You only need to catch a train from Southern Cross station and you’ll be greeted by dozens of posters and banners, plastered from floor to ceiling reminding us, “if you see something, say something”. At the same time, Daniel Bowen of the Public Transport Users association says it’s important not to feel a sense of panic, precisely because they are designed to alarm.
Fear seeps into our subconscious shaping our collective realities in insidious ways.
Watching who? Watching what?
Remember, there’s also chatter about the need to ban women wearing the niqab, especially in Parliament places. Should we be watching them?
“All terrorism is theatre and all counter-terrorism is theatre” (Dr Anne Azza Aly, research fellow at Curtin University)
The Great Fear
The ability of governments and the media to control and manipulate our emotions at a subliminal level is indeed a masterstroke.
Whilst we are reminded of “evil” people wishing us harm, we see images of grey ominous fighter aircraft being prepared for overseas deployments. We see federal police appearing at carefully orchestrated press conferences explaining how they have successfully prevented us from being murdered in our beds.
As Leunig said when we went to war in 2003, and which is equally applicable today, “to prosecute an avoidable war, a government requires in its citizens a critical mass of fear and hatred against the proposed enemy, and in the media there were many who were suddenly willing to work quite ravenously at fostering this emotional climate”.
The ability of governments and the media to control and manipulate our emotions at a subliminal level is indeed a masterstroke.
It channels our emotions towards a convenient enemy (forget the Catholic priest paedophiles; forget the perpetrators of domestic violence; forget the insidious drug dealers.)
Michael Leunig’s cartoon published in The Age on Anzac Day (25th April 2013), points to the manner in which the governments and numerous public relations departments shape our views, values and outlook on life. How many Australians is too many? he asks. Typically, cynically, he suggests, “We shall find out on ANZAC day when what it means to be an AUSTRALIAN is drummed into us”.
Accordingly, these notable gatekeepers of our political, social and cultural institutions including the media, political pollsters, public relations spin doctors and marketing gurus shape our views, values, thoughts and feelings. Sometimes they work in benign and productive ways, other times in insidious and coercive ways. Sometimes the influence is subtle; sometimes it is heavy-handed.
In Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley outlines the role of skilled mind-manipulators who, trained in the science and art of suggestibility, are able to exploit and control the thoughts, feelings and responses of both individuals and the crowd. “The science-dictator appeals neither to reason, nor to self interest, but to passion and prejudice – hidden forces in the unconscious depths of every human mind.”
Specifically in Brave New World, the technique of sleep conditioning, subtly implants moral suggestions in the child’s mind, until the “child’s mind is these suggestions and the sum of these suggestions is the child’s mind … But all these suggestions are our suggestions (i.e. those of the state.)
Thus the dictatorship is able to control the child’s automatic reflexes, and hence their moral choices, attitudes, desires and outlook on life. (In this case, the children are programmed subconsciously to associate the roses with horror.)
All the more insidious because the conditioning appears so benign and intuitive.
One victim of the “stolen generation” who was ignorant of his cultural origins says: “I didn’t mix with Aboriginal people at all. I had – and I’ve admitted this in public before, that I was racist towards Indigenous people. I learnt my prejudices from newspapers, from the television, from the radio. and while my adoptive parents didn’t go around criticising, you know, Aboriginal people in front of me, there was certainly no positive comments about Aboriginal people.” (Bringing Them Home, p. 237.)
Evidently, the media plays a critical role in shaping our realities, as does advertising and marketing specialists who similarly employ motivation analysts to study human weaknesses. They use their analysis to control influence and our realities, exploit our ignorance and fears for monetary gain. Just think about the world-wide storm of desire each time new tech gadgets such as iPads and iPhones are released.
In “Thou shalt be attractive”, (The Lot) Leunig metaphorically depicts the slick advertising and media apparatus as an omnipotent “dictator” who commands us to be “charming, strong, good-looking, successful, groovy, brilliant, amusing or rich”. We are told how to look, how to feel and how to act. We are even told what to dream in the “name of aspirational self-improvement”. We learn that charm is everything even at the expense of our ‘real” selves. As a result we live in constant “fear of being unattractive”. We become so conditioned by these ideals that we associate a masking of the self with acceptability and happiness and cultivate “two faces” thinking that we are real when in fact we are being deceptive. If we are sufficiently false, we will be rewarded: we will be “powerful, stylish, clever and charismatic”. (Compare Leunig’s comment about the “self aspirational” trend with Willy Loman’s desire to conform to the materialistic rat-race.)
One consequence of the dictatorial power of such marketing gurus is our growing obsession with beauty and cosmetic surgery. The size of this industry increased from $26 million to $37 million from 2002 to 2010. Why? Because people are going under the knife in the name of beauty. Youngsters are at risk, and so are many Asians who are believe they need the double eye tuck in order to appear more European-centric.
In 2013, Lisa Wilkinson delivered the Andrew Ollie Media lecture and encouraged women to take a stand against the media. Like Leunig, she criticized the way girls were being conditioned by the media. She states that “the Instagram culture has become the screwed-up arbiter of a girl’s self-esteem”. Further, that “many young girls are growing up while being held hostage via social media to the views others have of them, long before they even know who they are themselves.”
The war propaganda machine
Leunig is also critical of the Government’s war propaganda machine that paves the way for war, and in particular the most recent wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. He believes government gatekeepers whipped up fear and hatred towards a devilish dictator who had a tendency to spear babies with bayonets. The war was necessary (“weapons of mass destruction”) ; they assured the public it would be “quick”, “clean” and “effective”. (Note Naomi Wolfe’s term, “fear porn”)
Critics of the war were emotively branded “peaceniks” and “appeasers”. As Leunig would suggest, such language tends to typecast those who oppose war as, at the worst, supporters of the dictator and at best people who condone the dictator’s reign of brutality. (143). Contrastingly, the editors, who “zealously built the case for war” were unable to see “through the deceptions”; they “ravenously” fostered the emotional climate of fear and hatred that was necessary for the government to justify war. (142) Leunig is particularly critical of Pamela Bone, an opinion writer at The Age, who supported the case for war and who prior to her death realised that it “had not been worth it, that the price had been too high”. Leunig writes, “I was appalled by her pro-war columns, but also sensed with sadness that she had made an impossible and tragic burden for her humanitarian conscience, because like many others I could see what would happen. It always does.”
“It always does.”
Certainly, Leunig’s oppositional stance has been vindicated. Even the prime minister at the time, John Howard, recently confessed to being “embarrassed” at the lack of weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the war itself that killed 600,000 civilians. Recently, The Age political reporter, Mark Kenny sums up the foolishness of the coalition of the willing in Shakespearean terms: “if history is written by the winners, then the story of recent US-led adventures in the Middle East certainly qualifies as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”. Specifically, he says, “that the coalition of the willing left Iraq in 2003 to a corrupt sectarian government, led by Nouri al-Maliki, who ruled a disintegrating state with moral authority in short supply.”
Even worse, we left a traumatised Iraq, “all the psychotherapists in all the world would not be enough for Iraq”, quipped one psychologist, alluding to the conditions of hatred and resentment in war-torn countries that foster radicalisation.
According to Ramzy Baroud the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye, the threat of a new civil war in Iraq led by ISIL (Sunni Muslims with links to al-Qaeda) is a US creation. ”When Bush led his war on Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda, the group simply didn’t exist in that country; the war however, brought al-Qaeda to Iraq. A mix of hubris and ignorance of the facts – and lack of understanding of Iraq’s history – allowed the Bush administration to sustain that horrible war.” Even more shocking, Mr Baroud believes “ISIL was born in the dungeon of a US prison in Iraq.”
To repeat Leunig, “I could see what would happen. It always does.”
Leunig encourages us to nurture our “handcrafted peculiarity” and remain true to ourselves (“unto thine own self be true”). (See the author of Dear Leader, and Biff who seek to resist the trend to conformity; the trend to follow a phony and fabricated reality that doomes one to emotional servitude.)
See some good parallels with War stories: Soldiers ; governments and realities
Back to Summary: Whose Reality