Locobot

Okay ARTele, what is the "new authority paradigm?" You haven't yet told us, despite repeated requests, how your new Authoritarianism differs in any way from the historical precedents you're supposedly opposed to. I submit Orwell's Oceania as one possiblility. Oceania is really an amalgamation of various authoritarian controls mixed with (then) future technologies. Control is omnipresent through two-way telescreens. Corruption is checked by terror, torture, brainwashing, and a cult of childhood purity (see: Khmer Rouge). Leadership is disembodied, it doesn't matter if Big Brother actually exists or not. He never needs to be replaced. If this isn't what you had in mind ARTele, then please tell us how you intend to implement your NEW brand of kinder gentler postmodern authoritarianism...

roachboy:
You argued that authoritarian governments engender a more fragmented, diverse, individualistic society and I ask for a comparative historical example. The nations must be relatively equal in size, industry, etc. and have existed at the same time.

ARTelevision

Stompy, understood, as regards what people think.

I'm proposing there is just about zero choice in the matter. We are a control paradigm personified. There's nothing about us that doesn't reflect internal and external hierarchical control/feedback systems - except perhaps some of our wishes, dreams and desires. I see the essential discussion being what sort of (governmental/social) control is optimal for us.

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ARTelevision

Locobot, thanks for the opening.

As I stated, I see humans operating best today under two types of control - governmental control - of which the US and some other socialist/capitalist/democratic governments, similar to the US in fundamental ways, are examples - and mass-media control - which is non-governmental to the extent that it is owned by corporations, organizations, and individuals.

This is the conflict and the crisis of the postmodern age I see eventuating from this dichotomy (both poles of which tend toward total psychological control). If it were simply a choice between governmental control (which I see as a socializing influence) and media control (which I see as an anarchic influence), I would choose to focus on governmental control, as it it more viable in the long run.

Optimal performance is probably not a simple choice between the two forms of absolute control but probably lies somewhere in between.

I have also proposed that both control and freedom are artificial and illusory. So the question becomes: what forces will best focus and drive our illusions toward the betterment of society as a whole and - less important - toward the fulfillment of individual destiny?

I don't know the answer to any of this, nor am I certain of its scope and scale. My opinion is that both are vast and as I'm seeking a theoretical solution, I'm soliciting the opinions of others.

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VTBrian

I took a class last year that delt hevaly with touism and anarchism. The more and more I read the more I became absolutly convinced there is not way humanity could ever pull it off. Humans need some form of controll at all times.

roachboy

locobot: what i said was that authoritarian regimes engender an ***atomized*** population. this does not correlate with any of the substitute terms you proposed: " fragmented, diverse, individualistic" which sound like things you see floating about in benneton adverts. either we are not talking about the same thing, or you have blurred posts together.

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denim

What is an "atomized" population?

roachboy

art: on your post above: i am not sure i see this opposition as functional---government vs. media, both tending toward total psychological control, one socializing, one anarchic....so i have a few questions:

some of this is terminological, for which i sort of apologize, but i am trying to clear the ground a little bit so i can work out what is happening here...so bear with me.

i do not see the clear seperation between state and press. even in my most marxist moments, i would not have gone so far as to posit either a complete identity or a total seperation. could you clarify the basis for the distinction?

does it come down to a matter of ownership?
ownership is not as simple as it was in marx's time as a simple function of the diversification of ownership brought about by public stock offerings.
public vs. private sectors?
this would seem a distinction that moves around quite a bit, is a function of ongoing conflict over the question of the airwaves/cablewaves, whether the space occupied by the major broadcast media is or is not a public sector/good and what obligations follow from so defining it. in other words, if the distinction between entities lay here, i suspect you might be reifying an ongoing political boundary conflict,

i do not see the basis for imputing a discrete or even coherent policital agency to "the media"--it seems (take tv) to be broken up into political factions that snipe at each other and try to frame an audience that agrees with their general viewpoint in terms of content so that audience will be consistent in viewing and thereby in submitting to patterns advertising delivery.

when i looked through the mass media thread last night, i noticed that much of the energy you devote to the matter of "the media" seems to stem from a tendency to see it as being responsible for a certain type of cultural "degeneration" that you support by equating the development and usage of what amounts to a visual rhetoric (intertextual relations across/between adverts for example) and "mind control".... i wonder if this is the central tenent behind your position, that you see as unified this entity called "the media" as a way of explaining a set of effects--and then oppose to this agent a counter to which you attribute a series of counter values. (this is my actual hypothesis)

further, i do not see the distinction between the state as "socializing" and the media as "anarchic" given that both derive their legitimacy (and direct their approaches to maintaining that legitimacy) from a largely atomized public, the normative conception of which is a suburban nuclear family whose sense of community is to a significant extent fashioned through relationship with television. it seems to me that they are both exploiting a particular social-geographical model (fordist, american, whatever you want to call it) that has developed over the history of the us since maybe ww2 (insofar as it is after the war that fully prefabricated housing starts to penetrate the american market)....and that insofar as they are both reacting to a particular geography/socio-geographical model, they would tend to have similar outcomes with reference to actors who frame their lives within them. in other words, i think that the suburban model in its american variant is the prior condition that you react against, and the opposition you pose tends to obscure this assumption and to push thinking about the consequences of it into a place it need not go....

still thinking.....

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

atomized=wholly fragmented, tending toward negative identities, only able to form alternative social or political networks with great difficulties...incapable of coherent resistance , withdrawn into the smallest possible spheres of social interaction as a defensive posture...

features like that.
the public image of an authoritarian regime, which tends to rule by fragmenting the population and by doing so makes them infinitely more malleable.
not that far from american conservative ideology in its total, implacable hostility to the public as concept.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

roachboy, good stuff!

I need to ponder this. I most certainly will and will get back to you here - no matter where the current of the discussion flows in the interim.

Thanks.

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Charlatan

Art... I have only one issue with what you suggest above (and I suppose I am restating something from earlier in the thread) and that is that I don't feel it is so much media vs. government as it is The Corporation (private) vs. Governement (public). The media is the powerful tool used by both sides.

There are many Corporations that will work hand and glove with Government (see: Halliburton, etc.) but that is really only in so much as it suits their current needs.

Corporations are entities that, in the course of "doing business", have used the media to shape our dreams, attitudes, spending patterns... essentially who we are... or think we are.

At the same time, the Government uses the media to speak to the citizenry... when successful they can build support (Chomsky calls this Manufacturing Consent).


I see the forces of Corporatism as dangerous for the main reason that their sole stated purpose is to generate money for their shareholders... They are short term thinking, quick money making organizations. The only thing that keeps them in check are laws imposed by Government.

There is a constant push (via lobby groups) to diminish these Governmental powers in favour or a "freer market" (read: more power to the Corporations) and "smaller Government" (read: diminishing authority).

The real battleground is in public opinion and this is fought in and through the media.


To my mind, the end result of increase Corporate power is the "chaos" that Art speaks of... Therefore, it is essential to increase the authority of Government... this is done either with tougher laws or the abolishment of Corporations.

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ARTelevision

Yes, as for what I have been saying so far - that's about it, Charlatan. It's just that the media is composed of more than just corporations - it is also the product of organizations and individuals. But I take your point about government also using media, of course.

I suppose I'm talking about governmental media (propaganda) and all other media (mass culture). I prefer governmental authority and propaganda (because it is amenable to the constitutional democratic process) to the degenerative mess that popular culture creates in the world.

I'd like to take it to another level and respond to roachboy at the same time, but I want to think on it for a bit.

The input of others is welcome at this point.

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denim

The problem, as I see it, is that The Media is made of Corporations. It'd be much better, IMO, if The Media wasn't allowed to concentrate ownership of many outlets in few hands. It'd be better if no one could own more than one outlet anywhere. No more networks as we know them, in other words.

Government is, in our case, good for dealing with Monopoly, as a "perfect capitolism" would tend to generate. ONE BIG CORPORATION that owns everything, versus what would have to be a small, ineffective, government, would be fine to many corporations, as long as they were in charge of The Corporation.

I suspect this is a tangent, though.

ARTelevision

The problem with small orgs and individuals as regards media is that they produce anti-social anarchy and add to this counterproductive tendency.

BTW, before someone feels they checkmate me by mentioning that, as an artist and independent producer, I produce the kind of thing that I am pointing out as a problem, let me state that I am guilty as charged. I know my stuff is anti-social and anarchic at base. This is a part of the reason why I feel so strongly that people like myself should be regulated and held in check by powers more socially responsible than I am wont to be as an individual.

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roachboy

aside:
well, if that were grounds for checkmate, i too would be.
if anything, sound is more dangerous than visuals--maybe plato was right about that--on the other hand, being invisible feels like sufficient regulation.
if the collective ever gets visible, then we might be a problem. heh heh.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

denim

Honestly, I have no idea what you do for a living, Art. I find myself on opposite sides of almost every issue I discuss with you, so the topic hasn't exactly come up.

If you prefer regulation, that sounds to me as though you'd rather be a sheep yourself, which doesn't sound right. What do you really want, when you say "regulation" in this case?

Charlatan

Again, I don't believe that the Media per se is the problem. It is those that use the Media that are the issue. There is nothing inherently evil about a CD, a Television carrier wave, or Newspapers... it is the Corporations that create and distribute content in these various media that are the issue. The Corporations that sell us concepts of who we are until we swear it is our own idea of who we are...

I see this system as hugely problematic in that we are ruduce from citizens (active, cogent participants in our societal makeup) to consumers (where choice is ruduced to brand loyalty)...

The problem is that the Corporations using the media like this have created a situation where we believe ourselve to be free, empowered individuals... It is a wonderful dream from which I see no chance of escape (aside from becoming a hermit in a cave).

The problem with suggesting that a stronger government is neccessary and that propaganda (as Art defines it above) are so odious to so many on this thread is that it is much more up front in methods (perhaps it is because the form of government we have is a left over from the Modern era). As a result of this we can see the strings, as it were... we become acutely aware of the manipulation... Governement, as it is, is too unsubtle in the face of the Corporations and their media use.

Again, I suggest that success is to be found in a balance between these two opposing forces. You CAN have both a strong government and a strong economic engine.

__________________
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- Old Man Luedecke

ARTelevision

denim,
What I do isn't important but for the fact that some of it involves creating adult content and much of it involves the supremely self-indulgent egotistical and anarchic type of thing often referred to as "art". I mentioned it because there are enough people here who know this that I felt it would be disingenuous not to do so in this context.

I have no problem at all with many of the things the rest of my kind denounce as "censorship of the arts," and so forth, because I understand that individual human beings, especially ones who cultivate their creative individuality to a high degree, are too self-involved to be trusted with much more than a single citizen's "right" to political power.

Sheep don't need much regulation as they are well-domesticated. Humans, on the other hand are unruly types who serve no higher purpose than their own, etc. No need for me to repeat myself here. I just want to indicate that I am against me-ism for precisely the reason that most of my colleagues are all for it. To hear an artist proclaim "free expression" to the rooftops is, for me, no different than to hear a baby scream, "me, me, mine."

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ARTelevision

Charlatan - by "media" I do not mean the tools of content creation. I mean the content itself and the manner in which it is promulgated.

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Journeyman

Considering that the government (authoritarian side) has certain methods of ascertaining the truth in events (testifying under oath before congressional hearings), and the public (anarchic side) has it's methods of ascertaining the truth in events (freedom of press), a problem lies in the fact that the freedom of the press is abused in conjunction with freedom of speech, in that the press can often be full of shit. Biased in the direction of their private entities interests.

While the National Enquirer exercises it's freedom of speech, and pretends to be a member of the free press, it is by no means taken seriously. This is not a problem. The problem lies in news agencies that are, when they should not be. As a suggestion, it may be agreeable to all present that news agencies purporting to be credible be given the option (and, thereafter, seen to be the duty) to swear all reported facts as true, under oath and penalty of perjury, with punishments that could be doled out (fines, loss of press license, etc).

Editorial and opinion pages are nice, but it seems more and more of the opinions end up on the front page. This, under certain lenses, would be seen as an unfortunate feature of the anarchic side of the authoritarian-anarchic continuum.

ARTelevision

I love it!

Don't be surprised if some of our esteemed colleagues hate the idea, Journeyman. But what the heck. That's life. I appreciate the concrete proposal. Eventually, this thread will have to become a series of concrete proposals. I'm sure if it continues there will be much discussion of each one.

Thanks.

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roachboy

journeyman:
your position works well if you presuppose that at some point people imagined "objectivity" was possible.
which of course it is not.
at best, "objectivity" is a kind of neutral rhetorical style that functions to mask the political character of the arguments being advanced.

you note the increased visibility of editorial content in "journalism"

if you accept the above statements, it would follow that this increased visibility would probably be better for the public than a situation in which the illusion of objectivity obtained. in such a situation, viewers/readers would invest some faith in the distinction editorial/journalism and so would be more inclined to not note the convergence (identity?) of the two.

as for trying to enforce a standard of "objectivity" rooted in an ideological illusion...i dont see how it would be possible at any level.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Of course you're correct, roachboy.

But I do like the spirit of Journeyman's proposal.
I like it a lot. Why? Because it unflinchingly challenges one of the shibboleths that contribute to our somnolence. The fiction of a "free press" needs to be exploded. We are in a predicament deeper than our old cherished principles will be able to help us out of. And I appreciate such brave attempts to challenge the status quo as regards some of the very things that were created to free us and which now serve only to enslave us. If we are willing to send proposals such as this one up the flagpole, if even for a windswept moment, we will be sure to make some progress toward refashioning our existential situation.

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hammer4all

Look, if you are really interested, you'll look at how that question is answered in the FAQ, but for some reason, I don't think you are...

denim

You're completely correct: I'm not. It's not like it matters since y'all will never take power any more than the current "Libertarian Party" will.

roachboy

i was thinking about the drift of this thread for a while this morning, and it prompted me to track down something from a book by mark crispin miller, "boxed in"--it comes from an essay called "how tv covers war" and seems germaine.
a quote first, short (i hope) explanation after:

the quote:

because the tv image is intrinsically restrained, then, it is not the newsman's purpose to take the edge off an unbearable confrontation. his illusory control performs a different function, necessitated not by the nastiness of actual events, but by tv itself. what upsets us most about these images of aftermath is not so much their painfulness as their apparent randomness; we suddenly arrive upon the unexpected scene and ask ourselves: 'why this?' watching the news, we come to feel, not only that the world is blowing up, but that it does so for no reason, that its ongoing history is nothing but a series of eruptions, each without cause or context. the news creates this impression of mere anarchy through its erasure of the past, and through its simultaneous tendency to atomize the present into so many unrelated happenings, each recounted through a sequence of dramatic, unintelligible pictures (p. 158)

======
question: do you think miller's characterization of tv news, particularly with reference to war (conflict more generally) is accurate? (i understand that it really should be a question posed after reading the whole of the essay, but one of the main arguments in it emerges quite clearly in the above, so...)

if you find that it is, then a couple of consequences follow:
what tv atomizes is the reality that it purports to depict.
miller argues throughout his book that the problem created by this rest on the fact (assertion?) that people confuse image with depiction of "the real" and do not see image as such.

in the case of conflict, miller claims that tv images strip away any explanation for conflict--which would mean that the perfect term for tv to traffic in is "terrorism" precisely because it is, in its nondefinition, most symmetrical with the nature violence.conflict as framed through tv as medium.

now if tv is a primary information source for many (a horrifying thought, but there we are), and if the suburban situation can be taken as a guiding image for thinking about how that information source is integrated into everyday life---the glowing furniture eye in the center of a living room---then it would seem to follow that the effect of the endless presentation of randomized violence would tend to reinforce a desire for a more authoritarian type of state, even if only at the level of psychological compensation---the authoritarian state system would not in itself be fully thought out, but would be figured as a kind of wish for a spectral father-type who would staunch the flow of arbitrary violence-- a flow of arbitrary violence that substitutes for a conception of the "world around me" or "the world in general"--no that's not right--that articulates, that gives particular content to an abstraction named "the world around me"

so i guess the conclusion from this part i would draw is rather the opposite of art's: that tv is fully complicit in creating a climate within which authoritarian solutions to imagary problems seems plausible (by imaginary i am not saying made up--rather problems the nature and meanings of which are constructed entirely by assembling tv images as sources...or by connecting tv images with other medium-specific types of information in a situation where the images function as the ground for thinking)

if miller is correct, it would follow that this effect can occur without any requirement of an agency being imputed to "the media" as such--rather, for him it follows from the nature of tv image assembly-communication itself (in the book he goes to considerable lengths to talk about the implications of this kind of cut-up pseudo-view of the world in a context of advertising streams as well)

it would also follow that the anarchy that would be produced would operate at the level of collective conceptions of the world, but would not function with anything like a causal connection to the social/political atomization of the audience--which would be much more a function of spatial/cultural choices particular to america (the suburban model as example)...the sense of chaos-in-the-world would inflect particular aspects of the experience of this spatial model (it might make you feel more isolated, more helpless, but this sense would neither cause nor explain the isolation produced by the american built environment)

i'll stop here--i suspect this has already gone on too long, but to pose an alternative viewpoint sometimes you have to chatter a while.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Locobot

Atomized in the private sphere, sure, but certainly not in public. Authoritarian regimes, since the adoption of the nation-state, have always functioned as an artificial unifying device for public interaction.

I suppose ARTele's NEW Authority might seek to "atomize" the public while still maintaining control through a different means, other than a singular "ein volk" philosophy. Don't ask me what that other means would be--media, distraction, drugs???

ARTelevision

roachboy, yes, except it's just not TV that functions this way. It is all mediated reality. This begins with our inability to distinguish between our representations of experience and the words we use to describe them.

Subsequently all further conceptual and material reifications of the real, such as works of art, photography, film, TV, etc. function in exactly the same way. Millers ideas aren't new. Susan Sontag's "On Photography" accomplished a similar analysis of photographic imagery and drew similar conclusions. Marshall McLuhan's work engages many of these issues as well.

I've concluded that this inability to distinguish between the real and the representational is rooted in framing conventions, which are after, all based on the mehod in which the human being focuses on discrete objects/events within an overall field. The reduction toward absurdity seems built in to our perceptual/conceptual apparatus.

That said, all verbalization, reification, and all media are control mechanisms. This relates directly to the basic points raised in this thread.

Again, the issue is not whether hierarchy/authority/control paradigms rule lives and societies but what kind and what methods are optimal.

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ARTelevision

Locobot, yep that's the question posed here.

I'm convinced that as we move forward in time as a species, we will construct more and more complete control paradigms to rule our lives. They will be as invisible as the tools of media will allow - I see total invisibility just around the corner. Perhaps we are there now - and our discussions are just the bubbles of goldfish in a tiny bowl somewhere. It seems clear to me that our destiny is cybernetic. We will be binary code sooner or later operating under the direct command of a master control program.

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Locobot

Miller's theory sounds quite a bit like the reasons people give for not ever watching the news. I think roachboy is correct that this random violence induced disconnect increases the desire for authority. So the answer for ARTelandia then would be more media that was more purile and less connected to reality? You'd really have to have a person-in-a-box type scenario though for there to be an absolute disconnect. Otherwise events would be too easily connected to significant frames of reference for the desired disconnect to occur.

I'm reminded of "explosion" dvds for sale in Asia that are simply clip collections from various movie action sequences also mixed with 9/11 footage for sheer spectacle. I wonder if people figure all the footage is fake or that it's all real.

roachboy

art--am in between things so only have time to write something quick....

i know that miller did not draw out of the air his position, that it relies on folk like sontag and barthes...but what i was interested in the specific analysis he develops of tv as form--which taken together is one of the better i have encountered.

i was also interested in his position because i think it poses problems for some of the central distinctions you introduced earlier---the anarchic element you attributed to "the media" as formation, that is in itself, would, following the argument above, would be understandable as a formal effects/formal effects (in this case of the medium tv)---these effects might give the impression of being more than that as a function of the genre of images you refer to (that is why i went to an article about coverage of war, not something else...)

i do not see how you can move from a list of these formal effects to a justification for imputing political agency the "the media". nor do i see how you can oppose "the media" to the state, if the latter in some sense relies on the effects generated by the former to legitimate a right drift.

what i wrote was directed at a specific conversation---i am a bit confused about things moving to such a general level in response to it, but tant pis, let's see how the pieces fall here.

if the question really is about the problematic division between ways in which the world is staged conceptually as over against some notion of "the real" then we are either in a kantian or nietzschean space.
either way, it does not work to simply assert the linkage between representation *as such* and either the need for social or political hierarchies (the obvious objection would be how would you know if you own situation is conditioned by the same problems you point out...in which case we bend back round to the arguments you posted above again)...or any particular kind of hierarchy.

instead, i would argue that representation/concept/words are a baseline condition for being-human--this is not to say that this baseline condition is not problematic, and we could talk abotu that if you like--but i think questions about desirable social order are open and the arguments for or against a particular conception are political--and the political is a particular semantic region.

[[note: i edited this post heavily about an hour after i put it up...]]

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

gibingus

what a whopper, art. nice one. can't even begin to address everything that's here, hope i can contribute some though.

accepting that hierarchical systems of control are the only social option is like saying math stops at addition and subtraction. hierarchical organizational structures certainly have their place, but human interaction embraces much more complicated and much more flexible paradigms. example: current thinking in business management theory will tell you tall top-down organizational ladders are less agile and respond slower to change and are subsequently less competitive than businesses that employ matrix management structures.

in sociological and anthropological terms, we can extend the mathematical analogy: social interactions are rarely straight lines or polar geometry... even when only two people are involved. they aren't even coordinate geometry in tidy quadrants. art's own descriptions of the optimal range harken calculus, and i argue that real social structures push past set theory and are multi dimensional, organic and fractal. the rigid lines we draw of the hirearchy are the real illusion - we use it to simplify, classify, explain why 2+2=4, but in reality, it doesn't add up.

the media thing: enough self loathing. accept that you are what you complain about. civilization is enabled by complex communication. it wasn't our opposeable thumbs, or binocular vision, or nice posture that got us this way. we learned to talk, worked together to solve problems, and then learned to pass it on by writing the solutions down, and it just kept getting faster from there. communication is media and civilization is communication. withc awareness comes the capacity to change.

knowledge is power, and knowledgable indviduals are empowered and self-aware. they question authority. the more we communicate on a granular level, the power of mass communication is diluted. the more knowledge we seek individually, the less susceptible we are to spoon-fed informaiton, propaganda, marketing manipulation, etc.

i don't really get the whole " what means of control will be the most beneficial to society" bent here, i think it's pretty much elitist crap. no matter what language you put around it, an authoritarian system compromises free will and sets a ruling few over an ignorant, placated, or apathetic mass. of course beneficial is a subjective term, so maybe it depends on which group you're in to judge how beneficial that society is.

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ARTelevision

gibingus, thanks for the contrib to this thread.
I figure it's sufficiently thought provoking to justify itself. That is a separate and more significant issue than my own musings on the various subjects within its boundaries.

My sense of new management theory, which I've had some experience with, is that it is a fascinating illusory shell superimposed on hierarchical systems to give the impression that they are somehow not hierarchical. In some way it demonstrates the trend we've discussed here (at least roachboy and I have discussed it at some length) regarding the near invisibility of certain control systems and the increasing tendency toward fictitious "freedom" as an additional control layer.

Self-awareness is not self loathing. I know what I loathe about the various disciplines I'm involved in - not much really. My rhetoric tends toward the dramatic, as I'm aware. I've decided it would be less interesting if that were not the case. But that's just an opinion based on some observation.

Certain kinds of knowledge are powerful, that's true. The knowledge of the principles of programming human perception is the one I've pursued through academia and through practice. That's why I focus on media. The relationship between media and politics is a natural extension of my interest in the results of programming human perception.

Having some concern regarding the nature and place of quality in all this seems reasonable to me - this in response to your final paragraph.

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gibingus

interesting thoughts... although you kind of dismiss the biz theory, i rather like the idea of managers as facilitators of talent rather than controllers of human resources. but that's just me.

organized religion fits the bill as an authoritarian means of control in which the participants are voluntary. you mention fear as a control device, art, but they thow guilt into the mix with great effect. i tend to think most religious systems use a blend of guilt and fear couched in a promise of something ever after to get their followers to do the "right thing." accumulation of knowledge and increasingly sophisticated systems of communication offer more choices than mystical answers, and we've all heard that science as religion line as much as we've heard the religion is a drug line.

but somewhere, some knowledge has to tell us what the right thing to do is. a judgement has to be made somewhere as to what direction society is going to put the effort for the greatest good.

the libertarian viewpoint of doing the right thing out of personal responsibility is based upon self reliance and self awareness. the authoritarian view posits you will do the right thing because the authorities know best.

my turn to pose a question: which is better, a widely educated populace or a highly educated few? and in consideration of this question, is knowledge a commodity or a currency and is the middle class the key to the market?

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Locobot

But the power relationship is still the same, facilitators or controllers are still above, in a hierarchical pattern, the employees. A facilitator of talent will still fire your ass for skipping work or showing up drunk etc.

Still answering on behalf of ARTelandia the authoritarian paradise (a wonderful oxymoron), a less-educated populace would be desirable. Ideally education would be only available to the select few leaders or one leader. Education is a commodity, one that must be denied to the population of an authoritarian regime.

ARTelevision

I prefer to answer for myself. I don't know who "ARTelandia" is. I never proposed an "authoritarian paradise". It may be a wonderful oxymoron but it's not an invention of mine.

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Journeyman

ARTelandia is the Land of ARTelevision's Vision, I think. Sort of like Petoria, or Joehio.

Anyway, to say that an authoritarian nation would require an uneducated populace in order to attain a population that conforms to societal needs is to ignore the potential that the population may find undeniable truth in their own government, and thus accept it's authority. This would lend it more legitimacy than a bunch of drones with a select few at the top who know what's going on. The hard part would be attaining an authoritarian government that educated citizens would accept and approve of, which is a gigantically enormous task with a nation 3,000 miles across and approaching 300,000,000 inhabitants. To get that many people to conform, you may very well have to keep the bulk of them uneducated.

ARTelevision

Somewhere back in this thread, we discussed the fact that the most excellent authority cultivates the illusion of freedom throughout its domain. I believe that is the direction of "enlightened" governments in the present day.

There have been many significant issues raised in this thread. I'm hoping we can narrow things down to options for future possibilities. The types of government and media control that we experience today open up a seemingly bifurcated path, IMO. We explored that back in this thread, as well, and I see it as the most illuminating aspect of all this to further examine - whether you see it as bifurcated or not. The examination of how government control compares and contrasts with media control is essential, I think.

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roachboy

i dont see why you woudl need to assume that the population that might go along with a more explicitly authoritarian form of govt would have to be stupid or uneducated--it woudl seem to me that a slide into a more authoritarian political ideology would be easy to accomplish if you introduced it across television, did ot gradually, and were internally consistent--for example. everything would be determined by the event(s) you used as a pretext/occaison and the signifiers you mobilized in reaction to that pretext.

that said, it shoudl be obvious that i would see tv (for one) as a fundamental element in installing such a regime and maintaining its "legitimacy"--such as it would be. if that is the case, then it also follows that i still do not see the division state/media that underpins much of the above.

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Locobot

Sorry for using your name without your consent ARTele. I didn't mean it as a slight. I thought the purpose of this thread was to suggest new Authoritarian paradigms and I was using ARTelandia as a theoretical example for convenience.

ARTelevision

Locobot, new authoritarian paradigms, yes. But I haven't proposed a utopian state. Fact is, I pretty much stated I have no idea what the direction of what I see as the inevitable increasingly authoritarian states we're heading toward will take. I figure it will have aspects of the control paradigms of both types I see operating today: government and free-press/media. As to what admixture of both, that's up for discussion. Thanks for your contribs. I know this is a bit of a conundrum of a thread...

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