React To This Thing And Get An Experience Like A New Car As A Payoff For Getting Off

Like many, I sometimes worry over what widespread drug, alcohol, gambling, sexual, and money addiction is doing to what's left of the American Dream.  But I think addiction and addictive behavior is far more widespread than most of us admit to ourselves.  American society in the 21st Century has evolved away from a reasoning citizenry to one all about satisfying desires, many of which millions simply cannot achieve.  There are reasons for that, and most of the time, those reasons have everything to do with manipulating people in ways that essentially take away their liberty.  

Is a human a reasoning animal as Aristotle defined us? Or are we card-carrying members of the Zombie Apocalypse?  What is "the Zombie Apocalypse" anyway?  If we're zombie-walking as some commentators complain when referring to MAGA "culture", what does zombie-walking entail, what creates zombie-walkers, why are zombie-walkers being created, why don't we call those creating zombie-walkers "zombie-walker creators"?  

Since I am full of theories; and since I'm old enough to be considered a sort of crank, or a gadfly, or a crackpot; and since I have a lot of experience in the real world; an experience with suffering beyond that of many people; including experience in addiction, self-medication, and an untrammeled compulsion to confuse and conflate satisfaction with happiness; I'm dumping another theory on those who may encounter this blog.  

Aren't we all proud yet?  A theorist.  Can you believe it?  Maybe my life means something after all.  

Yet, we all know what potentially generating controversies is going to get us: People who come from way out in the La La Land behind the woodwork are going to challenge us, tell us we don't know what we're talking about, and maybe even try to fight us.  Or so it seems.  Posit a controversy set of ideas and watch the reactionaries slide into view from places that continue to remain three-quarters off the screen. . . . 

In other words, theories these days seem a dime a dozen.  Everyone's got a theory, a theory about who's going to win the Super Bowl, a theory why that team won the big game, a theory about the rising or degeneration of American culture or society, a theory about where morals disappeared and can once again be found; theories, in this sense, could cover almost anything.  But most aren't theories at all.  Theories are slightly different from opinions or frames of reference, and while some theories or hypotheses point to the potential of a panacea, many of them turn out to be mere shots in the dark.  We suspect something about a phenomenon or phenomena in general, then we look for evidence that falls on both sides of pro and con.  In terms of practical reason--sometimes known as empiricism, we sense objective stimuli, and then reflect upon it.  This is a common sense means of understanding the world.  

Perhaps that's where I land with my latest grand theory: What does my common sense tell me about a very complex issue facing many people in America?  

Look:  I have a theory about America's issues with addiction.  I'm not about to claim this is any comprehensive panacea so much as it is a set of ideas I think may be valid, ideas that might assist in pointing those concerned about addictive behavior enough to look for its root causes.  I don't expect to be taken too seriously.  I'm a layman, not a scientific researcher into the psychological and physical effects of addiction, or a sociologist who uses a method to determine through statistics, for instance, that show my hypothesis is worth further research into the social connotations of drug and alcohol use.  Nor am I about to begin practicing what is called "scientism", the excessive overreliance on science as "the answer" to all that ails us.  

Rather than pretending I even have a high horse to ride in on here, let me admit it: I'm only a person with a point-of-view, a frame of reference, that might or might not bear something more scientific.  My point of view, of course, like that of any individual's, is tiny and limited.  If my point of view was a point of light, my point of view would join billions of other points of light, all of which have points of view, and far many of them I know nothing about and never will encounter.

There.  My disclaimer.  The preliminaries to my upcoming apology tour.  No red or blue pill here either.  Go ahead.  Take both pills.  This is all about addiction anyway, not about accepting "truth" or remaining "ignorant".  Perhaps I really am unlike some bloggers who seem to picture themselves as Morpheus, the great big rebel leader in the science fiction movie "The Matrix", people who like the character often promote themselves as powerful and authoritative, voices in the wilderness that actually know better about "them" and thus try to gain respect for themselves whether or not deserved.  I see a lot of that sort of stance on sites such as SubStack.  Everyone's suddenly either an expert or a journalist.  And oddly, this is a factor in America's generalized issues with addiction as a social phenomenon.  

I'm unimportant anyway.  Which brings up the quality of unimportance as a social factor.  Many of us certainly see ourselves as unimportant--especially when we begin to address our inadequacy when we see a world that, as we see it, is so uncertain, haywire, out-of-control, and violating everything we want to believe about our lives, or life in general.  How does one single human being successfully confront major issues like wealth inequality, or the lack of affordable housing for the poor, or the death of good-paying jobs, or the creepy ideological warfare as seen every single night on television?  

I know I've felt exasperated here at the end of 2023.  Right now, a presidential candidate running in the GOP primary--Donald Trump--is actively demagoging content directly associated with Adolph Hitler's "blood and soil" mentality when he says over and again to adoring crowds that illegal immigrants (he calls undocumented border jumpers "illegals") are "ruining the blood of America".  The reliable segment of the mass media expresses its alarm, but that only spurs him on to reciting that madness again, likely because he knows it's a way to get free publicity.  And his supporters?  Many are ignorant of the history of Hitler's rise to power.  Many believe Trump's kakistocratic nonsense about "ending illegal immigration".  They see what they always saw as American culture being "threatened" by an influx of undocumented individuals and families, many of which, unsurprisingly, are fleeing the social effects of American addiction that have ruined their lives in Mexico, Central and South America.  

What can I do about that demagogue?  Sadly, I can't do much more than complain about it.  And, in the case of the megalomaniacal narcissist, that literally does no good at all.  In a sense, beyond my ability to vote against him in the 2024 election, I don't have any power at all. Worse, my exasperation and sense of inadequacy rises when I see nearly all of the Congressmen and Senators in the GOP caucuses remaining silent about Trump.  My only valid assessment is that they are in silent assent with his plans to turn a republic into a tyranny.  The mass media?  They're often so polite this translates into "authoritarianism".  See the opening paragraphs above and compare. . . .

Or, in addition, look at how so much "dark money" flows into presidential and Congressional campaign coffers of political candidates who already know that it is so expensive to campaign for federal or state office that they've become "money dependent".  In fact, many politicians readily admit they spend plenty of time drumming up the bucks.  Thus, economic inequality is distorting the democratic aspects of the American republic.  And those in power who oppose that?  Either a shrug or silence--silent assent to the status quo.  I can do nothing.  I am powerless to change that.  Other than, of course, complain about it.  

Sure.  It might not take a genius to detect a problem here, a problem that has a great deal to do with wealth inequality resulting in both legal and political inequality, but what's especially saddening is that a faction within the mass media establishment further distorts this issue by steering through often sophisticated propaganda techniques the rancor and directing it toward the government itself.  And then we end up with demagogues who capitalize on the rancor--while, naturally, unwilling to actually do anything to change that distorted status quo.  

Pressure.  Inadequacy.  And then the television set.    

I've written here about a connection I've identified between reactionary behavior and the television set, my point being that Madison Avenue has used psychological science to find ways to get the human animal instinct to react to stimuli and thus bypass the rational cortex of the brain.  Commercials are quick, convenient, and pass through individual consciousness quite quickly.  Typical viewers, myself included, have little to no time to stop and think about the content of a television commercial.  Some research into the psychological and biological effects of television on the human consciousness indicates that television reaches a different brain center than does reading or listening.  Television viewing is passive.  People can literally dream and "zone out" over the rapidly passing, pleasing, and sometimes fear and anger inspiring images that come and go so quickly.   

Take note, for instance, of the absurd and surrealistic hyperreality that infects television content: a two-dimensional spectacle of moving images, and sounds, fearful drama, particularly advertisements.  How can an instantaneous change in point of view from one TV character to another be remotely real?  Or a likewise sudden shift in location.  Or rapid-fire changes that in no way mirror the real world.  While superficially, we can brush all this off with a suspension of disbelief, this surrealistic facet of the medium can also condition us.  What if we expect the world to reflect the surreality of the television set?  That's not something I've seen anyone even begin to address.  Fix this thing, something deep down tells us, and fix it instantly.  

Does that sort of thinking rely on the illusion of power no one has?  

That intangible and altogether suspicious cousin to conspiratorial reasoning is a minor blip to what Madison Avenue's product propaganda is designed to do: It seeks to manipulate the viewer brain into releasing addictive chemicals.  Indeed, adrenaline, cortisone, and dopamine, are all addictive.  When those chemicals flood the neuronal pathways in the brain, a kindling effect occurs.  Certain neural pathways are gradually conditioned the more neural traffic uses them.  Soon, some pathways are wide--like freeways--and thus a viewer may or may not be conditioned into subconsciously using those pathways more than might be under circumstances viewed as normal.  

Since, according to psychological researchers, this imagery and information passes relatively unimpeded into the human unconscious, we each suddenly become millions--mass man comes to mind here--who are fit to be tied simply to be satiated, not necessarily by Brand X or Brand Y, but for more adrenaline, cortisone, and dopamine.  Perhaps if we looked at those brain chemicals as products produced by manufacturers manipulating objective stimuli, we've been turned into addicts, addicts who need a fix.  

What happens when people don't get a fix of heroin, or speed, or oxycodone, hydrocodone, cocaine's rush, or alcohol, even marijuana?  All anyone has to do is ask an addict: He or she becomes uncomfortable, achy, irritable, even angry, compulsively angry and awfully reactionary.  The TV addict is a concept that has so soaked into popular consciousness to now have no meaning at all.  What happens when addictive behavior gets up and takes itself on the road? How does addictive behavior affect one's immediate social situations, one's interactions with the grocery store cashier, or those in a circle of friends, family and acquaintances?  More generally in range and scope, how does addictive behavior manifest in terms of political, religious or cultural activity?  More important questions no one seems willing to answer.  Where are our experts?  Are they too giving their silent assent to what may (or might not) be distorting the demos and the polity?  

I think of those rapid, surrealistic scene shifts, and special effects, and what research suggests those stimuli do to the animal brain--the sub-rational cortex.  The human animal, after all, is hardwired to perceive threats to survival: a fast moving or unusual action is often perceived as a threat; as is the incongruent behavior of those who do not look or behave as we'd expect them to behave. When the TV set breezes fast moving, and unusually incomprehensible scene changes before the eyes of the human animal, a hunter instinct alerts, and perception heightens. . . . 

. . . just in time for the commercial to fill the subject with happy feelings and offers of contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness.  Just this morning, I read in a newspaper as a pop psychologist suggested people abandon actual happiness for fulfillment.  The pop psychologist's implied definition of "happiness" was "a thing to be pursued".  Which isn't happiness at all.  It's closer to, um, satisfaction and satiation, the sensation of having something empty refilled by a stimulus.

That's pop.     

Of course, illusory reactions to prefabricated stimuli that don't actually exist take us nowhere.  What happens when we're promised a destination and end up nowhere?   The TV set, however, is interpreted as an objective experience in terms of the human gestalt, and in the animal brain, which is larger and more powerful than the rational cortex which makes for the reasoning human animal, sees it as reality.  Philosophers named this illusory "reality" "hyperreality".  It's a false consciousness imputed into the subconscious mind, and it's all about commercial interests profiting off consumers of it.  

Maybe somewhere deep down in my consciousness something tells me I'm being manipulated.  I really don't know.  It's possible I intuit that something isn't right whenever I'm throttled into an anxious reaction by a violent television image such as the one I viewed last night when investigators discovered a bloody, severed head. 

Look.  Someone I have never met, someone who likely neither knows nor cares I even exist, got a reaction.  Human recoils, Cyclops wins.  

I remember reading a book critical of the positive thinking movement so prevalent in today's consumer culture.  The commentator informs that psychologists in the 1950s found that positive thinking increases labor productivity.  That seems commonsensical.  But the psychologists "proved" this, and thus corporations and companies nationwide began campaigns to instill positive thinking among employees.  Great.  You go to a positive thinking seminar that shows you all the wonderful benefits of being positive.  I've been to a few of those.  Afterwards, as I recall, many of my fellow employees began trying harder to keep a positive outlook.  Did our productivity improve?  I really don't know.  Nothing wrong with having "a good attitude".  As opposed to "a bad attitude", right?  Bad attitudes can even be interpreted by management as insubordination.  People can be terminated from employment for having a bad attitude.  

Interestingly, aside from the sudden differentiation between "good" and "bad" attitudes predominating at the workplace, a sort of either--or situation whereby one either has a good attitude or one is a problem--people began dragging both positive thinking and its totalization home with them.  Suddenly, both the positive thinking culture and the either-or totalization manipulated by authoritarian hierarchies self-socialized.  Our politicians urge us to be positive.  Commercials suggest or connote it all day and all night.  Even a strange disorder called "toxic positivity" has emerged whereupon one dictates those struggling within a dysfunctional situation to be positive or be excluded.  

What happens when someone gets bristly over that?  What happens when one is conditioned to react by stimuli for the sake of product placement in the subconscious mind or authoritarian power on the job, at home, or out in the city park?  

Propagandists know reactionaryism can be created.  It's especially easy when the reactionary is already made while sitting in a dark room while hypnotized by a glowing flicker from one corner of his or her room.  Is commercialism completely to blame for this?  It's not necessarily commercialism as a singularly direct root of this brain manipulation; it's how commercial interests advertise products.  And, in a country where democracy in a republic can only exist when the individual is relatively rational and unreactive, that brain manipulation is deeply cynical and subversive.  Sadly, given the fact the physical necessity of a human being is also an either--or situation--either get food, water, air, shelter...or die--it's as if our appetites and necessities are being used to manipulate, condition and turn us all into reactionaries.  Be positive--get a fix.  React to the TV (you have no choice but to react)--get a fix.  

Then what?   

This is where my common sense theory's rubber meets the road.  What's next is that an individual "subject" is going to look for ways to satisfy that itch.  Not only has he or she been conditioned to react to and rely upon a stimulus from the objective world that is illusory and false in many ways, he craves it.  And thus begins looking for other outside stimuli to serve as a fix.  If one becomes immune--a voidoid--to the stimuli on TV or has come to become callous to the enforced positive thinking at work or at home or in social circles, one is going to become irritable, agitated, uncomfortable, achy, even angry and paranoid.  One's an addict, and suddenly the fix isn't enough.  

Buzzkill, right?  

Years ago, during a particularly bad patch where my psyche was in the thrall of Bipolar (I didn't know I had that disorder), and when I was in bad financial shape, I noticed a cavalcade of TV advertisements for Cadillacs and Mercedes Benz automobiles.  There was no way on earth I could have afforded such luxuries.  My means to that end was unreachable.  But the ads persisted as long as I continued to watch the TV.  What did I see?  Beautiful women I could not see myself ever relating to, expensive homes, luxuriant clothing and jewelry, and more, and more, and more.  

Suddenly, in the bluish neon-like glow of the Idiot Box, I caught myself a) feeling like I was less-than or not good enough, and b) getting angry about it.  I'd been conditioned to react to my very bones.  

Is it possible many people in poverty see these stimuli and thus have a negative reaction that expressly lies to them about who or what they are?  What happens then?  The gun show?  That's possible--even if it seems hyperbolic.  We really don't know.  Or, let's say, I don't.  I'm only one person.  Again, I doubt any studies have been done about the adverse effects of commercial advertising beyond what I've summarized.  Why?  I'm not about to suggest there is calumny in this.  But just this month, cable news commentators expressed puzzlement why it is that so many Americans in numerous polls don't seem to think the economy is doing as well as "economic indicators" tell them (maybe not necessarily us) assert it is.  Production is up, let's be positive about it.  People are purchasing more stuff, let's be positive about that.  Oddly, and possibly deliberately, the pollsters or reporters continually fail to offer viewers a breakdown by income in regard to who and at what income level is positive about the economy, and more importantly, where that positivity begins to fade.  Or, if we look at "the average American", we see that multi-billionaires are ladled into the equation, something that skews the results if 80 percent of all Americans, at this time, are having trouble making ends meet.  Is this the case?  What happens if the wolf is at the door and an individual is commanded to be positive about it?  Show gratitude to the wolf?  Not only is that not likely, the opposite is again a reaction against "experts" and "elites" and even "statistics", "economists", "mass media", "leadership", "the boss", "the Northeastern liberal elites", and "the government".  

This is where we all sit back and go, Um. . . . 

Right.  Jobs are plentiful, the commentators tell us.  But what kinds of jobs?  This is a common complaint.  Apparently, the news stations have only so much time and can't be moved to tell us that most of the plentiful jobs don't pay enough for even a peasant to survive in an America where demand is manufactured as much as brain chemistry is manipulated.  Where else to go to stanch the unrest?  Of course.  The harder stuff.  

It's a common truism that many especially poor people are more liable to be saddled with addiction--to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sexual behavior, risky activities.  Some resort to criminal activity in order to meet both their financial needs and to scratch that itch.  Hilarious, right?  "He can't scratch that itch on the inside of his skull!"  But there is even more pressure placed on such people: stigma.  

If one is financially successful, commercialism lauds that one is "a good person".  The unsuccessful?  Not so good.  Indeed, we have another totalization, another either--or: Become financially successful--or one is not virtuous or a good person.  Is this positive for the people targeted by that sort of stigmatic pressure?  Or is it painful?  Another means of piling-on to increase that old itch, right?  

One commentator I recently read said that much of American life is all about "getting off" or "experience".  While he pointed to fundamentalist Christianity as a perfect example of people claiming that feeling good in church, hands raised, people even speaking in tongues, has everything to do with a sense that to them the Holy Spirit is actually them having an elevated sense of the experience of mass hypnosis.  If one reads about religious experience, there can be a heightened sense of reality, but not always.  Many who have decided to become Christian believers never got the Damascus experience at all.  But the experience of mass hypnosis, a cousin to Group-think, seems to delude many.  The actual workings of what Jesus supposedly taught--love your neighbor and even strangers, love God, and most of all, listen--don't always materialize in "the saved".  

Prosperity gospel, anyone?  Feel like joining the evangelical sales force?  Gospel for sale?  Never suggest this is "storefront religion".  That would be disrespectful to a boss-man named Jesus, an authority.  Be positive.  

Then there is an obsession with getting more and more and more.  What drives that?  As mentioned, those who aren't financially successful or who have trouble even meeting their most basic needs can tend to react by moving outside of the conventional wisdom by taking the law into their own hands.  And if that means scoring some dope, then so be it.  In my opinion, we've set ourselves up to be a nation of reactionaries and addicts.  This is not an accusation of some grand conspiracy underway to enslave us all; merely an observation.  But are we enslaved by it?  

Not long ago, I got another stray idea in my head: If so many Americans, as current news commentators are apprising those willing to accept noxious rhetoric from a presidential candidate named Donald J. Trump, are zombie-walking into authoritarianism, what about their addiction to the rhetoric, and to the forces that allow the demagoguery to flourish in their thinking?  How come no one cares to examine such a complex set of colliding dynamics?  Furthermore, if the goal is to keep us all zombie-walking and asleep, what about widespread marijuana use?  Isn't marijuana, in addition to being a hallucinogen, also a soporific?  What would be the societal effect of a populace blissfully passive as the world goes straight to hell?  

Here's where my personal experience enters the picture.  When I used pot on a regular basis, my affect flattened.  I had more brain fog than usual.  I was passive, agreeable, and most of all, far less perceptive than I otherwise would be.  Beyond that, in recollection, I thought just the other day that, if marijuana use is such a subversive phenomenon, and that it literally puts people into affectless sleep, wouldn't that be what any subversive worth his or her salt want for us all?  

Let's all smoke out and make the bald eagle go to sleep.  That way, the common rebelliousness is satiated, and the reactionary tendency is supplemented.  Can't pay the rent, can't find a job, is measured as lazy and less-than, has no solid ground and is in dire need of a scapegoat.  The perfect reactionary.  

At least smoking dope is a good way to check out of the system to a new position of spectator--moviegoer--and all to watch the US go into a nosedive.  But that's merely me, thinking.  One thing is certain, the one experience that is consistently being downplayed is the democratic experience.  If a reactionary is by nature first passive and does not act until an action from outside that either constitutes a threat or a reward (carrot / stick), it's going to be easy to capitalize on reactionary tendencies.  If such are widespread, the political dimensions slip out of the possible and into the probable.  

Interesting words: Lenin once quipped that the best way to control the opposition is to lead it "ourselves".  And if the opposition happens to be those of us who prefer democracy over capitalism, we should look at who is leading us down a vulgar road.  

OK.  This is where I'm supposed to go: Run along now, kiddies, nothing to see here, I'm just a guy with a bad attitude, don't pay attention to me.  As I told a friend yesterday, there's really nothing left to do but stand back and watch the proverbial pigs in the New Testament allegory race off a cliff after being possessed.  

Ah yes.  Possession.  And allegiance to possession.  Not the American way at all.