Back in the far past, when we humans first evolved, we started out as hunter-gatherers, as nomads. A few dozen millennia later, the first humans became farmers. They became cultivators and settled down to build great cities. Even then they continued to travel across the vast world. More recently we have ventured across the seas and have started travelling across space.
Even to this day, the same instinct for exploration and discovery lives on in us. And now, today, we want to throw all that aside, we want to willingly ignore millennia of history and many millennia more of prehistory and we want to say that the “idiot box” has humbled us. We want to bow down and concede defeat to a concoction of metal and plastic. Is this what the human race has come to? If we agree to this, if we stand by the fact that the television destroys us, then we have destroyed ourselves, and we didn’t need and help from the television.
Let’s actually think for a minute. What this discussion needs is just a small amount of that rare commodity called common sense, which today appears to be particularly rare. If we break up the word “television” we get “tele-” and “vision”. Vision, people, vision; sight, observance call it what you like, it’s the same thing. The television is meant to help us see, it opens our eyes to the outside, it lets us experience things from far across the world. It opens our mind, it doesn’t close it. It gives us an idea of what’s happening across the world. It helps our minds to grow and learn. And I ask you now, how can something that helps to enlighten the mind, conceivably destroy it?
I’ll answer that question myself. The television can destroy the mind, if and only if the mind itself is weak in the first place. Humans are supposed to be moral animals, according to Marx, they are political animals. No matter which statement you believe, it amounts to the same thing. People have a knack for knowing what is right, or at least for knowing what’s good for themselves (if you believe Marx). And if a person doesn’t know what’s good for him or herself, then that person doesn’t really think for himself, does he? It’s the same case with people who have been “<destroyed>” by the television (to use today’s word of choice). That includes TV addicts and couch potatoes of all ages and sizes. Their minds are too weak to even know what’s good for themselves. And since people like those are pretty much all the examples the opposition can come up with, the topic seems pretty darn empty. And just in case some of you are thinking about violent adolescents, well, in that case, I think that squabbling parents, drugs, alcohol and bad company are far more dangerous than any television.
And, members of the house why in the name of all who are innocent, are we placing the blame square on the poor old television. Let’s get technical, the television is basically a cathode ray tube and fluorescent screen or more recently a liquid crystal display or plasma screen. Along with that there’s little bit of high tech electronics lets us jump through the hundred-odd channels. Come on people, please, think. Can something like that really take on the intellectual capabilities of a human mind? Of course not! It just shows pictures and does very little else. It’s not to blame. If you want to blame someone, blame the advertisers and the programming directors. They’re the ones who are feeding us a constant stream of essentially the same ideas and visions of violence, obscenity and social misconceptions over and over again until they are firmly ingrained in our psyche. The television is just a poor pawn.
Today’s question isn’t really one of the television vs. the human mind, it’s about greedy human minds vs. gullible human minds. And since the topic itself seems to be hopelessly wrong or at least horribly misspelt, I find it very hard to agree in any way with my opponents. In fact, I wonder how they agree with themselves. Must be the common sense problem all over again.