Control of the Mind
I continue to read Harold Bloom’s excellent book on the King James Bible. On page 27 he writes:
Sages and rabbis labored to control our perspective, and the Five Scrolls of Moses represent as successful a usurpation of our consciousness as does the Christian conversion of the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament.
I immediately got out my highlighter and marked this passage, because he is talking about a very fundamental process – the control of our minds. Something that the majority of the people want to ignore – preferring instead to believe the very best in everyone – and at the same time, offering up their minds on a silver platter for other people to fight over. They like to watch the feeding frenzy that results.
This is what television programming is – a struggle for the minds of the people, which for all practical purposes have only one Mind. Whoever controls that, controls them – all of them.
Ideally, individual people (and groups of people) should create their own identity. Self-possession (which implies the existence of a self) should be vitally important. And people at one time would give up their lives to defend it.
But this is no longer the case. We want the same identity for everyone, and will destroy anyone (or any group) who is different.
Another way of putting this is that man has become mass man – who can have everything, but who can be nothing.
Being is a tricky concept. The best explanation I have heard of it is in The Master and His Emissary, which is about the two hemisphere’s of the brain. The right hemisphere knows all about being, and considers it the most natural thing in the world – it can feel it in operation.
The left hemisphere is not interested in being – and in our technology-obsessed culture it has become the dominant hemisphere – to our immense loss. We have become human things, not human beings.
The mind can think, that is one of its most important functions. But the mass, having no mind of their own, cannot think for themselves – and steadfastly refuse to do so.
These are the most important developments of our time – the rise of mass man and the movement of its Mind into its collective unconsciousness. They should be regarded as part of the same complex.
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