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Copyright Notice: Copyright © 1972 by Bantam
Books, Inc.; Copyright © 1996 by Nicholas Johnson. All rights
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Communication presupposes a community which, in turn, means a communion between the consciousness of the persons in the community.
The best answer [to how to make the citizen important again], I assume, is to try to keep stretching people's imaginations and concern, mainly through the media of communication. Television . . . has the greatest opportunity -- and the furthest to go -- to widen horizons in the arts, technology, science, societal differences, the political issues of the nation and the world.
We're in science fiction now . . . . Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.
[Broadcasting] matters more over the long run . . . than what anybody else does because [it is] more persistently shaping the minds of more people than all the rest of us put together.
Mass Communication and Mass Disintegration [Chapter
1]
As much as the Federal Communications Commission would like to crawl back in its hole and limit its jurisdiction, the fact remains that it is knee-deep in every problem or change in our society.
Man distinguishes himself from the other animals most fundamentally by virtue of his ability to communicate -- to create and manipulate symbols. However you define "communications," it ends up as part of the most fundamental and basic quality of everything that is human. Organized society at any level -- whether a simple agrarian commune or a highly industrialized metropolis such as New York City -- often can be most perceptively understood in terms of communications theory.
Very soon after arriving at the FCC, I came to realize that I simply could not avoid the responsibility of informing myself about the impact of radio and television programming upon virtually all of our society's problems. Ultimately these problems were going to end up at the FCC in one form or another anyhow.
Give me the making of
the songs of a nation,
and I care not who
makes its laws.
By limiting, distorting and
obscuring information, the
mass media can limit, distort
and obscure man's freedom of
action. To the extent that the
media limit his information,
they make a man less than fully
man.
It is because they [a self-governing people] are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools . . . and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three-legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.
What I have concluded so far has frightful implications for the responsibility of Big Business and Big Broadcasting. But it has also led me to some heartening insights about how each of us can markedly improve our own day-to-day lives in the midst of the corporate state.
Every society, in every age, has imposed some stresses
and strains on the people who have lived within it. In most respects, we
Americans are today an advantaged people. We complain about the burdens
thrust upon us by our wealthy, industrialized society, but we are also
enjoying its fruits. The medical care we receive may be inferior to that
in many less affluent nations -- but it is still decidedly better
than that re-
Malaise and tensions are mounting throughout tho world. Even affluent and strong societies show symptoms of a deep-seated uneasiness amidst uncontestable economic and technical progress. Violence has become a way of life and death when things get too complicated. Quick bloody clashes flare up almost everywhere, and nobody knows if larger confrontations are lurking just around the corner.
As we talk to people across the nation, over and over again, we hear questions like these: "What does it all mean?" "Where am I going?" "Why don't things seem more worthwhile . . . when we all work so hard and have so darn many things to play with?"
The question is: Can your product fill this gap?
Why is it that we, having everything one could wish, are unhappy, lonely, and anxious? Is there something in our way of life, in the structure or value system of our society, which is wrong? Are there other and better alternatives?
ceived by most of the world's peoples. It's true that our children's nutritional levels are substantially less than our knowledge and wealth could and should make possible. But it's equally clear that the prospect of potential starvation is not the real specter in this country that it is for many of the nations of the world. We may not spend our leisure time as creatively as we are able, but we do have more time to call our own than any preceding people in history. There is a great deal wrong with our educational system -- at every level. Other nations have features of their educational programs that are superior to ours. But we are still, as a nation, among the best educated people on earth.
In ironic fact, this increased wealth, education, and leisure -- the very products and prerequisites of our twentieth-century industrialized society -- now feed the rhetoric and revolutionary life styles that challenge it. It is important to make this point. Everything has not gone wrong in America.
At the same time, our society -- as well as that
of other highly industrialized and urbanized nations -- does take a heavy
toll on the human beings who live in it. Mostly this is something that
we just feel -- personally, and from our contacts and conversations with
others. But anyone studying our society today will also uncover some very
troubling statistical evidence of personal and social disintegration.
The fact is that they can feel better for a short time by using drugs, so it is useless to criticize them as being immoral -- any more than you can criticize someone for taking aspirin for a headache. We have to help them to succeed, to get rid of the pain -- or we will never reduce narcotic use.
Indeed, no social emotion is more widespread today than the conviction of personal powerlessness, the sense of being beset, beleaguered and persecuted. It extends not only to Black Panthers and members of the Students for a Democratic Society but also to businessmen, publishers, generals and (as we have recently come to observe) Vice Presidents.
Mr. America, walk on by
The liquor store supreme;
Mr. America, try to hide
The emptiness that's you inside.
The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.
But these are only the most extreme examples. Most
Americans are neither statistics nor corporation presidents. They just
lead dull lives which produce dull headaches. Together these people constitute
the nation's most valuable, and most underutilized, national resource.
For America's greatest wealth is to be found
Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all.
The gap between rhetoric and reality is so wide, the values actually operative so unrelated to biological, intellectual, and spiritual development in its fullest sense, that an authentically human existence for most Americans is an impossibility.
The ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be.
. . . Our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.
in the two hundred million man-days that are available to us every day -- two hundred million days of potential productivity, potential joy, potential love, potential creativity.
The general semanticist, Alfred Korzybski, described three categories of mental health: sane, insane, and unsane. His point was that most of us, while not insane, are unsane. We are not living up to the potential we possess as human beings. We are not fully functioning. The so-called human potential movement, including the late Abraham Maslow, argues that even the healthy human beings among us function at perhaps 5 percent of their potential.
Ask yourself how many people you know whom you think of as fully functioning personalities. How many are there in whose daily lives there is a measure of beauty, contact with nature, artistic creativity, philosophical contemplation or religion, love, self-fulfilling productivity, participation in life-support activities, physical well-being, a spirit of joy, and individual growth? That's what the world's great theologians, psychiatrists, poets, and philosophers have been telling us normal human life is supposed to be all about. But few of us have come close to realizing that potential.
There are many ways of escaping from a whole life. Suicide and the excessive use of alcohol are among the more dramatic examples. But one can also escape into work, the library, a flurry of volunteer paper work or organizational activity, sexual promiscuity, overeating, television watching, or any one of a number of hobbies.
The pressures that make us want to escape and
Society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. [Many psychiatrists] hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only . . . "unadjusted" individuals . . .. This book deals with . . . the pathology of normalcy, particularly with the pathology of contemporary Western society.
I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don't understand.
I have done my best to get along in your world, and now you want to kill me. I say to myself, "Ha, I am already dead, have been all my life."
Jesus dealt in his exorcism with the neurotic constrictions of individuals, but his whole life represented a kind of sweeping exorcism of the neurosis of a whole culture.
I shall make little distinction in value between talking about middle-class youths being groomed for ten-thousand-dollar "slots" in business and Madison Avenue, or under-privileged hoodlums fatalistically hurrying to a reformatory; or between hardworking young fathers and idle Beats with beards. For the salient thing is the sameness among them, the waste of humanity.
that repress our fulfillment are forces we all feel and respond to in varying ways. We are distinguished only by our capacity for adaptability, the strength of that inner force of resistance called our "individuality," and the paths we take when we are overwhelmed.
Just to say that we are living in a sick society doesn't advance the dialogue very much all by itself. It is a useful expression, however, as a prelude to -- or summary of -- further analysis. A great many psychiatrists and other social commentators have concluded, often reluctantly, that there simply aren't enough professional counselors available to deal with the problem one patient at a time. Besides, there's no point in curing a patient who's reacting quite understandably to intolerable pressures: he's right, it's his environment that's wrong. Is he healthier if he learns to live with such pressures? And, if not, how can a professional man in good conscience treat such a patient indefinitely? He is, almost inevitably, led to an effort to try to reform, or at least analyze, the society that is contributing so substantially to the problems of his patients.
It is revealing, I think, that the concerns expressed
by thoughtful psychiatrists and social philosophers are not the exclusive
preserve of a small group of liberal intellectual elitists. These concerns
are also finding expression in the voices of a cross section of America:
the full range of ages, educational backgrounds, social positions, races,
geographical regions, wealth, job categories, and so forth. These are the
people who write me thousands of letters every year. They are the people
who, together, make up this country and set its course. We ought to listen
to what we are telling each other and try to respond
Day after day, year after year, climbing those same steps, punching that time card. Standing in that same goddamn spot grinding those same goddamn holes.
But there's a sixlane highway down by the creek
Where I went skinny-dippin' as a child.
And the drive-in show where the meadow used to grow
And the strawberries used to grow wild.
There's a drag-strip down by the riverside
Where my grandma's cows used to graze.
Now the grass don't grow and the river don't flow
Like it did in my childhood days.
with as much intelligence, imagination, and compassion as possible.
What we are telling each other has a good deal to do with television. But before we examine television, it is necessary to understand the corporate state whose cancerous growth it fertilizes.