The upshot is that the mass-media engines of our society (cable network news channels, academia, think-tanks, laboratories corporate and private, lobbying and advocacy groups, “intelligence-gathering” centers) all play their part in the vast, integrated “fact-making machine” whose products surrounds us like a web—a comfortable matrix underwritten by the assumption that that things, in the human world at least, are more or less under control.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The hard & soft sciences, the media, and those walking haircuts we call politicians all create for us a comfortable galaxy of steady-state, banal reality from their neat atoms of separate “facts”—but now many people instinctively don’t buy them, because they sense this autocracy's infringement against the natural, spontaneous workings of Primary Imagination that has given them their religion and folkways.
The ascendancy of the "technocratic mentality" is the primary reason why fundamentalisms of all types have exploded in number across the globe—including scientific fundamentalism, or “scientism” as it’s called. We have created a system that is outside anyone’s control, we are deeply uneasy with the situation, and subsequently cling to world-views that were already outmoded last century.
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When the expert or politician or scientist passes judgment and creates a fact for our “consumption” they make an orphan of truth, because the deeper verities—those that enrapture us and enchant our lives—are not facts in the sense that statistics are facts. The most profound truths cannot be sound-bit, for they are not frozen pictures in time: they are as alive, “out there,” as we are.
Private epiphanies we experience give meaning to our lives, and we begin to perceive and live myths greater than any “fact.” This truth that we are each living, and how this truth manifests and resides in us, is the central thing our techno-fascist society will seek to delegitimize: the human faculty of Imagination, whether in its nighttime dreaming or day-lit forms.
It does not serve our society’s techno-fascist ends for us to experience and elaborate upon private myths and somatic epiphanies, because we are being enculturated to live only by the visions sanctioned by Mammon 2.0 and licensable by TIME-WarnerDisney.
Our “elite managers” in the political class purport that creativity and entrepreneurship are the greatest goods. If these qualities are allowed to flourish, we will all in turn thrive, they say.
Under epistemic and capitalist techno-fascism, all products of entrepreneurship and the visual arts types alike are now simply farmed for novelty en masse by the transnational cartel—just like our mass-produced food, automobiles, computers, etc. The billionaires have full reign to shop for—and possible even take by court or force—the entrepreneurial millionaire’s hard-earned wealth and product.
The creative types who gravitate to Hollywood, the music industry, and television are farmed for visions that conform to the acid-bath of social/scientific despotism. We even have our dreams designed for us nowadays in our mass-media entertainments—yes, in this illusion of “factual consumption,” we’ve become that damn lazy. Only that which can be translated into a commercial imperative survives—over and over. Witness the manufacture of all the sequels and comic book adaptations and “pre-branded” franchises. Hollywood as we’ve known it is dying, loudly, because at the crucial time when it’s in competition with YouTube, cable, and so many other media outlets it has banked upon the familiar, instead of showing vision and risk by throwing those production billions into dozens of smaller, imaginative works that might not strictly conform to focus-group preferences (witness the stellar rise—and subsequent absorption into the maw of the Disney machine—of Pixar, Marvel, and George Lucas's creations). Just like a bully who gets louder and more violent as his star is eclipsed by the new and bigger bully.
Instead of believing in the products our minds naturally give us, our society makes of Vision a CGI bone-rattling nightmare in the cathedral of a movie theater, transformed to pummel us in violence from without. We enter the cinema now to be ritually punished with visions of a magick world whose flatness on the screen is somehow part of the meaning, reminding us of what has passed us and now out of reach: Narcissus’s mirror-lake as a flat pool glowing upon the wall, beaten in our unconscious that our human inheritance is being leached away by our ‘entertainments’.
The monovisionary cartels grant no means of ratifying or receiving anything transformative that might originate from inside our own psyches, and hence the reception of any impulse of sacred Imagination from without. Occult-themed films' and TV shows' resonances with ancient impulses within us have only by this point numbed access to these inner worlds. And perhaps that is their point: to demonize and neutralize the daemonic, and render evoking it impossible, because its pre-fab, exteriorized depiction in these media is so powerful.
At best, our subjective visions are diagnosed as pathological; the sacred inside is rendered phantasmal, neurological, with its reception stripped of personal significance.
Our autocrats’ goal is that there Always Be An Answer to our mysterious, private, epiphanic encounters—an “explanation” already worked out for us, whether by megachurch or laboratory. Mystery cannot be allowed, and the answers should come easy…The Hollywood and video game dream-factories grant us ritual catharsis for our mythic instincts, and we are all left to our atomized glorified simian or sanctified Glorified Body to work out some relation to the sacred outside the glowing rectangle.
This colonization of the mind, of course, is all in line with the continued destruction of privacy on the internet and all our forms of electronic communication. The processing of our personal agency into a hive-mind is nearing its terminus—an omniscience by the “Masters” unknown in our history.