La idiotización de la sociedad como estrategia de dominación

By Fernando Navarro | La Haine |

To achieve this, power uses empty entertainment, with the aim of bloating our social sensibility, and accustoming us to seeing vulgarity and stupidity as the most normal things in the world, incapacitating us to achieve a critical awareness of reality.

In empty entertainment, sappy and disrespectful behavior is considered a positive value, as we constantly see on television, in the trash programs called "of the heart", and in show shows in which shouting and disrespect is the norm, with show football being the most complete and effective form that the established system has to abhor society.

In this subculture of empty entertainment, what is promoted is a system based on the values of possessive individualism, in which solidarity and mutual support are considered as something naïve. In empty entertainment, everything is designed so that the individual stoically endures the established system without question. History does not exist, the future does not exist; only the present and the immediate satisfaction that empty entertainment provides. That is why it is not surprising that there is a proliferation of self-help books, authentic psychological slop, or mysticism à la Coelho, or infinite variants of the classic “how to become a millionaire without effort”.

Ultimately, what empty entertainment is all about is convincing ourselves that nothing can be done: that the world is the way it is and it is impossible to change it, and that capitalism and the oppressive power of the state are as natural and necessary as the force of gravity itself. That is why it is common to hear: “It is something very sad, it is true, but there have always been poor oppressed and rich oppressors and there will always be. There is nothing that can be done.”

Empty entertainment has achieved the extraordinary feat of making the values of capitalism also the values of those who are enslaved by it. This is not something recent, La Boétie, in that distant sixteenth century, saw it clearly, expressing his astonishment in his small treatise On Voluntary Servitude, in which he states that most tyrants endure only due to the acquiescence of the tyrannized themselves.

The established system is very subtle, with its stupidities it forges our mental structures, and for this it uses the pulpit that we all have in our homes: television. In it there is nothing that is innocent, in every program, in every movie, in every news, it always oozes the values of the established system, and without realizing it, believing that true life is like that, they introduce its values into our minds.

Empty entertainment exists to hide the obvious relationship between the capitalist economic system and the catastrophes that plague the world. This is why there must be the vacuous spectacle: so that while the individual degrades himself by wallowing in the garbage that power supplies him with on television, he does not see the obvious, does not protest and continues to allow the rich and powerful to increase their power and wealth, while the oppressed of the world continue to suffer and die in the midst of miserable existences.

If we continue to allow empty entertainment to continue to shape our consciousness, and therefore the world at will, it will end up destroying us. Because its objective is none other than to create a society of men and women who abandon the ideals and aspirations that make them rebellious, to settle for the satisfaction of needs induced by the interests of the dominant elites. Thus human beings are stripped of all personality, turned into vegetative animals, the old idea of fighting against oppression is completely deactivated, atomized into a swarm of unbridled egoists, leaving people alone and disconnected from each other more than ever, absorbed in the exaltation of themselves.

Thus, in this way, individuals no longer have the energy to change the oppressive structures (which are also not perceived as such), they no longer have the strength or social cohesion to fight for a new world.

However, if we want to reverse this situation of alienation to which we are subjected, all that remains is the struggle, as always, we only have to oppose other values diametrically opposed to those of the empty spectacle, so that a new society can emerge. A society in which life dominated by the absurdity of empty entertainment is only a reminder of the stupid times when human beings allowed their lives to be manipulated in such obscene ways.

Collective rupture. Originally published in the magazine Al Margen # 102, Valencia