By
Cognitive Dissonance
“Quick…answer this question. How many people can you stuff into a telephone booth?” a father joked to his teenage daughter. Her answer was quite revealing. “I don’t know what a telephone booth is Dad, but I can fit several million into my iPhone.”
I bet you can. And just wait until the iPhone7 comes out next year.
Aside from the pubescent confusion between a physical place for flesh and blood humans and a microscopic place for silicon bits and bytes, nowadays many (young) adults have little understanding of physical, spatial and informational concepts. Those of us over the age of fifty find this inconceivable and it appears to be proof the aliens did in fact land in Roswell and have taken over the Earth.
Intellectually we, and in this case ‘we’ is anyone over fifty, understand that as the world churns and burns “We the Elderly” find it increasingly difficult to keep up with the ever changing technological universe while our offspring snicker and joke about their Neanderthal parental units. As I like to say, it’s not the learning that is so difficult, but the forgetting of the old that is the problem.
And this illustrates the reason why every despot, dictator and democratic regime since the beginning of recorded history has latched onto indoctrinating the youth as the best way to ensure their future in the halls of power. After the ‘revolution’ occurs (political, industrial, technological etc) indoctrination begins as soon as the schools can be reopened and the teachers vetted for allegiance to the new propaganda policy. In this case there has been no changing of the guard in the capital, at least not officially, but rather in the home. The computer, TV and ‘smart’ phone have been seamlessly inserted into the dominate position of power in each and every household.
If you think this is an exaggeration then you’re probably over fifty and are once again finding something inconceivable or unfathomable. It is our failure of imagination that has allowed the aliens not only to establish a beachhead, but to then infiltrate our children and homes. The insidiousness lay in the fact we have invited them in as conquering heroes rather than the technological blight they really are. It is an inspired ‘seduce and destroy’ strategy brilliantly employed by the invading aliens.
Before you call me a Luddite, carefully consider what is happening in your own home. I clearly see all the advantages an electronically connected home brings to us up here on the mountain and I whole heartedly applaud their addition to our humble abode. But even this old fart recognizes the corrosive effects they have on my brain. I think and process thoughts differently than I did ten or fifteen years ago and it can’t all be attributed to aging. On a daily basis I frantically push back against the encroaching small mindedness and attention deficit disorder the alien machines actively promote.
While we all bemoan the fact our math skills have seriously degraded now that a calculator is always within easy reach simply by grabbing our ‘smart’ phone (remember when all we owned were ‘dumb’ phones that hung on the wall as odd ball decorations until suddenly, and urgently, we were summoned to them by Pavlov’s bell?) of even more importance is the twisting and distorting of our natural curiosity and critical thinking skills with the proliferation of the Internet and the advent of ‘information’ search engines.
The phrase “Google it” has replaced “Look it up in the ______”, with various reference material such as dictionary or encyclopedia inserted into the blank. When Google returns 13,827,944 references to your query it is inferred there are that many opinions and/or bits of information on the subject rather than two or three distinctly different references slightly modified and duplicated 4 million times each. Dumb and dumber never looked so good, or at the very least more valuable.
While we are showered with a wealth of information, little to no thinking is involved in the actual extraction other than to manage the Boolean complexities of question phrasing. While I promote the asking of better questions in order to receive better answers, advanced Boolean searches isn’t what I had in mind simply because Boolean is just another black hole thought box dressed up with very specific parameters. Slap on some lipstick and a red dress and even a poo covered pig starts to look pretty.
With the astonishingly rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) soon everyone will be able to purchase a machine to do our thinking for us. That still won’t solve the garbage in – garbage out problem, but with our cranial cavity now reduced to little more than space for rent, ultimately who will know or care? Just ask the machine…I’m sure you’ll get a straight, if not patently propagandized, answer from the central processing unit approved by the central control unit.
Speaking of space for rent, it might make some sense to fill the void with skull candy if we were actually compensated for all the useless garbage and propaganda we ‘consume’ on a daily basis. Alas, such is not the case for the odds are high you paid prodigious amounts of fiat for that palm sized handheld computer aka a ‘smart’ phone (a brilliant propaganda naming coup in its own right), wide screen TeeVee (don’t tell me you still watch an actual boob tube) desktop or laptop computer (I don’t think my laptop has ever graced my lap) not to mention the expensive DSL/cable and wireless connections purchased to deliver ‘connectivity’ directly to you and me.
I can’t wait for the day when they surgically implant a propaganda iChip directly into our cranial commodes at birth while convincing the teaming masses of the need to retrofit our hopelessly outdated gray matter with the latest NSA/CIA/MSM technology. Hopefully they can wire up Beyonce first, then program her to perform another “Let me let me upgrade upgrade” sex-sells commercial like she did for DIRECTV eight years ago. That way voices (and pictures too) in our head won’t just be for the hopelessly insane.
The brilliance behind the alien invasion of Mother Earth lay within our willing acceptance, may I even say desperate adoption, of the invaders and their magic machines. No need to dispatch interstellar warships loaded with AI storm troopers armed to the gills with laser sabers and mobile medical kits used for the forced iChip implants in 'We the Humans' when we eagerly queue up in front of the local Apple/Best Buy/Target store and happily pay (dearly) for the privilege of being consumed by our consumerism. The sad fact is we have met the enemy alien and the enemy alien is us.
I could go on and on about this, but you get the point. And if you don’t…well, that is the point. While we bemoan the implementation of Orwell’s 1984 mind control techniques by powers large and small, the reality is we willingly embrace the filling of our empty space and pay others for the privilege to do so. The next time we become righteously indignant and rage about the latest governmental/political/banker/corporate transgression, instead of misdirecting our anger towards the obvious targets, we might reserve some of that energy and conduct a fearless and thorough self examination of our participation in this macabre farce.
Or not! The choice is always and forever our own regardless of what the aliens tell us.
12-05-15
Cognitive Dissonance
