with their books. The view from the screen doesn’t allow for the freedom-arousing mutuality of communication and discussion. Conversation is the lost art. These inventions steal time and self-awareness. What technology gives with one hand – easiness and physical security – it takes away with the other.”
What Meerloo leads us to is the mass media ability to hypnotise the viewer with a seductive and all-penetrating ideology – whatever ideology the programmer wishes to imprint upon the viewer/listener. He talks about the devaluing of the individual brain and imposing a “totalitarian system for which its citizens are compelled to become more and more the servile tools. The inhuman “system” becomes the aim, a system that is the product of technocracy and dehumanization and which may result in organised brutality and the crushing of any personal morality. In a mechanical society a set of values are forcibly imprinted on the unconscious mind, the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs”. Now I think there is more going on than simple classical conditioning, nevertheless Meerloo is prophetic in his estimation of the power of mass communication. This is during a decade when households were experiencing a revolution in communication by installing TVs in just about every household, and the thing to do was to sit down in front of the tube and passively absorb whatever was being transmitted every evening after dinner.
Meerloo goes on to further prophecy the end of democracy via technocratic menticide:
Paradoxically enough, technical security may increase cowardice. The technical world we ourselves have created has replaced the very real challenge which nature originally afforded man’s imagination, and man is no longer compelled to face the forces of nature outside himself and the forces of instinct within himself. Our luxurious habits and complicated civilization have a tendency to appeal more to our mental passivity than to our spiritual alertness. Mentally passive people, without basic moral and philosophy, are easily lured into political adventures which are in conflict with the ethics of a free, democratic society. (Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 214-215)
What “political adventures” are we being lured into right now! What forces of nature are we unwilling to face? What have we given up to the government, to the technology, to keep us safe at the expense of democracy?
There are ethical and moral underpinnings of our democratic societies that have been slowly eroded by what Meerloo describes as “the machine”, but could be seen as the defaulting to technology in general, and will eventually erode all traditional values. An algorithm does not have a tradition, a moral stance, a soul. This is what we are submitting our democracy, and our lives to - a soulless, amoral, algorithm2, to which the bureaucrats bow down to as some sort of saviour. I agree in part with what CJ Hopkins has said about the global control we are experiencing – it’s more a blind machine marching though our democracies than (necessarily) a well-coordinated coup d'état by a handful of elites3. This is both terrifying but also offers some hope. We are in a war against the machine. Unlike The Matrix it’s a war against an ideological algorithm that’s pervading every corner of the globe rather than physical machines. Nevertheless the rebellion, the capacity to see the matrix for what it is, and the courage to face the machine, is probably closer to the Wachowskis vision than we’ve realised.
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
— Morpheus, The Matrix
Like a memory of me and a mate going out on dirt bikes into the bush, without any personal protection, air guns slung over our shoulders, looking to shoot anything that moved - Ah the days of freedom!
OK so I’m being poetic here - it’s obviously not a literal, single, algorithm, but a mechanistic system in general.
CJ Hopkins didn’t say it exactly like that but you can get your own take on what he was saying here
Thank you Winston.