Aside from the political commentary, the following quotation is worth pondering on how we use, or are used, by technology. How do we send out spare time? How do we use our time on a daily basis? Is it really that important that we are right on top of the breaking news that we carry around iPads, iPhones, portable computers? How many people do you know who have the news on constantly on TV? How do we use the information that is given to us all day, seven days a week? Do we absorb it? Worry about it? Or are we so busy we just ignore what is going on around us? These questions should be addressed within our own spiritual life.
Turn it off and spend more time in prayer and Lectio — there is where you will receive true guidance on what to do in your life and how you fit into God’s plan.
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Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the “cost” of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.
He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:
“My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers of 24/7 social and “news” media. What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet the Web is now ubiquitous.
Servitude comes in many gradations and forms.
Charles Hugh Smith
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