The loss of our individuating self and our relationship to the unconditional comes from the essential nature of the business model which the media and advertising serve. It works as an I/It model in which we must serve as a means to the dominator structure of the media and advertising. Their ends come in what we all familiarly now call "the bottom line," the profit levels they receive for their efforts and exploitation.[161] They achieve that end by turning us into their means by providing what seems like entertainment and information geared to making us into their willing means to that end by getting us to use our money and ourselves to completely support the system of the consumerist/conformity in which we live and on which the economy of the United States is based.[162] All that seeming entertainment and information confuses us about the nature and value of life by using our human and very precious needs and vulnerabilities, and i8t makes everything into a commodity including ourselves.[163] It works.
The child with the overly demanding toy works diligently to make form out of seeming chaos. The media and advertising does that for us. It presents the world in recognizable, in very accessible and comprehendible forms. That satisfies our need for form, but it does so at a price, something other than in an economic and monetary way. It leads to our almost complete surrender to the forms that the media and advertising control to gain our willingness to be used as a means to their end. When the media and advertising become our essential meaning perspective for the value of living and of life itself, the economic exchange between us and consumerist/conformity, therein created and supported, can take full force.
Such an exchange leaves us with very little. It can cost us our search for and connection with our becoming self. In that way, we give up our being for having, to gain a very little part of a very ephemeral material world the media presents to us.[164] Part of our essential self comes in our ability and the right to make form out of the world ourselves, and we have a need to do so in order to live fully and continue to live as aware, whole beings in relationship with our becoming self. When we voluntarily surrender our apprehending and making form out of our direct experiences in deference to the media model of life and reality, we surrender one absolutely necessary part of our working definition of the becoming self:
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
When the media model makes form out of the world for us, we give away our perceiving the world ourselves. When the information we receive comes from another source, a source that has its own ends in mind at all times, we learn what it wants us to learn, and we make choices based entirely on that learning. In that way, we surrender our freedom, a quality of life and living for which many have striven and fought for throughout human and personal history. Indeed, many of us rail madly against limitations on our freedom by some entity or another. We generally do so because of something we saw on television, heard on the radio, or read in some publication or another—our form makers. As hard as form making can seem at times because of the responsibility that comes with the choices and results from our form making and acting in the world, without it, our lives are profoundly diminished.
No matter how stupid the media and advertising present themselves, they never act in any way but through strategies created in an intelligent and highly manipulative manner. The very fact that it can look so incredibly dumb works as its best and most intelligent strategy.
The invisibility of this strategy came to me very clearly one morning in the
interview class. A student told me that
she had done nothing the night before. I
asked what "nothing" meant. If
we live as form makers of the world, we always do something if we remain
aware. We make form out of our
experience whatever that may be. Perhaps
one core and quite invisible strategy of the media model keeps us from our
awareness. The student answered that she
spent that night watching children's television shows with her niece. I thought that was kind, but she insisted it
was "nothing." That came from
her belief that watching all those programs wasted her time. It wasn't because they were for kids. They wasted her niece's time: "She's a kid. They didn't teach anything." She didn't learn anything. It was just dumb and stupid. No matter the appearance and feeling she had
then or we have now, television always teaches.
These public television programs taught the very young niece a number of
things. They taught her to watch
television and to watch it with pleasure.
They taught the passivity of watching and receiving not doing and
creating. Accepting what her aunt said
about these shows, they taught her to accept dumb and stupid as acceptable
entertainment and information. It also
taught her that if she accepts dumb and stupid as acceptable, she must feel
quite dumb and stupid about herself. The
student agreed. After a night if these
shows she said, she felt pretty stupid herself.