The amount of time a species dedicates to play is proportionally related to its overall cleverness. It appears that the intelligence that enables a species to survive and to become successful, also endows it with a mind that needs more qualitative and quantitative stimuli to maintain its mental health but also, through its success, it then awards it with more free time to spend trying to distract itself from boredom, due to its ability to sustain itself with relatively minimal effort. Furthermore, heightened brainpower makes play, not only, a diversion but a necessary aspect of growth and training that prepares the individual being for the upcoming demands on its mind. This double-edged sword of intelligence, that bestows superiority but also the burden of demanding constant stimulation to escape tedium, is more pronounced in man, the highest and most successful of all earthly beasts. Man need only spend a fraction of his time and effort on matters of survival but must then find outlets for his intellectual requirements and constant distracting subjects and objects to focus his overactive and demanding mind. Play, therefore, has become for man, not only essential but an important participant in his mental and physical well-being. But more than this, play has ceased to be merely entertainment through action and participation and has evolved into a passive, non-acting, voyeuristic pastime where an individual vicariously involves himself in distraction through third parties and through the athletic or creative abilities of others. This vicarious, passive entertainment and the extent to which mankind indulges in it, appears to be a distinctive characteristic of mans existence and has evolved to meet, not only mankind’s natural requirements in a modern civilization, but mostly man’s social and cultural ones. Where play once served as a training function and a distracting element, it now, in our modern civilized times, has also taken up the role of an indoctrination tool and a pressure release mechanism for mans more subversive and socially destructive natural inclinations. ENTERTAINMENT AS AN INSTITUTION It is evident that man has been taken out of his natural environment and, through forces of his own devising, has created substitute ones to replace the one he was originally intended for. This leap ‘forward’, from natural environments to manmade ones, have thrust humanity into situations man is minimally able to adapt to psychologically and must, therefore, be disciplined through the threat of reprisal or by mentally indoctrinating him, from an early age, within a frame of mind that will suppress or misdirect instinctual inclinations and egotistical motivations, to varying degrees of success, into socially acceptable avenues that remain loyal to the specific greater whole of a particular cultural, religious and economic time and place. Proof of humanity’s current unnaturalness can be found in the amount of rules and regulations that are needed to keep him within social parameters and disciplined to behaviours of human invention. Everything from the rule of law to morality has been employed in suppressing parts of his natural behaviour and such things as etiquette and political correctness constrain his free conduct within specific social environments. Further evidence can be found in how man always fails to live up to standards, ideals and values of his own design {Christian man, Communist man, Selfless man} and in mankind’s general discontentment with his existence within systems he has not yet evolved to harmoniously participate in. Man has evolved to be violent, sexually promiscuous, egotistical, territorial, tribal, arrogant and selfish- just to name a few human characteristics that are a detriment to a social environment that requires large numbers of individuals to co-exist amicably within small geographic areas and shrinking resources- for this reason many of these, ‘undesirable’, natural traits had to be suppressed and contained, given that evolution takes millennia to adapt species to new environments and human technological and social progress is a wave of constant flux that flings mankind into novel situations every decade. This sacrificing of mans individuality and nature, made necessary by the demands of civilization, is feasible through multiple methods of manipulation and subjugation. The rule of law, religious authority, social institutions, peer pressure and, the most insidious form of control, mass entertainment, all participate in limiting mans actions and in altering his nature into a more malleable and acceptable form. In particular the modern entertainment industry has played a great part in maintaining the illusion of contentment, liberty and naturalness and has supplied an outlet for some of mans most undesirable or self-serving attitudes; it has taken the natural proclivity to play, as a means to distract and train the mind, and has moulded it to include a social programming and an instinctual venting element to it. Entertainment is, therefore, a necessity for any civilization no matter its brutality and callousness. Modern governments, as in past times, regularly use distractions to alleviate the pressure of scrutiny and criticism; there’s nothing like a war, for instance, to take a population’s thoughts away from economic hardships and athletic events are often used as substitutes for real action, something the Romans knew all too well. As such the entertainment industry in any nation serves as a pacifier of discontent and a method of taking the focus off national problems. With the advent of recent technological means of communication, entertainments has acquired the power to coerce, control, distract and direct entire populations and has established itself as one more institution with its own, authority and importance. Hollywood, in the US, is in fact a major power-player within the political and social framework, who’s voice is never underestimated or ignored, and the music industry one of its most lucrative businesses that can impose its message upon millions of young or not-so-young listeners and export cultural ideals around the world. But where entertainment has achieved its greatest strength and power is through television broadcasting and its accessibility, by millions, from the privacy of their own homes. We, in fact, live in the age of the television; there is no home that does not have one-in most cases more than two- and there are few individuals that do not share the common culture of TV experiences no matter what their national backgrounds. Knowledge is disseminated through the TV, opinions offered, information dispersed and minds subliminally coerced to buy or to believe or to behave. Here is where the line between entertainment and seriousness is blurred, to such an extent, that news shows are marginally different from sit-coms and pseudo-documentaries, proposing paranormal superstitions, cannot be distinguished from real documentaries offering real scientific insights. In Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ he proposes that this constant drive to entertain and to be amused, not only takes away from our focus on important, life threatening or enhancing interests but also the method of entertainment and the means by which it is presented, is creating a type of mind that is unable to deal with deeper more difficult ideas and which relies on images and small, superficial pieces of information because it cannot focus its attention on any specific item for any period of time over the duration of a typical TV commercial. He says: “To say it still another way: Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.” In his view this metamorphosis from a, what he calls, ‘typographical’ mind, that thinks and deals with ideas with language and imagination, into a television mind, that suffers from attention deficit disorder, ignorance and an inability to comprehend ideas other than in a piecemeal, superficial way and that requires any subject to be chaperoned and submerged in hefty amounts of amusement, to even register in its consciousness, is leading to a society that only Aldous Huxley or George Orwell would not be overly surprised with. Postman goes on: “ America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in western education. The first occurred in the fifth century B.C. when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third is happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution, particularly the invention of television. To understand what this means, we must read Marshall Mcluhan.” We have reached a point where news reporters cannot be told apart from entertainment characters and where presidential candidates are judged by their TV personalities and their photogenic qualities and not, so much, by their opinions and mental qualities. Looking at our modern western world we see how, overindulgence in entertainment, has created minds dependant on it and unable to occupy themselves with anything of importance if it does not contain some aspect of amusement. This dependence makes the entertainment industry a very powerful instrument of mass control, equal if not superior to religious dogma, and an educator of massive proportions. But let us dissect the utilities of mass entertainment and see how they play a part in directing and forming psychologies and mental qualities. UTILITIES OF ENTERTAINMENT Due to the complex demands of the human mind and the necessities of a complicated modern existence within civilization, entertainment has acquired multiple uses, which all coexist and work in unison, to create specific human drives and to divert others into useful avenues or suppress them into non-existence. I have categorized the utilities of entertainment into three main groups, each containing in itself multiple sub-categories with common routes and goals. 1}Distraction This primary and most primitive of entertainment utilities remains the driving force behind it all and has lead to unforeseen consequences through the arts. The essence of entertainment is mans propensity to become bored and to require a diversion for the minds restlessness. But, where once we were the creators of our own amusements, we are now more willing to allow others to distract us, giving rise to the entertainer, the artist, the professional athlete, that indulges his own creative or physical talents in play and allows us to participate, as passive observers. The amount of distracting, a being requires, is inversely proportional to the amount of time it needs to meet its other physical and social responsibilities but, more than this, it reveals the degree of liberty it has in quenching other physical and mental necessities which may be undesirable, in a social context, or denied to it, due to the rule of law, moral prerogative and cultural prejudice. Furthermore, the need to distract, may also expose a deeper discontent with the ‘real world’ or with the beings overall ability to express itself externally. This limitation on its choice of action may demand an escape from ‘reality’ into an alternate one, that may possess more lax social and moral codes of conduct, have no real cause and effect or may be more appealing to the specific individual due to taste. There are many, socially allowable, ways to distract oneself; starting from the original participatory one, of playing or creating oneself in athletic events or through artistic expressions, and including the non-participatory ones, made obligatory by economic or social restrictions that the individual is burdened with, including being a passive observer of another’s athletic or creative pastime and going as far as escaping reality through another’s imaginations: as in movies, books etc. In our modern western world the active distraction option has been exceeded by the more passive, non-active one. We find, in our western society, such a degree of stressful time demands on individuals, that a further active element is made practically impossible due to fatigue. In its place the passive element has come to dominate and made feasible through technological outlets. Man, today, is more likely to sit on his couch as he looks on to how others play, create and even live; he substitutes his own life with those of others, whether real or mythical, and lives passively through their actions. Man no longer lives but experiences living; he no longer participates in reality but is an observer in a hypothetical, ideal reality where his nature finds expression and his instincts are defused so that he can go on being a simple, disciplined automaton in a faceless system he has no control over and no power within. Sports teams become extensions of his family, his tribe, actors become intimate friends, idols and mentors to be fantasized and emulated, singers become echoers of his voice, movies and books become new realities to replace the one he is forced to exist in. 2}Indoctrination The indoctrinating element of mass entertainment should not be underestimated. It is through subliminal consistency that rules are established, opinions guided and moral attitudes maintained. Something as simple as a joke in a sit-com, a commercial with a particular image, an anchor on a news show using a specific word instead of another, may appear as harmless, but when repeated continuously over a period of time and from diverse sources, it becomes, in the mind, a deciding factor as to what is ‘truth’ and what ‘fantasy’, what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil’, what is ‘real’ and what ‘false’. On TV channels that are supposedly dedicated to documentaries and/or history there are regularly interspersed paranormal, pseudo-historical shows that deal with fantastic theories in the similar manner employed by legitimate scientific documentaries. This blurs the distinction between fantasy and fact or respectable and unrespectable ideas further and makes the individual observer unable to discern between the two and to group both under the same label. With the constant bombardment of information from multiple sources, of questionable quality, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate, genuine and disingenuous becomes hard for the mind to filter through and memories based on real events and fictitious ones becomes a matter of personal tastes and self-interests. The amount of information sources in modern, western society is not proof of accessibility to diverse opinions since most information centers are controlled by a few corporate entities with common interests and the few individuals that have access to mass audiences must go through the same outlets, be chosen, supported, endorsed and bankrolled by them and are all the product of the same social environment and so share the same influences of religious and cultural institutions upon their mind from an early age. The few ‘bad apples’ and dangerous opinions that may get through can be censored and slowly be allowed to perish through indifference. It may be argued that no direct control is exacted upon the disseminators and facilitators of mass mind manipulation and that they are allowed to function freely with only popularity and profit as the guiding standard; this neglects to consider the indirect control exacted by those owning the entertainment outlets and how they choose which artist, which reporter, which musician will be allowed to roam freely within their realm. Censorship is conducted during the choosing process, which allows for the illusion that free expression is endorsed by the system and all opinions are tolerated equally and that popular tastes are the deciding factor as to what gets produced and offered up for mass consumption. In fact popular tastes and values are themselves coerced by the disseminators of entertainment and not judged by the general tendencies of the masses. The people are conditioned to have particular drives or to have particular needs to express their natural inclinations, either through the entertainment industry itself or through other religious, social and cultural institutions such as the education system, and then they are given the very thing they were meant to want, in the first place, or an alternative to substitute a need that cannot be erased but also cannot be allowed to exist as it is. Even when subversive ideas are allowed to be expressed, it is in such a way as to diffuse their power and to degrade their veracity. It is not surprising that those opinions that contradict the popular, official position are exposed in fantasy scenarios or in humiliating simplicity and labelled as a ‘conspiracy’ that devalues them, as a possibility, and takes away the necessity for an explanation. In recent times questions such as: How and why did the US enter the Second World War? Who killed Kennedy and why? Who really leads a ‘democratic’ nation such as the US? What are the connections of leaders and men of power to corporate interests? These questions are treated with a mocking attitude derived by the before mentioned techniques where just by uttering them you are deemed foolish and summarily included within the group that believes in ridiculous alien abductions, Big Foot sightings and other paranormal mythologies and you become ludicrous by association. In an analogous manner, real subversive ideas and ideals are aloud some free expression through popular entertainment outlets and ‘de-clawed’ in the very process. Some recent movies containing deeper dissident symbolisms such as ‘Fight Club’ or ‘The Matrix’, musical groups and artists expressing dissident ideas such as Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson, in recent times, and Pink Floyd, to name one from the past, as well as many comedians and artists in all the arts, that include some elements of discontent against the system, are allowed to express themselves against the very institutions that give them a voice in order to diffuse their power through exposure to the masses, that may not completely understand their metaphorical meanings or by losing respectability by being associated, in this way, with the same pop culture they speak against, and in this way they become unthreatening to the status quo. Beyond the few exceptions of non-conforming artistic expressions, that are demystified in the before mentioned way and further diluted within the myriad of conforming artistic expressions, the real work of entertainment continues; social attitudes are created, consumer tastes moulded, moral ideals presented, political viewpoints circulated, socially acceptable modes of behaviour proposed, life goals and dreams offered and mass control achieved. Something as simple as using a word, rather than another, a particular color, and a specific musical tone can be enough to influence the human psyche on a subconscious level; the methods of mind manipulation are countless. -Man is more prone to take an attractive person to be more honest, more reliable and so we have good-looking reporters and most musical artist must also possess the ‘right image’ to be considered worth listening to. - Man can be affected by music and so department stores and even super-markets include an accompanying musical theme to enhance the buying experience. -Man is affected by color and so the marketing industry and packaging have become a science by which not the best but the best looking are awarded consumer recognition; aesthetic psychology. -Man has an instinctive need to belong and so an artistic work is valued by its popularity, the numbers, and its sales; psychology of the mob. -Man likes to overestimate himself and to want to associate with what he considers superior and so all ideals are wrapped with the mantle of a winner, of an aesthetically appealing ideal in order to become more palatable to the stomach; psychology of the vain. -Man is, by nature, attracted to fats and sugars and so most popular foods are drenched in them. -Sex sells and so every consumer product has some sexual ramifications, even soft-drinks; evolutionary psychology. Argument and substance have ceased to be the standards by which ‘truth’ or ‘value’ are discerned; now it is the image that dominates our standards and popularity that guides our desires. The imagination is drafted in the service of indoctrination and, what is most striking to it, is utilized to direct the minds inclinations. The quality of a people can be judged by the role-models it chooses for itself: Bill Gates as a model of wealth and a go-getter, who used the system to his advantage, Michael Jordan as another model of wealth and with the athletic talents to entertain us, Tom Cruise as another model of wealth that sells a persona, a marketable character and image that ignites the imagination of shallow minds, these are the models most would like to emulate. How many have as role-models men and women of science, intellectuals, and creators? Notice that all these role-models are somehow associated with the entertainment industry and all possess our highest modern value: wealth. The influence of entertainment goes beyond just opinion shaping, it has a direct effect on how we behave and act in social environments. Gender roles are established or reinterpreted through television shows, romantic interplay and most other interactions are imposed through standards proposed through movies and TV programming; our interests are dictated to us, our ambitions, our conduct towards authority figures, towards people of other nations and towards knowledge are given and strengthened through entertainment. 3} Venting Another utility of the entertainment industry is in how it provides society with a venting, pressure release means by which many of mans more undesirable, natural inclinations are allowed to flow through. Through the method of passive participation man lets loose some socially unwanted attitudes and drives and enables him to remain disciplined and malleable in his other, more socially desirable, activities. -Sexual promiscuity is undesirable so pornography comes in to allow some release for a creature that is, by nature, polygamous, in order to maintain the standard monogamous lifestyle civilization depends upon. Furthermore, through sexual entertainment, some more mischievous, aggressive and culturally unacceptable sexual behaviours are allowed to vent their energies. -Violence is undesirable so entertainment comes in to allow a vicarious experience that allows for any level of violence to be explored and represented for a creature that is, by nature, violent, in order to maintain the standard of lawfulness and peace that makes civilization possible. Furthermore more personal vindictive, destructive characteristics are allowed to be expunged and cleansed. Many such other human, ’socially undesirable’, predispositions are deflated and freed from the constrains of the human subconscious and inhibited from becoming pressurized and explosive, in this manner; adventurism, rebelliousness, destructiveness, aggressiveness, egotism, arrogance, laziness, free-thought, unwanted creativity, confrontational political ideals, and a multitude of various other unacceptable expressions of individuality and uniqueness are given an avenue to be articulated and forgotten. Here is where entertainment serves as a pressure valve through which most of the human natural heat is vented and rendered null, for the benefit of the social norm. The very fact that these entertainment outlets exist speaks more as to the real nature of man and how it has been manipulated and mutated to fit into systems of his own creation. CONCLUDING REMARKS Evidently the demands of civilization limit man and his actions and impose an added boredom to the natural one stemming from an overactive mind; the success of our species and the overpopulation this has lead to also detaches man from his personal attachment to his creations, his work and his fellow human beings and dehumanizes him into a statistic, a number, a simple consumer that must be controlled and guided to particular forms of behaviour that benefit the ‘hypothetical’ whole. This manipulation of individualism and natural drives is achieved through many institutions, of which, the entertainment industry is one of them. It is not only the subject matter of entertainment but the mode by which it is offered in that plays an important part in how we think, what we think and why we think it.
I'm almost ashamed of this, I wrote it well over a year ago when I'd just found Foucault and I wince re-reading it: I agree with you on the subject of entertainment, Wanderer, and I'd take it a step further: The way we are entertained now also serves to label us. A young man wishes to be or look vicious - he listens to Cannibal Corpse or Eminem. Perhaps he wishes to be or look thoughtful - he might then listen to something like System of a Down or Tool. Classification allows for better management of the herd - both in the application of social values and in marketing these values to prospective buyers.
Sometimes we are attracted to that which we lack and we try to buy into image and respect and love without earning it. Pop culture sells images to those that wish to think of themselves accordingly.
Just wanted to let you know that I find your posts interesting, WANDERER. So much, in fact, that since I have ran out of time to read this post online, I have printed it so I might read it later on. ...sorry Xev, I didn't include your responses in my print-out Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
To try and experiance new ideas and thoughts is a form of intelligance but by narrowing our quests by just listening to only one type of music or reading one style of book is limiting our growth potential. If one only enjoys a certain type of music then they are only supressing their intelligence not expanding it. I try to learn about many peoples music, books, lifestyles to try to understand them better as well as enlightning myself to the wonders of the human mind and what it can give us all.
