Amerika

We hear “the medium is the message” a lot in this modern wasteland, so it makes sense to look at the actual meaning of the McLuhan trope:

An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.

Essentially, this is a clever spin on an old argument: if technology allows something, it will be done. This is true, but it forgets that demand drives what technology is developed, so the medium can be controlled.

Counterbalancing that however the above describes not just profit motive but also the problem of the audience shaping technology. That is, if most people want dumb stuff, whatever good stuff you have will be dumbed down so that it is acceptable to them (The Metallica Problem).

Even more, whatever is dumbed down will rise above the rest, and then everyone else will feel a lowercase-c conservative need to “compete” with it by cloning it, so at some point everything is a dumb mishmash of whatever random stuff succeeded before (The Pantera Problem).

The system is shaped by its audience, but then also corrupts its audience, by making what they want (which is usually not what they need) more possible. Civilization makes it easier to live, so people have extra time and money to pursue what they desire, which in the case of most people, is destructively vapid anti-realistic illusions.

This is why we turn to nihilism as a means of clearing the peer pressure of others out of our head, because we recognize that humanity has a reality distortion field which leads it to self-destruction:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

This definition gets incoherent with the words after “radical skepticism.” Nihilism is radical realism paired with a skepticism of human belief and socializing. It acknowledges that humans tend to enshrine their wishful thinking and personality projection as assumptions of fact, morality, and communication.

As was written here about nihilism some time ago:

Nihilism — which declines to accept the human projection of a shared space of universal, absolute, and objective forms of truths, values, and communications — is an extreme form of realism that accepts human inequality and therefore, understands relativism and esotericism in our understanding.

This expands the only logical definition of nihilism to be:

Nihilism declines to accept the belief in universal, absolute, and objective forms of values, truths, and communications.

With this we move “the medium is the message” to “the message is the medium”: we are controlled by what we believe to be true, which we follow like programmable robots, until it explodes in our faces.

Throughout history, our enemy has been ignorance (solipsism, insanity, stupidity, denial). Until we learned to make fire, cure disease, create soap, maintain running water, discover electricity, invent computers, and cool or heat our air, life was pretty grim for most of humanity.

We face another great ignorance gulf ahead. What we say we are doing is not what we are doing; instead, we act out human drama and rationalize what we are doing as good.

Someone said to me the other day, “I am a good person. I do good things.” I have heard these exact words before, so was not surprised. Logically: if you must assert this, you doubt it, or others have cause to doubt it. The words are there to control both yourself and the social group in order to try to force me to accept them.

The medium is the message is the medium. Once words, tokens, symbols, images, and emotional gestures — which people mistake for truths, morals, values, and communications — exist, they will be used to manipulate others in the endless competition for power in human social groups.

In groups, this gives rise to the committee mentality, or the worse problem of committees avoiding risk by pursuing nonsense activity while dodging serious and important questions.

Add to this the genetic crisis of society, which by making life easier, allows those who normally depend on external forces to stop their reckless breeding to have many more children, so it slowly drowns in credulous, half-crazy idiots who are so selfish they become passive-aggressive, greedy bullies.

Not surprisingly, people feel intense epic loneliness because their lives feel meaningless because nothing good is recognized and everything good is in the process of being destroyed by the idiot herd-horde:

Loneliness, characterized by the subjective experience of insufficient social connections and resources, is linked to a range of negative health consequences including cardiovascular disease, substance use, poor mental health and intimate partner violence. A 2023 advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General estimated the health impact of loneliness to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and it identified social media use as a loneliness risk factor.

Americans were already growing lonelier before COVID-19, the authors note, and the pandemic worsened the trend. In the United States, an estimated 50% of the adult population is lonely.

“I wasn’t sure if we would see as strong a relationship between social media and loneliness for 60-year-olds that we saw with 18-year-olds, but we did,” Primack said. “Those who were in the upper 25% based on frequency of social media use, compared with those in the lower 25%, were more than twice as likely to test as lonely.”

Wet streets cause rain: people are lonely, so they turn to social media, but it does not provide the connection they need, so they keep trying and leaving unfulfilled. This means that they view it as their only option even though it is a mediocre one.

Loneliness kills societies.

When people have no connection with each other, we get nominal performance on all things. People fail to return grocery carts. They put in minimal effort at their jobs, which means doing only what you are told to do, and ignoring any chance to make things better.

Like the committee, they avoid noticing the difficult or negative, and focus on the immediate positive, which drives them to unrealistic expectations. In fact, one might say our society is dying of positive thinking, which is compensatory behavior to avoid noticing the lack of a positive future:

In each of these studies, the results have been clear: Fantasizing about happy outcomes — about smoothly attaining your wishes — didn’t help. Indeed, it hindered people from realizing their dreams.

Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals.

What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with “realism.” Here’s how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.

This simple process, which my colleagues and I call “mental contrasting,” has produced powerful results in laboratory experiments. When participants have performed mental contrasting with reasonable, potentially attainable wishes, they have come away more energized and achieved better results compared with participants who either positively fantasized or dwelt on the obstacles.

Mental contrasting involves applying a realist filter to positive thinking, forcing the person to think positively about things that can actually occur and can actually achieve what they need, instead of pie-in-the-sky fantasies or defensive and compensatory paranoid ideation.

What is realism?

Realism, in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them.

One of the earliest and most famous realist doctrines is Plato’s theory of Forms, which asserts that things such as “the Beautiful” (or “Beauty”) and “the Just” (or “Justice”) exist over and above the particular beautiful objects and just acts in which they are instantiated and more or less imperfectly exemplified; the Forms themselves are thought of as located neither in space nor in time. Although Plato’s usual term for them (eido) is often translated in English as Idea, it is clear that he did not think of them as mental but rather as abstract, existing independently both of mental activity and of sensible particulars. As such, they lie beyond the reach of sense perception, which Plato regarded as providing only beliefs about appearances as opposed to knowledge of what is truly real.

This definition is a little bit technical, but basically it means that reality is consistent and is not directly influenced by human thoughts. That is, we cannot say “abracabra,” pray to God/gods, or physically change reality with our minds.

What we can do however is follow cause-effect chains; every thing that exists (effect) has one and only one cause. Plato tracks this back to the metaphysical, saying that essentially some larger world of information must exist for our physical world to exist as an effect of that.

A more detailed definition of realism concerns that it believes (1) in a world outside our heads, both individually and in groups, and (2) that this group is independent of our thought:

There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by looking at realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties. First, there is a claim about existence. Tables, rocks, the moon, and so on, all exist, as do the following facts: the table’s being square, the rock’s being made of granite, and the moon’s being spherical and yellow. The second aspect of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties concerns independence. The fact that the moon exists and is spherical is independent of anything anyone happens to say or think about the matter. Likewise, although there is a clear sense in which the table’s being square is dependent on us (it was designed and constructed by human beings after all), this is not the type of dependence that the realist wishes to deny. The realist wishes to claim that apart from the mundane sort of empirical dependence of objects and their properties familiar to us from everyday life, there is no further (philosophically interesting) sense in which everyday objects and their properties can be said to be dependent on anyone’s linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or whatever.

When the mental contrasting people talk about “realism,” they mean a simplified commonsense version of this definition: the world is bigger than us, but consistent, so we can anticipate many of its responses to our actions or which choices offered to us will have the best results.

Nihilism embraces ultimate realism: that is, anything in a human head is suspect, but the consistency and logicality of our cause-effect universe is what controls existence and the change in events. When a nihilist thinks positive, called active nihilism, it is toward what is achievable knowing how reality works.

This gets us away from unrealistic ideas, fantasies, mysticism, pathologies, stupidity, insanity, and other defects shared between human individuals and the group mind. If the medium is the message, our medium must be sane realism and logic.

Tags: committee mentality, loneliness, marshall mcluhan, medium is the message, mental contrasting, nihilism, positive thinking