Metamagical Grafitti – Be What You Are
#2 Be What You Are
When I stated to a friend that Douglas Rushkoff’s book Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say was the most influential treatise on black magic published in the last ten years, I was only half joking. Our individual worldviews are dangling on the puppet strings of the media’s news releases; created in the wake of a thousand persuaders, each striving desperately to sell us their view of reality. I’m doing the same thing, promoting a worldview less centralized, more empowering to the individual, but without overlooking the importance and influence of superorganisms and group collectives. Because I have less influence than the media conglomerates, my worldview which I am trying to pass on to you is not as dominate as the collective cultural worldview produced on Madison Avenue.
I do not want to start this off with the statement that all marketing is bad, or that all corporations are out to eat you. Good marketing tells you what you didn’t know about a product that you may very well be interested in, and the product itself should deliver on the promises implicit in the advertisment. If it doesn’t, don’t buy any more shit from that company. We can dig back through history and make the assumption that this is precisely why the Sears catalogue was the powerhouse merchandiser of the turn of the century. But that is far from the standard operations of government and religious advertising, and even product awareness and marketing have shifted dramatically from honest product information once a standard in advertisments. I for one would welcome a return to such standards.
Instead, today we are enmeshed in a matrix of media messages the bulk of which rely upon persuasion techniques refined by years of market pressure and behavioral psychology.
«To influence us, they disable our capacity to make reasoned judgements and appeal to deeper, perhaps unresolved, and certainly unrelated issues. By understanding the unconscious processes we use to make our choices of what to buy, where to eat, whom to respect, and how to feel, clever influence professionals can sidestep our critical faculties and compel us to act however they please. We are disconnected from our own further disempowerment. The less we are satisfied by our decisions, the more easily manipulated we become. «To restore our own ability to act wilfully, we must accept that we are the ones actively submitting to the influence of others. We are influenced because, on some level, we want to be.»
(Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say – 1999, Douglas Rushkoff, p. 19)
This influence is by no means restricted to advertising. In fact, advertising in the traditional sense comprises a much less serious threat to our unconscious than the whole of mass communications. What is presented isn’t an advertisment for a product, but an entire worldview composed of what can be considered self-censoring corporate culture. And we are complicit in the spread of the mediocre psychic environment we now find ourselves.
Our responsibility is to embrace that which does a better job of explaining reality and discard that which obfuscates. We need to become conscious of our true selves to do this, which means discarding the personas long enough to comprehend how our persona influences our perceptions.
«… by unconsciously accepting mass communications, we are adopting alien thought patterns. These thought patterns have an agenda, thought patterns that triggered a buzz-whir effect in our brains so that presented with certain situations, we have a knee-jerk reaction that although it feels like a free formed ‘logical’ action, was actually implanted in our brains.»
(Twisp, Ben Mack, p. 39)
How does this work? In part because of how the brain operates:
«Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him… Anyone can be made to hear voices with scrambling techniques… To carry it further you can use recordings of voices known to him.»
(The Electronic Revolution, 1967, William S. Burroughs)
Taking this a step further, when a person normally hears or believes he hears voices from within:
«… it is regarded either as undiluted nonsense or as the voice of God. It does not seem to occur to any one that there might be something valuable in between.» (Four Archetypes, Carl G. Jung)
This is one of the tricks in the bag of a audio sculpture/remix artist. Devising incredibly small bits of information that come from an overall pattern, then re-arranging the bits of information in an engaging way provides a structure from which the brain re-assembles the message. Three things become one. Repetition drives memorization. Especially when we are running on robot, when we aren’t fully home, which appears to be the normal level of operation for most of us.
«… people are seldom at home, always somewhere else, always ‘absent.’ Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. And the simple reason for it is: FEAR.
«As we see whenever a war breaks out, the fear of war is overcome the moment one is really in it. If war were really as terrible as people imagine it to be it would have been wiped out long ago. To make war is as natural for human beings as to make love. Love can make cowards of men just as much as the fear of war. But once desperately in love a man will commit any crime and not only feel justified, but feel good about it. It is the order of things.
«The wisest men are those who speak of illusion: MAYA. Illusion is the antidote to fear. In harness they render life absurdly illogical.»
(The Wisdom of the Heart – 1941, Henry V. Miller, p. 96)
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