Noise and mental deprivation affects all of us or, at least, most of us. We all know that being close to loud noise effectively stops our ability to think or, at least, severely degrades our mental agility, assuming of course that we had any in the first place. But I digress.
Loud noise is one of the best and well-tried torture techniques, and it can reduce a normal human being to a gibbering idiot in a relatively short time. Even well-trained spies are not immune to this technique.
I submit that current media noise from all sources is doing the same thing to our brains, if more insidiously and a little more slowly.
My partner and I spent around twenty minutes over breakfast the other day discussing a news report about the winner of a U.S. Congressional primary in Georgia who supports a radical fringe religious belief, called QAnon, that apparently believes and supports the idea that Donald Trump is fighting a war against the infiltration of the U.S. Government and other elite institutions by a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
I am sad to say that it took me most of the twenty minutes to realize that even considering thinking about such a topic was a total waste of my time. I could have been thinking about something far more productive, like thinking about nothing at all.
This morning’s event also made me realize how much time we waste listening to, watching, and generally absorbing total crap, because the media has indoctrinated us to think that we must cram as much information into our heads as possible. I am reminded of one of the basic tenets of U.S. radio stations. Succinctly put, it said that the biggest crime you could ever commit was to have “dead air”, in other words silence.
Today we are bombarded with information, most of which we could well do without and, worse, clutters our minds and prevents us from thinking.
Perhaps this is a government plot to keep us from thinking too much, or at all. Afterall, no politician in their right mind wants an educated and informed electorate that could question their decisions. So, why not create a very noisy environment where they can’t think about anything remotely important. A simple, cheap and very effective technique for controlling the voting public, don’t you think?
I joke………sort of?
We all have a limited mental capacity, some of us more limited than others, which means we can only absorb so much information. If ninety per cent of the information we are “forced” to absorb is total and irrelevant crap, how can we possibly act as responsible citizens in a democracy.
Simply stated, we can’t.
I realize that this blog is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also real, and every day it gets worse.
The media, in all its forms, seems obligated to fill as much air time as possible, as well as catering to the obvious sensational appetites of its audience. Information of substance doesn’t stand a chance in that competition.
The eventual result of this process could be a moronic population that can be totally manipulated.
And I’m not sure that “eventual” is not already here. Noise and mental deprivation is an insidious enemy of thought and should be recognized as such.
