If It Sounds Too Bad to be True, It Probably Is (Part 3)

Schadenfreude (shäd′n-froi″də) – 1) Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others; 2) Malicious enjoyment derived from observing some else’s misfortunes; 3) delight in another person’s misfortune. 

– Source: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5^th Edition.

Greetings my fellow Americans!

From the differing camera angles and lighting in the Nixon-Kennedy debate of 1960 to the three-eyed fish swimming in the moat surrounding the Springfield nuclear plant where Homer Simpson has worked for the past 32 years and counting, it is likely clear to most of us old enough to remember when nuclear energy had a bright future that political bias has run rampant in both television news and entertainment programming for decades.  What may be less obvious is how movies, television, and internet media have been shaping our society and culture, especially in the West, for at least as long, as many of us born into the golden age of television allowed ourselves to not only be influenced by what we saw and heard through these devices, but also relied on these more and more to experience life vicariously.  While the chicken-egg conundrum of how our collective spiral away from the faith and morals upon which America was founded was caused by the systematic corruption of our media may never be settled, that both communities are degenerating in lockstep is much easier to claim.

One of the first motion pictures to feature divorce in its main plotline was The Gay Divorcee’ (when gay still meant “happy”) way back in 1934, while 1962 featured the first primetime divorced television character with The Lucy Show.  However, divorce had become a fairly well-known mainstream attribute of the movie and TV star lifestyle during the mid-20^th Century; and as the perceived glamour and appeal of Hollywood stardom took hold, and movies and shows such as Peyton Place (both versions) offered recurring views of lives much more dramatic, yet sensual and seemingly less boring, than those of many of the viewers of such fare.  Well-known for consistently pushing the boundaries of the mainstream America culture of the day, Norman Lear’s All in the Family featured the first openly homosexual character in 1971, and The Jeffersons the first “transgender” in 1977.  Coming out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, more and more TV programs in the 1970s (especially the so-called “soap operas”—sponsored by soap companies) regularly featured scenes alluding to sexual encounters, infidelity, divorce, and general dysfunction of male-female relationships.  And all were encapsulated, and resolved, in 30- to 60-minute episodic bites, and filtered through the glamour and glitz with little or none of the real consequences.

As mentioned previously in this series, the history of electronic media clearly shows a general drift away from feel-good, pro-American, -family and -God offerings in favor of stoking and satiating the viewing public’s ever-increasing appetite for sensual stimulation and gratification by watching others suffer and struggle in complex and increasingly controversial situations.  Why this degenerative path was chosen, and why our society has been unable to collectively snap out of this media-induced trance which we have allowed ourselves to enter, now deserve further examination.

Sex, Violence and Misery Sell

Whether strictly to maximize profits or for other more nefarious reasons, our mass media (movies, TV, games, internet) have increasingly relied on narratives with these main sensational elements, in visual and audial form, to elicit the most provocative and addictive stimuli to potential audiences.  They realized that people were drawn to these in the greatest number; and once the boundaries of what would be permitted to be sold to an increasingly compulsive public were stretched and eventually broken (such that there appear to be no such limits now), they also knew that new offerings would have to be all the more laced with sexy, violent and/or misery-laden material as that public became increasingly desensitized to it.  And with ever-advancing technology available to enable delivery of maximum sensory perturbation, the stories themselves no longer needed to be of any significant depth or meaning.

As mentioned earlier in this article, determining which came first—the media’s (and their advertisers’) exploitation of these tools of “virtual reality” to sell their products or the public’s voracious appetite for it—probably matters less at this point than recognizing that both sides are continuing to feed off of each other in a vicious figure-eight-like manner, as our real-world culture and society has proportionately degenerated.  Our perceptions of what is happening to those around us and the world outside ourselves has been largely conflated with what we see and hear via the media, and our collective ability to distinguish fantasy from reality has been seriously debilitated.  Many of us have unwittingly allowed those who rose or have risen to the level of “most trusted” and “most revered,” by virtue of acquiring fame by appearing in movies and TV (and now YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc.), to shape our views of ourselves, others and the world around us—to constitute “reality” for us.

Those who have sought our destruction have no doubt recognized our collective addiction to mass media, and its great power to influence our perceptions—and behavior.  While it is likely that we are being fed anti-American propaganda on many fronts (including our education system), the sheer reach and impact of what has been injected into our mass media makes it perhaps the most insidious and formidable on which to offer resistance.  How far that we have allowed our government to actually drift from our original founding principles can be attributed to the fantastic perceptions of the world’s problems and the proposed magic of government solutions proffered through our media-induced worldviews?  How much of our passivity to resist, even now, may be due to sedation at the hands of media convincing us that either (a) our drift into globalism is for the greater good, or (b) that those currently in power are polling badly and in political hot water, and that all we need to do is keep voting for the other party and then the guy who was in there before who’s all but promising to run again?

Returning to Reality

And how do we now break free from the hypnotic spell of deriving perverse pleasure from the perceived misfortunes of the world, and others, around us, and/or awarding implicit trust to those we observe via the media, regardless of political persuasion?  We are all human, we all have senses through which we experience the world inside and outside ourselves, and we are all capable of being fooled via those senses.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

• Pray a lot more to God for guidance and discernment, for yourself and those for whom you truly care, through the mounds of disinformation and propaganda (aka, BS) with which we are now almost constantly bombarded and is readily available at our fingertips 24x7x365
• Think and observe critically at all times, especially when viewing anything via mass media
• Find alternatives to the products and services of the mega-sponsors of news and entertainment programming
• Seek out far more direct, face-to-face interaction with family, friends, neighbors and those in your local communities
• Seek out far less news, information, and entertainment which has been written, produced, filtered, enhanced, sensationalized, censored, and/or presented by relatively anonymous sources who are handsomely compensated to attract your attention and to compel you to keep watching—even if you agree with it

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