Popular Culture Under Seige

A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes – Gandhi

With religion on the way down we don’t follow many prophets, philosophical manipulations are of a limited scope as it leaves out most of the populous, so they use popular culture to attempt the reverse engineering. Once again using prepackaged products intended to have mass appeal to subvert the culture and promote antisocial behavior, and cause paralysis by ignorance.

Basic values are replaced with a perverted set of priorities delivered through all forms of communications, kluged in a façade of fun, prosperity or just artistic expression. Television shows where the winner is the most unscrupulous or conniving competitor reinforcing greed, envy, cruelty and violence, bombarding society with a daily dose of misinformation and meaningless trivia intended to breed ignorance and stupefy, creating a generation of uninformed easy prey zombies.

Television and the internet also have the power to deconstruct reality and replace the assumptions, without real context and uncompromising they take away discretion and the ability to reconcile the moment. Everything becomes a pressure wave with the capacity to generate strong emotions and leave long lasting impressions. They are intrusive and glamorizing by definition, and often offensive, producing the unnatural demand and the environmental enrichment, like all other electronics mediums inherently containing the tease and restrain potential with the ability to breakdown the information. The constant repetition and advertisements generate third degree burn, the reaction to contact. Here too we get the inflation and a ‘debt ceiling”, and here too, when the emotions explode everything that has been consumed bursts out destroying structures and erasing memories. We cut social programs as a result of the same manic-depressive condition produce by overstimulation. This is very profound, it means being subjected to capacity and demand exertions that are especially harmful to kids. 

They are addictive because we have to make the adjustment in an ambiguous environment that keeps asking the obstinate question, then information becomes increasingly morbid placing society in double jeopardy, you are either imperfectly in sink or perfectly incongruent and face a lot more friction. Appealing to your better sense to generate pressure and stimulate consumption is the universal approach, natural sensitivities are abused and we are damaged, subject to bombardment and the wrong interaction. It’s the commercial society, but is also the principles behind the duplicity and the ignominious capitalization, eventually we are dehumanized constantly forced to adjust the values. Regardless of the information if the voice is too laud it generates pressure, and there is an energy cost involved with that stress. Something could be both endearing and disturbing depending on the occasion.

The message coming through is much more than images and sound, the guard is down and self-preservation mechanisms are relaxed and we internalize a different reality. You are not afraid of Dexter, disturbed by the smell of blood or certain sites, disgusted by the serial killer on trial who starts receiving fan mail, or startled by the sound of a gunshot. You only get the excitement and want to expose yourself to the stimulus that is sinking in deep, to the thrills of Jason and Freddie Kruger or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, eventually you are not repulsed, as is natural, by the site of the human form being desecrated. They have the power to replace information on a subconscious level by raising the ante while suppressing the capacity, turning us into insensitive egomaniacs and hungry deviants, generating inferiority complex making you feel like you’re always missing out on something.

But it goes beyond that producing the most unlikely abominations and dependencies. Repetition generates energy but also has incredible alienating potential, which is the case with many of the electronic gadgets we consume today, as they become more intuitive we become more desensitized and disconnected. The source of information becomes part of a more relevant moment generating the negative enrichment, where the recovery take place at an equidistant location and we lose track of the price we pay and the time we lose, making it common place as the deficit sinks in deeper. As opposed to the actual definition that makes it save to come closer and over a period of time becomes part of a cognitive values system and a potential.

Certain technologies offer opportunities to explore the human condition, but showing the more superficial behavior consistently is emasculating for society, which becomes critical of itself and eventually dysfunctional. Lowering the standard generates as much a temporal distortion as the stringent measures, good quality in the wrong proportions becomes as much a problem as the wrong information in the right proportions; changing the criteria completely is inconceivable.

Anonymity gets around structure and honest relationships producing the abnormal development and making us fall in the capacity/demand chain reaction, where we relate to the pressure and internalize the wrong values and attributes. No form of free expression can involve deception, by definition or omission, at the end nobody has a chance to exercise their freedom. The internet and social media allows us to express things without the natural feedback or sense of accountability, no rewards for good or bad behavior and no consequences. We tweet and send massages out of the compulsive need to consume, what we communicate is usually inconsequent to the emptiness we internalize. Society and the justice system fall increasingly behind too, forced to find others more aggressive methods themselves to counteract the retaliation of the technology; they get it wrong when they equate normal human interaction with means of communications obscure and confining by nature. We forgot that we use to demand responsibility and a degree of certainty from all media. It is the house dealing the card and the profiteer dishing the pain, the same perfectly dumb geometric equality unabated by sociological tensions.

Hollywood villains always contain certain endearing qualities and trades we admire or at least can relate to, they’ve been abused by society and were very decent people at some point, they could be strong and determined, funny and creative and only kill bad people. This all serves to open the gates of reasonable possibilities, blurs the moral boundaries and approximate us to previously unthinkable options, and desensitize people to violence and cruelty. That’s the Joker and the Riddler, the unwilling split personality antisocial monsters, which are also the characteristics of the hero, a person full of conflicts who channels his frustrations with anger and violence, and glamorized deception, like The Hulk or Batman. The embattle super hero uses the same formula, they claim the moral high ground and have a tacit license to break all the rules, more importantly they reinforce individualism and make people feel inferior and inadequate in their humanity, giving then a reason to cross the line. But it all makes some sense to us because the environment demands it, it’s all part of the resonance and the retroactive cycles that continue to take the cultural dimorphism to new extremes. The subliminal messages always seem innocent but even when we know they exist it can plant the seed in the subconscious and reinforce the beliefs. 

Our imagination is very active, especially when we are young, it is helping us create a context for our reality so we can navigate the environment. It is going to be defined by the content of the information and is subject to developmental pressures. It is going to be enriched or deformed and the effects of repetition are magnified. We consume when we rationalize the information and kids for the most part cannot suspend disbelieve, reality and fantasy blend in and they will internalize on deep visceral levels. Even adults start rearranging their values system and purging information after prolonged exposure to the absurd and the commercial hammering, victims of the intuitive intelligence. During these years the information has to be age appropriate and the emotional stimulus has to be associated with the right behavior, placing emphasis on socialization and cooperation in order to reveal their inner motivation and give then the ability to exercise their own person.

 

As a species we have an identity crisis, the means of communications main function is informing and nurturing the human potential, like any other living creature we are subject to environmental stimulus that cannot be excessive or arbitrary. Most of what we know about other cultures is through television, movies and the internet, we constantly submit to this frame of reference and snap shots that shape our perception and diminish our reality. We are the culture, if the culture is cruel and greedy so are we, if it is violent so are we. The intensity of the moment shapes reality, a fist fight and a gun fight eventually feel the same to us, but the gun fight is more corrosive because it has a different value for the social event. When we compromise these values we don’t get any additional benefits but the internal pressure that suppresses the capacity, we burn out between the escalating effect and the consumption.

  

“Walter Benjamin declares that optical manipulation of the film camera inevitably lead the viewer to identify not with the actor but with the camera itself. Benjamin’s assessment clearly places the onus of constructing meaning on the film maker, and not the performer, acknowledging the role the director has in guiding and controlling the viewer” – From Popular Culture.

It matters that we constantly talk about killing and war, vengeance and gore, it matters that we produce Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto and Zombie, that we export violence and the power of Google yielding about eight hundred million pornographic sites, and that over eighty percent of the internet’s content is some form of prostitution. It’s abrasive, like sandpaper to society. It matters that we make guns and promote violence and force other people to consume all sorts of subversive material, and promote the idea that they are not free unless they open the doors unconditionally to this abomination, that we sell the conversation to stick in the knife, massaging the passions to corrupt the culture. It matters that the internet’s headquarters is in California and we produce weapons of mass destruction. 

More importantly, it matters that television and the media have become a tool of the self-fulfilling prophecy advertising an apocalyptic destiny that becomes reality, making the intractable incident resonate with disproportional influence setting us of fire. That they have become the manifestation of their bad intentions and our own subconscious abstraction, making us upload pieces of ourselves into some form of depraved condition with the power to drag across time and space, like Achilles dragging Hector at the walls of Troy.

Whether through god or money the erosion method is always the same, the false morality and deprivation of resources, the enrichment and the pervasive consumption, the choke, the hold, the exchange and our reality coming undone, the promise and the revelation that twists the conscience and corrupts the mind, the forbidden fruit and the poisonous snake. The unwinnable prompt generating the subliminal pressures, which means not seeing the hand that throws you around, anonymous corporation and the magnifying power of the media. The commercial fraud that forces the empathic reason to open up to more corrupt information.

Hollywood becomes the metaphysical paradox that swallows everything and corrupts the resources. Itself the pervasive generalization we lose ourselves in, promoting pornography, violence, drugs and the reduction of all decency standards under the glare of the magnificent karma; a different kind of commoditization that also ends up producing the egotistical tendencies and radicalizing society. Revolving around a legacy of crime they capture our imagination and become the negative source of certainty contagious and alienating that generates the insanity. In reality, they end up falling in the protracted decadent spiral and paving the way for the special interest that sells the gun, and the dehumanization.

This approach constitutes the difference between promoting growth and civil society or corruption and decadence, promising a less optimistic future for man. At the bottom it is a matter of social health, we have to allow ourselves the time at our discretion to reconcile our values and figure out the problems, clearly we are largely reduced to criminalize or commercialize. These are conflicts generated by the liberal currencies and the political dogmas, which generate the pressures and turn what should be marginal activities to be frowned upon into criminal behavior. It causes the loss of depth perception and a range of motion, the end of common sense that started with the sinner and the priest, the center of gravity that forces you to overreach or lose everything to prohibition, to the punitive, the sequestration. What standard is going to replace balance and certainty, choose your poison sort of speak, which has also led to multiple formulas and odd compromises. 

The normal environment is not available anymore, the mechanisms that allow us to manage information, bond and grow. We fall in the extremes because the dogmas don’t allow us to keep a sense of measure and reality, enjoy the freedoms and the relaxation of time, appreciate what is ideal, normal, extreme and the exception, the ridiculous and the fantasy, what might be amusing and the occasional thrill, what is artistic expression, insidious or perverse. We lose equilibrium and site of the danger, become oblivious to the damage, the event speeds up and life becomes a blur. It is a matter of public health, it promotes the latent and glamorizes the abnormal and the dormant, making us vulnerable to things that continue to weaken and attempt against society further.

If you cannot anticipate what is one hundred percent predictable you are just dead in the waters, standing in the middle of the road, if you cannot predict what you would be exposed to in the haunted house or the gay parade. If you believe in self-radicalization and the lone wolf you are the dead Gazelle, the fact that the terrorist comes out of the mosques and the culture breeds the crazies, if it catches you by surprise. If you cannot predict the mass shootings are going to happen and the effects drugs have on society you might already be dead, and what we cannot anticipate with any precision is when the bomb is going to go off. The awareness comes from the intuition and lasting tradition, from the inside and more stable to the less, the uncertainty growing as you move to the frivolous surface.

The false morality makes everybody dysfunctional and easy pickings, victim or victimizer, pursued or pursuer, ready for the taken, the thirst, blame and more aggression. It slices through our judgment and creates a distorted perception that contributes to the environment that adds to the misconceptions and on and on. A self-mutilating sadomasochist system based on inflicting pain and selling the fix. Destroying society just like you would a man, generating tension and assigning fault to immobilize, constantly showing the worst moment and short comings to demoralize, using the fringe and sensitivities to grind down, what hurts and causes pain, generating the constant contact and slowly draining out the strength. 

The idea is without god you get caught up in the vacuum of values, in the debt or deficiency, a distance they aggravate by pushing in both directions and keeping you from finding yourself. The bigger the enrichment the worse the damage and the potential reaction, eventually you can’t see the coast anymore, having lost the discretion to the delusion and a class of pro-competition sociopaths that have become something other than human, that promote fantasies and absolute ignorance, anti-science, sexist, racist, belligerent and self-involved that wants to solve everything with a punitive law and more revenues. In one way or another having a problem with our moral condition as a function of society.

We get cough up in the ritualistic enrichment, chasing recognition while pushing the boundaries, building resentment and never finding satisfaction, convinced that certainty is there, escalading the situation only to feed the frustration and make it worse. Locked in these dynamics the tools we use to deal with the problems are mostly the result of cultural influences. Eventually the new reflex shows up bringing out everything we have consumed and we’ve been reprogrammed, not knowing what happened to us or why we even contributed so much. Promoting individual rights and chasing dreams in place of the social guarantees is already part of the collective instinct in the canonized Capitalist-Democracy, the path of least resistance is now in conflict with the moral judgement and we get caught running up hill unable to stop, where the consuming effort is still the easiest route and you get some relieve.

The origins might be clear, the esoteric concepts corrupt the information, and we get caught up in the dynamics and becoming increasingly reactionary, part of problems that actually require the social performance. A level of recognition and anticipation that is being put to the test as a matter of survival, the vision that allows us to adjust the expectations in a different timescale, as a man is better defined by more immediate needs. Man alone cannot solve this problem, it requires the superlative system and the specialized institutions, very slow and deliberate calibrations in order to generate the progress but also slow down the chain reactions, a process that takes place over long periods of time and requires that level of awareness and commitment. 

For human evolution certainty and equality could only be achieved through moral discretion and segregating information rather than people, it placed the burden on the culture and set the clock to the group, civil society is not much of a price. It validated the spaces and a very flexible environment but generated the need for the fixed traditions, which exists because of the freedoms and not in spite of them, because we eliminated selective breeding and other phenomena becomes pervasive if we don’t promote the right behavior.

 

Generally speaking on the extremes there is no room for compromise or diversity, which is at the bottom of the enrichment and nominal minimization, integrating the answer is possible but it always encounters the problem of the social cost. We cannot talk about certainty without understanding movement, therefore we have to define what quality means for human evolution, what allows us to aggregate value without generating stress. A political condition and the moral imperative are precisely what makes it possible for a heavily cultural species to get along, respect is the result of managing the expectations of a longer curve over a soft horizon that helped us slow time down and defuse the tension, the fluid environment requires the quantitative easing, deliberate movement and moral articulations. When things become part of conventional wisdom and cultural traditions is like wearing close, we have little use for laws and more superficial regulations that call on the generalization to create the short cut back to some security, and that are only meant to support the ability to judge reality, not replace it.

Forever is balance, morality is the social compromise born out of love inexorably connected to aggression and sexuality, which we made very special and personal. It attempts to teach and is patient, flexible and judgmental like you would be with your children, it creates its own antithesis and grey areas without which it doesn’t exist, what is private and public, what is rude, obnoxious and illegal, the smile, the frown and the indignation. It is fluid and adjustable for immediate reciprocity, creating the environment where honesty is possible adding precision to the empathic reason. It is the discretion to the capacity that is life itself, which generates the falling feeling and the ecstasy, but also the fear and the pain, hunger and anxiety, proving that it is all about function and that the sensitivities suffer when we ignore them.

It is essentially the false morality that transforms movement into an imperfection displacing responsibility and the burden. Love is the subliminal consent that needs disambiguation and a code of conduct to manifest, the question that invokes all other questions and rewards time, producing the spaces and behavior necessary to regenerate and survive, the evolutionary assumptions where all conflicts take on a relative meaning or become mundane. It is the lifeline and the empathic connection, the motivation of perpetuity and the pain of procreation, the prerogative of movement and sharing the resources. It is music and rhythm to the lyrics, the suggestion and the destiny…you have to feel it and choose it.

The reaction to pressure almost always prevails making us connect to almost anything and even implode when the values get no traction. It generates the pathologically jealous system that attributes disproportional significant to innocuous details and becomes abusive and deceitful, being late, too serious or happy, a look, a smile, or a gesture, everything could be incriminating, you are now the sinner in need of treatment or a new rule, a new even more restrictive line.  Love requires the respect, society and man, the awareness and the enjoyment, morality and the freedoms complement each other. Like the wings that allow birds to fly is not one or the other. They are as much the result of the expansion of empathy, the inclusive soft landing versus the extremely punitive selective breeding apprehensive aggression.

How can a society survive the High Stakes Vegas Economy? There is danger in removing the filter and propagating pernicious information, concepts and belief systems that obstruct development and corrupt society. In addition, whole civilizations have gone off the deep end but haven’t taken the entire world with them, something that seems plausible today.