j.
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This was a good talk, but somehow it failed to convey a key element for me about mass media. Up until a certain point, which I've never been able to locate, because I suppose it was a social awareness process and not a simple idea, I believed most of what I saw and read. I absorbed the generalized impression of what constituted the world and the immediate social milieu around me. At some later point there was a disconnect, a disjunction, a separation, a critical distance between what was going on around me and my perceptions of what was going on in the world and both were protrayed back to me through the media lens.
This was a big surprize to me. It inserted a giant wedge between the world I saw and the world my parents and many of my friends saw. It also had an alienating effect, felt as a sense of the surreal. It had a profoundly disturbing effect that I was living in an ocean of lies and delusions.
There was a joke, which I forgot how to tell that essentially says that crazy people, think the rest of the world is crazy and not them. Well, imagine being one of those people. Among the many psychological effects was to then begin to wonder why other people believe what they believe, which is so obviously based on lies.
Eventually, I came up with a name for this as stepping outside the mythological envelop. It's borrowed from anthrology and the idea that other cultures perceive the world differently.
So, this is a much more common understanding today. But there was a time, when it was very much less common. It is now part of the institutional systems to creat, fabricate these alternate realities. It is itself an institutional process and covers every argument, every image, every interpretation of human events, and it is the central tenet of mass media. It is now almost all an unconscious habit of thought.
Back now fifty years ago, the institutional fabrications were much more crude but also much less well perceived by many fewer people. This was part of a radicalization process, perhaps even a beginning foundation. You had to step through the looking glass, and turn around and look back. It was the inverse of Alice in Wonderland. You stepped out of wonderland, and looked back. It was similar to the dramatized effect of taking the red pill.
That's one reason I liked the Matrix series. Unfortunately, once you see the effect of the red pill, you can't re-see again. The whole thing was very similar to a once known reality, where I believed most of what I saw, read, heard, only to discover it was not just bullshit, but intentional fabricated systems of ideologies that created the illusion of an entire bourgeois universe.
So, in the pop culture of the period, LSD and other psychotropic drugs were supposed to be the red pill. They were not of course. They altered a sense of reality, but were just an alternate delusion. And worse somehow, because they put political acuteness to sleep.
Anyway, my additions to Morgan's talk.
CG