...An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism.
We keep at it, and through constant repetition, many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?
~ Carl Sagan
Think for a few moments, what he is really saying there. Those are very important concepts he is laying out that show where we were going wrong.
We should investigate and evaluate all we are being sold by media. It's a purposeful product, it is not an accident, made to profit owners of media, not us. People get aggravated when others try to turn them away from it, since it's highly addictive.
And the place it's all working out is in our brains, our hearts, our society and how we treat the world and each other. Not that there weren't other means prior to modern media, but they used rote learning, brute force and superstition. There was not as much of a surrender and embracing of it then, as now.
They didn't have the advantage of persuasive psychological techniques that the ubiquitous entity we call mass media has.
Every sound, music, tone of voice, background imagery, the normalization of things at one considered abhorrent, made to appear to be the only choice, is now normalized. That is why there is little outrage anymore.
Think back years in one's life, how people have morphed into a state where brutality, cruelty and deception is now thought to be just a way of negotiating to get what one wants, and seeing others humiliated and abused is considered to be entertaining, even amusing. And they won't be denied it. Sagan was right.
We become what we think about.
~ Earl Nightingale
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