March 19th, 2022
What people forget is that they do not have to look at things the way “the world” agrees to look at things. Consensus reality is simply an amalgam of a cultural subjectivity (a particular and relative way one culture sees and perceives and interprets things) and is therefore not “True” in the ultimate sense.
I preface this writing with the former paragraph in order to illustrate that the shaping of our individual view on society and humanity and life and existence is not truly our own, so long as we haven’t stepped back to see the mechanisms that amplify any particular viewpoint on a large scale of influence, that influence being relatively large in so far as it influences us particularly, which therefore includes our parents, our church, our school teachers and friends, and the media.
The media particularly is almost 100% comprised of articles and information that focus primarily on dramatic content that will keep asses in the seats in order to captivate audiences so that viewership numbers remain as high as possible in order for these companies to charge as high a price as possible for the advertisements companies will pay in order to reach these large audiences.
What I’m saying is this: the media is not focused on bringing us the Truth. They are focused primarily on dramatic captivation by any means possible in order to sell ads at the highest price. And the means used are almost entirely fear-based, the opposite of love-based, if love were to have an opposite.
Looking at the world through the eyes of the media is like looking at the night sky through a cardboard toilet-paper roll and saying the thirteen stars viewed through this device are the only stars that exist in all the cosmos—a serious mischaracterization of reality. Not only are there more than thirteen stars in the Universe, there are over 200 billion of them in just our galaxy alone, one of at least hundreds of billions of galaxies each composed of their own hundreds of billions of stars.
Allowing ourselves as individuals to operate in the world amongst each other and amongst our fellow life forms the world over from a position of illusion and incorrect understanding about the nature of things is dangerous and unnecessarily destructive.
The truth about our species is that we are a glorious species. Our intelligence and capabilities are unmatched by any other species on the planet. We are the most intelligent and technologically advanced. We are able to think and speak symbolically and propose hypotheses and do the math or experimentation to prove the validity or falseness of these propositions. We are able to build intricate portable environments to travel to other massive bodies in the infinite space beyond our own atmosphere. We are able to collectively empathize with the plight of others thousands of miles away in completely different cultures and to send aid in order to feed millions of starving women, children and men in hardship. We are able to see the suffering of those facing diseases and spend our lives searching for the cure in labs where the creative leaps of imaginative insight open doors that logic alone could never have achieved.
We are living in a time with far less wars happening in the world than any time in a thousand years, and this decline has been occurring for a very long time. More people of all genders getting an education than ever before in history. More people not dying of starvation than ever in history. How can all this be true when the news never mentions these truths at all?
It’s time to turn off the televisions. Most already have. They call it cord-cutting. People are moving onto platforms that do not rely on advertising for their profits, and thus do not compete for attention via the lowest common cultural denominator, namely trashy drama and mischaracterization of the greatness of ourselves as a species.
In my opinion, the very best thing that anyone can do for the world is to become a true individual. One who thinks and feels deeply and has one’s own opinions that do not simply parrot the views of others or groups of others. And the best way for this to occur, again, in my opinion, is to stop watching television, to pick up an art of some sort, and to focus on creation and reading and writing and to cut off all of the media altogether. To hang out with diverse and highly individualistic creative people who think in revolutionary and unique ways. This is a path toward becoming a better person, and thus creating a better world.
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