Turn Off Your Television!!

by L. Wolfe

Hey buddy, I'm talking to you. Yes, you, the guy sitting in front of the television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can hear what I am saying. Now, try to concentrate on what I am going to say. I want to talk to you about your favorite pastime. No, it's not baseball or football, although it does have something to do with your interest in spectator sports. I'm talking about what you were just doing: watching television.

Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in front of the television set? According to the latest studies, the average American now spends between five and six hours a day watching television. Let's put that in perspective: that is more time than you spend doing anything else but sleeping or working, if you are lucky enough to still have a job. That's more time than you spend eating, more time than you spend with your wife alone, more time than with the kids.

It's even worse with your children. According to these same studies, young children below school age watch more than eight hours each day. School age children watch a little under eight hours a day. In 1980, the average 20-year-old had watched the equivalent of 14 months of television in his or her brief lifetime. {That's 14 months, 24 hours a day.} More recent figures show that the numbers have climbed: the 20-year-old has spent closer to two full years of his or her life in front of the television set.

At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing phenomena. It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more {stupid}. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research began to study such things. As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse.

It's the change--the constant trendline downward--that interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch. Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter what people watch, whether it's "The Simpsons'' or "McNeil/Lehrer,'' or "Murphy Brown'' or "Nightline':' the more television you watch, the {less literate, the more stupid} you are.

The growth in television watching had surprised some of the researchers. Back a decade ago, they were predicting that television watching would level off and might actually decline. It had reached an absolute saturation point. They were right for so-called network television; figures show a steady dropoff of viewership. But that drop is more than made up for by the growth of cable television, with its smorgasbord of channels, one for almost every perversion. Especially in urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired to more than 100 different channels that provide them with all news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all sports, all weather, all financial news and a liberal dose of straight pornography.

The researchers had also failed to predict the market penetration of first beta and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible to watch one thing and record another for later viewing. They also offered access to movies not available on networks or even cable channels as well as home videos, recorded on your own little camcorder. The proliferation of home video equipment has involved families in video-related activities which are not even considered in the cumulative totals for time Americans spend watching television.

You might not actually realize how much you are watching television. But think for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television on, if it isn't on already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing at what is on the screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a show. You eat with it on, maybe in the background, listening for a score or something that happens to a character in a show you follow. When something you are interested in, a show or basketball game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So your attention to what is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no point when you are home, and inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't that right?

The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched television, according to the intensity of their viewing. But the point is still made: you compulsively turn the television on and spend a good portion of your waking hours glued to the tube. And the studies also showed that many people can't sleep without the television turned on!

Brainwashing Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television is bad for your health. They put stories like that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes to stare at the screen, they say. Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want to make another point. We've already shown that you are addicted to the tube, watching it between six and eight hour a day. But it is an addiction that {brainwashes} you. There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's called {hard} brainwashing is the type you're most familiar with. You've got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare.

This brainwashing is called {hard} because its methods are overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force, and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is man's moral strength that informs and orders his power of reason; without it, the mind becomes little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints. No one is saying that you have been a victim of {hard} brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what you look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank stare of a television zombie. This is {soft} brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them.

Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you. It works on a principle of {tension and release}. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the {only} choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices.

Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such choice-making is not a "rational'' experience. It does not involve the use of man's creative mental powers; instead man is conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.

The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his controllers.

The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment {social turbulence}. The last decades have been full of such {social turbulence}--economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, ecological and biological catastrophes. {Social turbulence} creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings. Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems.

Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality, {is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence.} Eight hours a day, every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.

If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have made recently that was not in some way influenced by something that you have seen on television. I bet you can't think of one. That's how controlled you are.

Who's Doing It But don't take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to a man from a think tank called the Futures Group in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more than 20 years of his life manipulating the minds of the leaders of our society. Listen to what he said:

{"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. Americans are wired into their television sets. Over the last 30 years, they have come to look at their television sets and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts the images, people start changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of their television. Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has become part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to you, but your mind is being shaped and moulded.''}

"Your mind is being shaped and moulded.'' If that doesn't sound like brainwashing, I don't know what is. Becker speaks with the elan of a network of brainwashers who have been programming your lives, especially since the advent of television as a "mass medium'' in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This network numbers several tens of thousands worldwide. Occasionally one appears on the nightly news to tell you what {you} are thinking, by reporting the latest "opinion polls.'' But for the most part, they work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution.

And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are united by a common world view and common method. It is the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in institutions that pass this power on from generation to generation. They view the common folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them to rule.

One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of populations is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the "mother'' for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a member. They are the specialists in {both} hard and soft brainwashing.

The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar outfits in the United States and elsewhere, are determined that you should be a television addict, sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing from the "tube;'' that is how they control you.

Like his fellow brainwashers, Becker prides himself in knowing the minds of his victims. He calls them "saps.'' Man, he told an interviewer, should be called "homo the sap.''

"Soft'' brainwashing by television works through power of suggestion. Television watching creates a state of drugged-like oblivion to outside reality. The mind, its perceptions dulled by habituated viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality as presented on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching, is prepared to accept that the images that television {suggests} as reality {are} reality. It will then struggle to form fit a contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker claims.

Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years, confirms this. The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: "Television as a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are:

"1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.

"2) The left cortical hemisphere--the center of visual and analytical calculating processes--is effectively reduced in its functioning to tracking changing images on the screen.

"3) Therefore, provided, the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness....

"In other words, television can be seen partly as the technological analogue of the hypnotist.''

The key to making the brainwashing work is the {repetition of suggestion} over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion.

Some Examples Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about 20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the day. Think about those same issues today; notice how you seemed to change {your} mind about them, to become more tolerant of things you opposed vehemently before. It's your television watching that changed your mind, or to use Becker's terms, "shaped your perceptions.''

Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is now called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be protected on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against the basic concept of Christian civilization that man is a higher species than and distinct from the animals, and that it is man, by virtue of his being made in the image of the living God, whose life is sacred. That was 20 years ago. But now, many people, maybe even you, seem to think otherwise; there are even laws that say so.

This contrary, anti-human view of man being no more than equal to animals and plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of television. Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television shows, into televised movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up steam. Environmental spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow of television. Those who opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable way. It was done over time, with repetition. If you weren't completely won over, you were made tolerant of the views of environmental lunatics whose statements were morally and scientifically unsound. Let's take a more recent example: the war against Iraq. That was a war made for television. In fact, it was a war {organized} through television. Think back a year: How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on the other. The images repeated in newscasts, backed up by scenes of alleged atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself: the video-game like images of "smart'' weapons killing Iraqi targets.

Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, conducting a final press briefing that was consciously orchestrated to resemble the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory.

Those were the images that overwhelmed our population. Only now, months later, do we find out that the images had nothing to do with reality. The Iraqi "atrocities'' in Kuwait and elsewhere were exaggerated. Our "smart'' weapons like the famous Patriot anti-missile system didn't really work. Oh, and the casualty figures: it seems that we murdered far more women and children than we did soldiers. Hardly a "glorious victory.'' But while it might have made a difference if people knew this while the war was being planned or in progress, polls show that Americans no longer find the war or any stories about it "interesting.''

Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them? Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than 5th grade comprehension level; parents, like you, are themselves being remade in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society becomes more infantile, more easily controllable.

As Emery explains: {"We are proposing that television as a simple constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central nervous system of man.''}

Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American's ability to think: {"Americans don't really think--they have opinions and feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it.''}

Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable channels. It tells people what has been said and what is "important.'' Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who can't. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of leadership.

Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as choosing a box of laundry detergent: a set of possibilities, whose limits are determined, by the images on the screen. You are given the appearance of freedom of choice, but that you have neither freedom nor real choice. That is how the brainwashing works.

"Are they brainwashed by the tube,'' said Becker to the interviewer. "It is really more than that. I think that people have lost the ability to relate the images of their own lives without television intervening to tell them what it means. That is what we really mean when we say that we have a wired society.''

Turn It Off! That was ten years ago. It has gotten far worse since then. In coming issues, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on earth and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss television programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a "paradigm'' shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media, showing who controls it and how; we will deal with America's addiction to spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction to the tube.

So, after what I just told you, what do say, buddy? Do you want to stay stupid and let your country go to hell in a basket? Why don't you just walk over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely off. Go on, you can do it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little better already? You've just taken the first step in deprogramming yourself. It wasn't that hard, was it? Until we speak again, try to keep it off. Now that will be a bit harder.

From New Federalist V6, #29.