Post by Martin Ljung on Feb 15, 2006 14:03:06 GMT
I once wrote this:
Not really sure why, now
All Hail The Great Pacifier
Karl Marx referred to religion as ”opium for the masses”.
He was wrong. Religion is, as things go, a really dull cup of coffee; old people love it, you don’t really need it and yet it seems society cannot, for some incomprehensible reason, function without it.
Television, on the other hand, is addictive, it can make us lose all sense of time and it can take our minds to faraway places. It has become the drug dreaded by Marx.
Without this marvel of modern technology we wouldn’t know which toothpaste to buy, we wouldn’t be aware of the fact that that their actually is a market for scores of weird-looking exercise tools, or the apparent demand for semi-eatable shampoo’s and suspiciously winged objects you can stand on for hours without your feet getting sweaty.
Without TV we’d have to use our imagination, we might even have to resort to reading books or, even worse, take walks in order to make time pass.
People in general might become clever, creative and fit (perish the thought). Television lets the young stay just the way they are; the obstinate couch potatoes that constitute the backbone of society.
What would life be without psychedelic cartoons, American talk shows featuring the terminally inbred, dull English dramas, and oh so many products of our own television networks- programmes made by men and women more suited for the precise art of banging rocks together, possibly in rhythm.
I tell you it would be a life of brooding without interlude. You would have no sanctuary from the clarity of your own mind, life would be a struggle. In this modern world we are no longer challenged by hardship or superstitious fears, our minds need to be numbed for our civilisation to function properly.
Television is great. It is the glue that keeps our, the western, society together in its current form. If this constant flow of information would be removed, people would, in search of anything to fill they're empty minds, start thinking, and, possibly, see the world within they're horizon for what it actually is. Governments would fall, yes indeed.
Karl Marx referred to religion as ”opium for the masses”.
He was wrong. Religion is, as things go, a really dull cup of coffee; old people love it, you don’t really need it and yet it seems society cannot, for some incomprehensible reason, function without it.
Television, on the other hand, is addictive, it can make us lose all sense of time and it can take our minds to faraway places. It has become the drug dreaded by Marx.
Without this marvel of modern technology we wouldn’t know which toothpaste to buy, we wouldn’t be aware of the fact that that their actually is a market for scores of weird-looking exercise tools, or the apparent demand for semi-eatable shampoo’s and suspiciously winged objects you can stand on for hours without your feet getting sweaty.
Without TV we’d have to use our imagination, we might even have to resort to reading books or, even worse, take walks in order to make time pass.
People in general might become clever, creative and fit (perish the thought). Television lets the young stay just the way they are; the obstinate couch potatoes that constitute the backbone of society.
What would life be without psychedelic cartoons, American talk shows featuring the terminally inbred, dull English dramas, and oh so many products of our own television networks- programmes made by men and women more suited for the precise art of banging rocks together, possibly in rhythm.
I tell you it would be a life of brooding without interlude. You would have no sanctuary from the clarity of your own mind, life would be a struggle. In this modern world we are no longer challenged by hardship or superstitious fears, our minds need to be numbed for our civilisation to function properly.
Television is great. It is the glue that keeps our, the western, society together in its current form. If this constant flow of information would be removed, people would, in search of anything to fill they're empty minds, start thinking, and, possibly, see the world within they're horizon for what it actually is. Governments would fall, yes indeed.
Not really sure why, now