Dec 12, 2024
Dec 12, 2024
Most, so called free press is a conspiracy of vested interests to dupe the naive, unsuspecting and ignorant public to promote the agenda of advertisers and the powerful. It is often to the detriment of the general good of the majority. This is done insidiously and often using premeditated fraud, while the ignorant, in brainwashed complacency applaud it as the necessary foundation of democracy. Thus the sheep are shorn with a higher belief, that their sacrifice of precious wool is an altruistic one, which has nothing to do with keeping their exploiters warm or the pecuniary profit, which provides luxury and disposable income to the rich shepherd.
Even honest industry consultants concede that advertising is an appeal to the immature and insecure susceptible group from childhood to age fifty, who are malleable and impressionable enough, to succumb to the lures of the manipulating pied pipers, selling the snake oil of sex, status or unneeded desire to gullible fools, easily parted from their money for a parcel of hope or land in a swamp, moon or heaven. Until there is a possibility of having a financially viable form of media, divorced from its advertising revenues and the bias of its owners, it is in the same quandary as the inability of perceiving true reality in the quantum world, while having the inability to eliminate the perspective, influence and bias of the observer of the experiment.
Only Evolution, that blind force devoid of intention, has come up with a classic answer by trial and error, undeterred by successful past experiences, to throw out a diametrically opposite innovation. It abandoned a tried, true and winning strategy of the colorful advertised receptivity and fertility of earlier primate female ovulation, to make a complete U-turn by hiding this same event, by concealed ovulation in the human female. This covertness was utilized unwittingly and became the bedrock of a bonded family, which ultimately led to the triumph of a physically puny species, which became the monarch of all it surveys. Thus do I say that art lies in concealing art, just as fraud lies in concealing itself.
The conundrum then lies in the quintessential question, which has plagued humanity from its earliest times, as documented in the histories of the Egyptians, Indians and Greeks. How does one achieve a fair, just and ethical society and by what means? The problem that no civilization has seriously pondered is whether it is necessary or possible to attain this. They have taken an indirect approach, answering the question by essentially confessing to the impossibility, by constructing a conjured concept of Valhalla, heaven, paradise, Swarga or a nihilistic capitulation, as life being Dukha, and thus opting for the extinction of Nirvana. Plato in his Republic, defined the restrictions to be put on the Guardians, which are an imposition most human beings would rebel against. The Catholic Church is finally facing the absurdity of its celibacy doctrines which lead to unintended evil consequences of imposed unnatural biological restraints. For the dismal consequences of ideas from the eighteenth century, we have the experiments of the French disaster, where irresistible ideas of Liberty collide headlong, with the immovable inertia of Equality. The American experiment is revealing the futility of combating factions and the failure of the brilliant innovation of checks and balances on power, which are being suborned by the power of the privileged and the corruptibility and cupidity of humanity. The resounding and glaring failure of Marxism that other doomed experiment finally discarded in the dustbin of human history, is still sending aftershocks throughout the world. How then, does one live an examined life? The answer is best summed up in the prosaic conclusion of Bernard Williams, that there is no philosophical basis or justification for ethics, or even better in the immortal poetic words of Tennyson, 'The old order changeth, yielding place to the new and god (read-evolution) fulfills himself (read-itself) in many ways, lest one good custom corrupt the world'.
21-Jul-2002
More by : Gaurang Bhatt, MD