Furthermore, many traditions and institutions that once gave stability to people's lives have themselves collapsed under the weight of new experiences and information. In a sense, these time-honored values and institutions -- such as the nuclear family, the work ethic, and organized religion -- formerly served as shared modes of information processing for our entire culture. They set patterns of thinking, feeling, and living that reduced potential chaos to social order. As these institutions crumble, however, even in the name of equal opportunity and long-overdue social justice, many of the resulting changes and social benefits only serve to increase personal confusion. Without established roles and expectations, without guiddines for making new choices, individuals in a shifting culture are forced to improvise, to test a variety of alternatives before selecting one that they hope will be the best method of going forward. In a rapidly changing society where time-tested patterns of living can no longer be recycled from one generation to the next, new lifestyles, experiences, and opportunities, however promising, may lead unforeseeably to disaster.
And disaster does seem to be overtaking many Americans in the seventies, as the awareness that fired our culture a decade ago has been tempered into reluctant trade-offs on every level -- personal, social, and political. Despite that increased awareness and the cornucopia of new material goods and experiences that have become available to almost everyone, the demands of America's monstrously complex and globally interdependent technological society still overshadow the needs and aspirations of the individual. Among the people we talked with in our travels, those of all ages expressed new hopes, new dreams, and new goals. But many who were dedicated to creating truly meaningful lives for themselves and their families also seemed to be confronted with a growing sense of exhaustion and an impending conclusion that the ideals they had been striving for just might not be attainable, considering the serious problems of energy, economy, and environment which cannot be ignored. To us, it seemed that people in every walk of life across the country were edging toward a confrontation with the mounting pressures and conflicting emotions of modern life: individual awareness versus social responsibility; immediate pleasure and sensation versus long-range planning and some larger and less tangible form of happiness. We heard people express the feeling that they were simply pushing themselves to the point of futility. They said they feared that everything they had been struggling for in their personal searches and practical plans would have to be reconsidered in the light of an even newer awareness which might be called "realism" or "pragmatism," but which they sensed would spell the surrender of their ideals and their dreams. In this way, the grim realities of the seventies seem to be drawing so many Americans to the brink of their own personal catastrophes.
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We have watched the forces building in people struggling to avert an impending crisis in their jobs and careers. They know that the "grind" is self-defeating, that the rising cost of maintaining even the most modest lifestyle and standard of living means that, in all likelihood, their work will be all-consuming. They also know that even their hardest efforts will be offset by inflation and steeper taxes. Yet they are aware that they must save some time for their families, their friends, and their community -- not to mention their favorite sports and hobbies and their own private needs. For America's growing number of working women, as well as its working men, the immediate trade-offs of everyday life pose challenges of potentially catastrophic proportions. The consciousness explosion and the women's movement have shattered the myth of the carefree, happy housewife. Yet few women, married or single, are capable of juggling the multiple roles of wife, mother, lover, companion, housekeeper, and career woman many of them are now expected by society to play. Some women manage to play them all for a while. Some men reap the best of both worlds, home and office. A growing number of individuals, however, are finding it impossible to pursue a career, a family, and meet their new demands for personal development. Caught in this bind, many members of America's emerging singles class, both young and old, have become the nation's most avid searchers, often declining the rewards and responsibilities of marriage and family life in favor of their need for independence and the promise of a full life down the road. Yet in many ways theirs can be the hardest life of all, lonely, disconnected, and, like their more traditional counterparts, poised for some unforeseen and possibly catastrophic resolution.
When that catastrophe occurs, it may take a variety of forms. In keeping with the principles of catastrophe theory, some tiny change may set off a sudden drastic reaction. A man may quit his job, leave his family, kill himself, go crazy in any number of recognized forms of mental illness -- or, in the manner of snapping, undergo a complete and inexplicable transformation of lifestyle and personality. Or, following the path of gradual catastrophe, a professional or businessman or woman may simply withdraw from his or her friends, family, and the outside world in a quiet struggle to suppress negative emotions and disturbing thoughts. A housewife may do likewise, sinking into depression, running away from home, or timidly embarking on a personal search for a higher level of existence. Young single people may go further, being free from commitment and in the most likely position to seize upon -- or be seized by -- some novel alternative. It is these individuals who, even in adulthood, may slip into religious cults or devote their lives to becoming teachers or volunteer laborers in paternalistic mass therapies.
Then there are those who, from all appearances, have simply given up and stopped worrying altogether. These are the legitimate titleholders of snapping in everyday life: people who have confronted their own potential and rejected it for something less. Like cult members, the victims of snapping in everyday life have gone to great lengths to suppress their negative emotions and still their minds to all doubts and questions. Their manner of snapping may take innumerable forms, both glaring and subtle. There are those who dive into grueling work routines or feverish physical activity to keep back their doubts and fears. Others achieve the same end by plunging headfirst into idle fancies and diverting pastimes, much the way ardent meditators slip into the still pool of their senseless mantras.
The temptations of the American marketplace cater to this form of snapping in everyday life, beckoning the individual to become totally absorbed in each new consumer craze. No CB radio, digital watch, or "recreational vehicle," of course, carries within it any inherent germ of snapping. Yet amid our current cultural confusion of new goals, shifting values, and collapsing traditions, it is not inconceivable that an insignificant consumer item could become the narrow focus of some wider and deeper discontent. Like any manner of not thinking, the simple preoccupation with gadgetry so flagrantly promoted in our society may itself constitute a socially approved form of distraction, a way to still the mind to all larger questions by filling it with small concerns. Taken to extremes, however, over time these popular patterns of not thinking may become ingrained, and the larger whole of an individual's personality may begin to reflect both the experiences with which it has been filled and the thoughts and feelings that may be lacking.
In this way, the dominating force, not simply of our consumer society but of its entire system of values, raises much broader questions of snapping in everyday life. Today, American business and advertising have at their disposal the latest and most comprehensive body of knowledge concerning the manner in which human behavior can be manipulated by means of strategically targeted messages, images, and suggestions. This well-oiled machinery of mass persuasion functions on the strictest principles and assumptions of the robot model of man, pouring out a constant flow of information to the American public designed to stimulate the consumer's guilts, fears, weaknesses, insecurities, and fantasies -- and then reward each individual in immediate physical and emotional terms for succumbing to them. This simple ploy is carried out repeatedly on Americans literally hundreds of times each day, stunning them with a barrage of false promises, distorted values, and jumbled personal priorities, then urging them to give
in to every wish and impulse.
What happens to an individual who is subjected to an endless stream of such scientifically conceived and vividly produced appeals? Our perspective on snapping suggests that this all-engrossing experience-combined with the other mounting pressures of modern life -- must have some cumulative effect on personality. The cults provide the symptoms to look for in a world of constant stress, artful distraction, and endless propaganda. People become passive, vulnerable to suggestion and command, and incapable of thinking for themselves. In our opinion, these symptoms have become widespread throughout our country.
It could be that in subtle ways these stresses and techniques which shape our modern lives have started every American down the sloping catastrophe curve of snapping and information disease. Our individual capacities of thought and feeling may have already become impaired. Many people, in the rush of daily activities, appear to have relinquished their ability to form an original point of view, paying little more than token consideration to the real issues and events that influence their lives. The majority of their opinions on world events are shaped by mass media. Their attitudes toward pressing matters of politics or the economy are determined less by reason than by persuasion. Our current popular attitudes toward the energy crisis, for example, reflect the possibility that America as a nation may be snapping collectively, for despite the ominous statistics and dire predictions, many Americans now seem incapable of long-range thinking and planning.
But even more important than the urgent issues of energy, the environment, and the economy are the intimate personal questions that many people also seem incapable of confronting and thinking through on their own. Despite our rampant national quest for personal growth and spiritual fulfillment, most Americans ignore their inner thoughts and feelings until they hit some emotional impasse or crisis. Only following a divorce, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one -- or when frustration and boredom become unbearable -- do many people sit down and sort out the painful feelings and negative emotions they generally harbor at all times. The popular turn in the seventies toward authoritarian cults and therapies that offer easy answers seems to confirm that hundreds of thousands of Americans can no longer reason their way through the complexity of their personal problems. They are unable to recognize the happiness they may have already found and feel compelled to buy emotional guidance from all kinds of spiritual and psychological suppliers.
Last, but not least, there is television, the all-powerful convergence of our American experience and daily communication habits that may be our culture's primary contributor to snapping in everyday life. The most efficient, effective, yet subtle tool of mass communication and persuasion, television has drastically altered American life in less than three decades. It has reshaped our eating habits, our sleeping habits, and our family and social relationships. It has become the predominant purveyor of news, the molding force of public opinion, and the principal source of our collective images, dreams, hopes, amusements, and desires.
As important as the content of the information that television puts out, and its widespread social repercussions, is the manner in which it may affect personality -- not simply an individual's actions and behavior but the way he or she perceives the world. Like any intense or prolonged experience, the electronic experience of television does indeed have the power to shape and alter human awareness. Like TM, TV stills the mind through repetition, not in the form of meaningless sounds but in the larger assault of momentary images upon vision, the dominant sense in the nervous system. Like both Transcendental Meditation and Scientology's auditing process, television also may be a potent neutralizing force of human thought and feeling. Its incessant transmission of information physically trains an individual to hear and observe without stopping to think, to switch from one set of sounds and images to the next without pausing to reflect or digest the information that has been consumed. Advertisers have long known that this rapid-fire kaleidescopic manner of consumption may make television viewers more vulnerable to their suggestions, but only recently have even more potent side effects of this communication technique come to light. In its unique way, television teaches an individual to experience scenes of terror, anger, shock, and tragedy -- purely as entertainment.
Within the last few years, our society has begun to acknowledge the disquieting fact that an entire generation of Americans has now been molded in the image of television -- shaped by the combined impact of both the medium and its messages. It may be no coincidence that this generation is the same one that has been drawn en masse into religious cults. According to A. C. Neilsen, by the time of graduation from high school, today's typical teenager has spent more than 15,000 hours before the tube. By the age of seventeen, the teenager has been exposed to 350,000 commercials and watched 18,000 dramatized murders. The net result, many concerned investigators are finding, is that today's youth has suffered markedly from the shaping experience of television.
Television watching may have profound physical effects on the nervous system of a young child. Every minute the child spends sitting motionless before the tube -- for a total period of inactivity that rivals sleep as the major experience of childhood and adolescence -- is time that is not spent working, reading, playing, or engaged in other molding activities of the early years. During this period in which fundamental patterns of thought, feeling, action, and expression develop, television provides a singular mode of experiencing the world, and its cumulative effects may touch the basic organization of the brain. As the nervous system adapts to great daily doses of experience received with no initiative or effort, the child may, in fact, become physically passive and intellectually lazy. Furthermore, reading tests of young television watchers confirm that their imaginations may have become permanently stunted. Educators report that heavy TV watching destroys the natural ability of children to form mental images from what they read or hear. With too much TV, the growing child's basic capacity of imagination, like an unused muscle, never reaches a level adequate for performing even the most elementary creative acts.
Our educational systems are powerless to counteract these formative effects, for few methods of instruction have the impact and attraction of the information avalanche of TV. Few teachers can rival television's power over the individual, cultivated from infancy, that gives the medium its hypnotic hold on a young child's attention and trust. Yet the medium is not wholly to blame, even for these fundamental ills. The quality of programming and the kind of information television disseminates could undoubtedly, with increased effort and concern, be used to make human beings more sensitive and more imaginative (TV triumphs like Sesame Street and, on a culture-wide scale, Roots, are obvious examples). For the most part, however, the overall effects of America's television programming and viewing habits seem to be inseparably linked to a new and growing form of personal malaise.
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And in the seventies, it is America's young people who appear to have been the most deeply affected by the combined stresses, ploys, and techniques of modern life. Their intelligence test scores have declined markedly, while their suicide rate has risen to almost double that of a decade ago. This generation's collegians have become once again politically mute and narrowly, intensely career-oriented. They are also proving dangerously vulnerable to suggestion and spiritual seduction. In a few years, they may become the legitimate heirs to a world in which people have stopped considering their lives and the other people in them, stopped feeling the conflicts of their discrepant values; a world in which people have studiously avoided long-range planning and stopped thinking about the future except in fantasy and science fiction. This legacy America appears to be leaving to future generations is a heritage of snapping.
Today these numbing effects of modern life are even more ironic. They have come to light at a time when our culture has finally discovered how to experience feeling good. In this decade, American business and religion have mastered the art of shaping people's choices by positive rather th
an negative means, while self-declared experts and spiritual pioneers have developed skills which tap the power of man's innate capacity to change the way he thinks, feels, and experiences the world. The only thing we in America haven't learned in the exploitation of our indomitable faith and trust, and in the refinement of our dazzling technology of experience, is how to use these new tools responsibly. In the sixties, we set out to help people become more fully realized human beings, and now, with the understanding and ability to accomplish that goal at our disposal, we seem hell-bent on turning ourselves into robots and lesser things.
15 Snapping and Punishment
A population subjected to drastic change is a population of misfits --
unbalanced; explosive, and hungry for action.
-- Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
Yet, no matter what, it remains an impossible task to turn a human being into a robot. In their infinite flexibility and adaptability, human information-processing capacities may, in fact, be altered to make human beings behave like mechanical men. But our investigation has shown us that even in a mindless, desensitized, automatic state, these people are still processing information -- and even under conditions of impaired awareness, delusion, and domination, there is always the possibility that they will snap out of it. After years have passed, these robots may still regain their freedom of thought; their responses as individuals may be restored, and the skeleton of their personalities may drop back into place.
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