Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (12 page)

Popular Philosophy and Arbitrary Reality

There is considerable evidence that the science fiction vision of arbitrary reality inevitably leading to autocracy has already begun to materialize. We can see it in action in the quasi-religious philosophies that are now sweeping the country, gathering in millions of devotees.

The techniques used in gathering adherents to these burgeoning movements are startlingly similar in conception to
1984, Solaris, Brave New World
and the eight-pointed list just offered. The results are also similar. Converts effectively submit to having their minds reconstructed along simpler, flat, narrow, but, most important, unrooted channels. This allows them to embrace arbitrary information as though it were grounded in concrete reality.

In a world where alienation and confusion are common conditions, these new philosophies offer a comforting mental order that accepts and absorbs all contradictions. The danger is that once people’s minds are so simplified and receptive, they become vulnerable to any leader, guru or system of forces which understands the simplicity of the code and can speak the appropriate techno-speak.

Like a mass of Manchurian candidates, the people whose minds have been retrained into passive channels by these technologically based processes are available at all times for imprinting. In this way they merge with and can accept advertising-mind, television-mind and other simplistic intrusions without the slightest belch of rejection.

I am going to be using
est
as the example to show how thinking patterns are restructured, but not because it is any worse than any of the other currently popular systems. In many ways it is benign in comparison with Scientology or the mind control used by Reverend Moon. Neither is it worse than advertising and television.

However,
est
is interesting because it operates in a realm totally outside the media while nonetheless utterly re-creating reality in an arbitrary form. In fact, its failure to realize its potential as a world movement stems from the failure of its founder, Werner Erhard, to grasp the use of the media, though he tries and tries.

The
est
training sessions are always held in huge hotel meeting rooms which have artificial light, air conditioning, no windows, and are characterized by the kind of non-decoration typical of such places.

Trainees are met by
est
graduates and trainers, all of whom wear coded name tags and amazingly similar clothes and facial expressions, cheerful like airline attendants in advertisements. Hard folding chairs are arranged in neat rows facing a stage and microphone. The instructions are absolute: no talking, no sitting with friends, no eating or drinking. In an eighteen-hour session, there is usually one short meal break, and one or two bathroom breaks. No moving around the room. No clocks. No taking notes.

There are absolute rules on exactly how to wear your own name tag, how to sit, how to hold the microphone when speaking into it, how to acknowledge other people’s reports (whatever the content, what you say is “good”), how and when to look into people’s eyes. Above all, you must follow instructions immediately and to the letter. If, for example, someone does not wear the name tag in exactly the prescribed manner, or shows up a minute late, he or she is publicly humiliated and threatened with expulsion. The violator is told she or he is breaking an agreement, but of course there was no real agreement in the usual sense of two parties working out a contract or understanding. This is “agreement” in the hierarchical model, as in a military situation where rules are predesigned and then imposed. You “agree” or else you are punished,
est
can’t put you in the brig, so the punishment is exclusion.

All these rules break any contact with outside grounding. In this new floating environment, the trainers become the absolute authority
(1984)
and the source of all salvation, although they continually give credit for all the rules and activities to
their
absolute authority, Werner Erhard. “We do this because Werner says this is what works.” What it works
for
is
never
explained because either you “get it” or you don’t.

But I am happy to tell you that what you “get” in the end is training in a new pattern of thought and a floating logic.

The trainers lead the trainees through a series of long, repetitive exercises, which include the use of implanted imagery and hypnosis. These are combined with a series of games, including deliberately silly, funny games which, nonetheless, require full participation, that is, submission to the game, before one is permitted to stop. Included are self-humiliation and humiliation by the trainer. The only purpose of these is to break ordinary mental patterns and let go of earlier “tapes and records.” Once that is done, new ones can replace them. This is not to say that breaking “tapes” cannot be useful therapy, but in the case of
est,
you get Werner-tapes to replace parent-tapes.

Time is a critical element in the training, because it takes quite a while before all the trainees become unified in the experience of living up to the instructions of the leadership, discovering the appropriate responses, and developing a peer-group understanding of what is expected. Meanwhile, the trainer retains a grim visage.

People who protest are told they are bringing their own belief system in, which is what they are there to
stop
doing.

People are told
not
to compare what goes on in the
est
training with anything else they have experienced—in this way
est
maintains its floating, separated quality, like the sensory-deprivation subject floating for hours in a liquid tank, or the atsronaut in the space station. Slowly the isolated environment, the endless series of instructions, the fixed patterns of behavior, the repetition and the boredom raise the volume of immediate experience, so that any connection with the world outside, including past experience, recedes and disappears as though it is the abstract and the room the real. (Solaris) The room becomes the whole world. The people in the room are all of society, embodying all values as delivered from the mountain. (Erhard) The trainers are the ultimate authorities. Reality is here and now. Nothing else exists.
(1984)

After several days of this environmental and contextual onslaught, any confusion and resistance people brought with them gives way to the desire for acceptance, and then the construction of a new “ground of reality” can begin. When trainers say “ground of reality” they literally mean the structuring of a reality where there is none. (Space station)

Here is a summary of the new
est
reality: Everything is belief. Everything that we see or experience of the world is only an outgrowth of our belief that what we see and experience is the way things really are. Reality, then, is nothing more than an agreement as to what is real. There-fore, problems that we may have, or problems that may exist in the world (napalm, genocide, police repression, loss of jobs or lovers, pollution and so on) are real only because we believe they are real; in fact they exist only in our minds. If we do not acknowledge them, they don’t exist. So we effectively create these things with our belief systems; so do the napalmed kids, the Jews in Germany, and the laid-off factory workers.

This is a very comfortable attitude for much of today’s world; people who “get it,” like it. It’s not only a fun game— mixing up all those perceptual tricks in one’s head—but there’s something that passes for mystical in the notion that one creates one’s own reality, and the world doesn’t really exist. It makes people feel they have special powers. It is a comfort because it simultaneously relieves trainees from making better sense of their artificial, arbitrary world, which
is
literally nonsensical and ungraspable, and at the same time it asserts that
they
determine whatever world they wish. If things don’t go perfectly, well, that’s the way they created it, and it must be for the best. It is simultaneously creation and submission, total responsibility and irresponsibility, involvement and noninvolvement, according to personal definition.

Now, it is certainly true that if you believe a thing is a certain way—let’s say you believe yourself to be competent or beautiful, or that you will succeed in your new career— then that will make your belief more likely to become reality. Dale Carnegie taught that fifty years ago; so does every loving parent. So
est
can benefit many people who might otherwise turn themselves back at every conflict. If there were nothing attractive in
est
then obviously no one would follow it.

When people fully accept the idea that all reality exists
solely
in their own minds, and that nothing outside their minds is definitely, concretely real, each person then has unlimited personal power to create and define reality. It is now up for grabs. There is no cause. There is no effect. Relationships do not exist. Money does not exist. Jobs do not exist.

I have known several
est
trainees who carried this belief into new levels of disillusionment and a loftier sense of personal failure because they were unable to “create” food or meaningful contact with other human beings when they needed it.

More important, when these assumptions of personal creation are extrapolated out of the individual realm and applied to society and politics (a philosophy which holds a napalmed baby responsible for having created its own reality is a political philosophy), then we have something dangerous on a systemic level. Power does not exist unless one decides that it does; oppression does not exist, politics do not exist, and neither does nature.

In this denial of everyday worldly reality, all realities become totally arbitrary, creating the perfect precondition for the imposition of
any
new “ground of reality” within the void. Though it may be nonsensical or fascistic, any reality is acceptable.

From
1984:
“Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. . . . [The fallacy is to believe] that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our minds? All happenings are in the mind.”

Whether it is Werner Erhard or Big Brother reconstructing the mind, it is true that once mental processes are disconnected from planetary sources, or concrete realities, then all validation of truth is impossible. Everything is acceptable. One constructs one’s own truth. War is peace. Hate is love. Anything can begin to make sense but only within its own self-contained, unrooted bubble of logic. Once the bubble contacts the Earth, however, the logic evaporates. There is nothing arbitrary about the reality of an earthquake or the collision of cars or the loss of a job or the stabbing to death of one person by another. Nor is there anything arbitrary about one group of people subjugating another either through military or economic means. When such events happen, then they actually happen. They are outside human definition. Reality can become arbitrary only within the confines of a mental framework. People who live in direct contact with the planet itself are not concerned with any such questions.

The difference between Erhardian religions of the present moment and Indian or nature-based religions of other cultures or earlier times is that Erhard’s is abstract. Its ideas depend upon their own unrootedness. Nature-based religions, including even Zen Buddhism, are concrete, involving direct observation, totally functional and integrated perceptual systems that “see” things as they are and experience life directly: person to planet, person to person, and person to self. When American Indian religions speak of responsibility, there is no question of responsibility to self as opposed to group. The one cannot be separated from the other.

Erhard-type movements are outgrowths of the wider alienation from source that I’ve been describing, which makes all things possible because nothing is grounded, definite and personally verifiable. These religions would remain mere curiosities or aberrations if they did not fit so neatly the technologically created arbitrary environments, but they are growing at a wild rate. As they grow, they turn further to the right, producing
real
monsters like Reverend Moon and others, no doubt, still to come. They reset the minds of millions of people to believe that all things are arbitrary and, since this is so, that nothing actually matters, and therefore nothing needs improving.

I will quote briefly from a letter I received from a young woman, Magi Discoe, just after she completed the
est
training. The letter reports on the cathartic moment when the trainer reveals to the trainees the beauty of the concept that there is nothing to be done about anything:

“Stand by for revelation. After our minds are in the appropriate mush state, the trainer winds up for his greatest moment. He looks us over and begins, letting his voice rise to a booming crescendo: ‘IT IS ALL HOPELESS,’ he says to us. No use whatsoever. There is no hope. That’s what is. It’s not depressing or anything else, it’s just hopeless. Not only that but we are hopeless. We are also machines. And so that we ‘get’ what machines we are, we are told to be in touch with our own little voice saying ‘I am not a machine.’ That’s how much we are machines. We are stimulus-response machines. That’s just the way it is. That’s what’s so.

“Up until this point no one involved in the training has smiled. Exactly when in this harangue the trainer began to smile, I am not sure. I was perceiving a difference and finally it dawned on me that the man was beginning to smile. A shared secret smile. The entire environment of the room changed at this moment. The fact that we were machines was surpassed by the fact that we were for the first time being included in the world of
est.

“A lot of people were still functioning well enough, even after this long period, to get upset at the idea of themselves as machines. It was their last hold on resistance. By the end, however, people either stopped commenting or agreed. If people held out too long, the trainer got into a smiling tirade about
them
having to be ‘right,’ that all they were doing was trying to survive by making someone wrong. It was another one of those circular processes he always used which made it impossible to argue with him or even to remember, once you were swimming in his words, that it was
he
who needed to be right,
est
depended upon it. But he had all the cards from day one.