PM's Self Reliance Tools: “Howard Beale, the last sane man on television”

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“Howard Beale, the last sane man on television”

The perfect slaves are those who can be persuaded to serve the state against their own best interest and without question.

Long ago the social alchemists developed the art of propaganda. They discovered that persuasion as a system of enslavement is far superior to the rack and the thumbscrew. Persuasion is far superior at creating obedience, docility and an altered state of consciousness with no risk to the state. Furthermore, this mind-altering process is automatically passed from one generation to the other without cost to the state.

Given that, I thought the following excerpt from Jon Rappoport from the Matrix series worth sharing…

The best film ever made about television’s war on the population is Paddy Chayefsky’s scorching masterpiece, Network (1976). Yet it stages only a few minutes of on-air television.

The rest of the film is dialogue and monologue about television. Thus you could say that, in this case, word defeats image.

Even when showing what happens on the TV screen, Network bursts forth with lines like these, from newsman Howard Beale, at the end of his rope, on-camera, speaking to his in-studio audience and millions of people in their homes:

“So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television’s a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business… We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion.”

Beale, coming apart at the seams, is a mad prophet. And because he shines with brilliance and poetry, he can affect minds. Therefore, the television network can make use of him. It can turn him into a cartoon for the masses.

It is Beale’s language and the passion with which he delivers it that constitutes his dangerous weapon. Therefore, the Network transforms him into a cheap religious figure, whose audience slathers him with absurd adoration.

Television’s enemy is the word. Its currency is image.

Beale breaks through the image and defiles it. He cracks the egg. He stops the picture-flow. He brings back the sound and rhythm of spoken poetry. That is his true transgression against the medium that employs him.

The modern matrix has everything to do with how knowledge is acquired.

Television, in the main, does not attempt to impart knowledge. It strives to give the viewer the impression that he knows something. There is a difference.

Knowledge, once established, is external to, and independent of, the viewer. Whereas the impression of knowing is a feeling, a conviction, a belief the viewer holds, after he has watched moving images on a screen.

Images… plus, of course, in the case of the news, the narrative voice.

A basic premise of New Age thinking is: “everything is (connected to) everything.” This fits quite well with the experience of watching film or video flow.

Example: we see angry crowds on the street of a foreign city. Then young people on their cell phones sitting in an outdoor café. Then the marble lobby of a government building where men in suits are walking, standing in groups talking to each other. Then at night, rockets exploding in the sky. Then armored vehicles moving through a gate into the city. Then clouds of smoke on another street and people running, chased by police.

A flow of consecutive images. The sequence, obviously, has been assembled by a news editor, but most of the viewing audience isn’t aware of that. They’re watching the “interconnected” images and listening to a news anchor tell a story that colors (infects) every image.

Viewers thus believe they know something. Television has imparted that sensation to them. That’s what news is all about: delivering a sensation of knowing to the audience.

There is no convenient place where the ordinary viewing audience can stop the flow of images or the story being told. They are inside it. They don’t have the leverage of a crystalized idea or the power of reasoning to get out.

They are inside the story. Knowledge thus becomes story.

The viewer is transfixed by the sensation that he is “inside” watching/experiencing story.

This fixation produces a short circuit in his reasoning mind (if he has one). No time to stop, no time to think; just watch the flow.

When you take this pattern out to a whole society, you are talking about a dominant method through which “knowledge” is gained.

“Did you see that fantastic video about the Iraq War? It showed that Saddam actually had bioweapons.”

“Really? How did they show that?”

“Well, I don’t exactly remember. But watch it. You’ll see.”

And that’s another feature of the modern acquisition of knowledge: amnesia about details.

The viewer can’t recall key features of what he saw. Or if he can, he can’t describe them, because he was in the flow. He was inside, busy building up his impression of knowing something.

Narrative-visual-television story strips out and discards conceptual references. And lines of reasoning? To the extent they exist, they’re wrapped around and inside the image-flow and the narration.

Ideas aren’t as interesting as images. That’s the premise.

To grasp the diminishment of language, consider the current use of the word “text.” Suddenly it’s become a verb; it means a process of sending words. It also refers to paragraphs or pages of writing, as opposed to pictures. “Text” makes “writing” seem like nothing more than one functional (and machine-like) method of delivering information.

And since bone-dry information (e.g., “genetic sequences”) these days is practically considered a synonym for life, when a writer infuses his words with passion, they automatically become a “rant.” “Rant” was formerly applied to describe what a person did when he was totally unhinged to the point of making no coherent sense.

Image, not the word, is the now preferred means of acquiring what passes for knowledge.

Retired propaganda master, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), once told me in an interview: “If you wanted to try a real revolution, you would produce thousands of videos consisting of written words on screens, with someone speaking those words. You would try to reinstate language as a medium. Poetry, formal arguments and debates, great speeches, dramatic readings. You would go up against image and try to relegate it to its proper place…”

In the American colonies of the 18th century, several hundred thousand copies of Tom Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, were distributed among a total population of only 2.5 million people, and the earth shook.

When a technology (television) turns into a method of perception, reality is turned inside out. People watch TV through TV eyes.

Mind control is no longer something merely imposed from the outside. It is a matrix of a self-feeding, self-demanding loop. Willing devotees of the image want images, food stamps of the programmed society.

—But now, something is happening. Something different.

It is to be fervently wished that the revolution against major media will also result in a revolution against knowledge as nothing more than image.

About the Author

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Yours for a productive 2017,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

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