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us that when people are being physically and emotionally abused, they
lose self-respect and strength if they remain in that relationship, and
that people will use all kinds of rationalizations to justify their inaction.
Common sense tells us that isolation and surveillance reduce people’s
ability to resist domination. Common sense tells us that people are
broken by fear, punishments, and bribery, as well as by drugs that discon-
nect them from their being; and we know that bastardizing noble ideas
will cause them to lose their power. Common sense tells us that if we feel
a natural part of our being is sinful, shameful, or diseased, then we will
be less whole and weaker. And common sense tells us that we can get to
such a point of weakness, the truth of our oppression no longer sets us
free but can in fact shame us, creating even more pain, and deepening
the self-destructive cycle.
How do these basic psychological principles and techniques for pacify-
ing and breaking a population play out in American culture and in major
US institutions? That is what I will examine in the remainder of this
chapter.

Television, Technology, and Zombification

In˚ 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing is at an all-

time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set,
a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. Nielsen reported that the
average American is viewing television 151 hours per month, or close to
5 hours per day. This increase, according to Nielson, is part of a long-
term trend attributable to greater availability of screens, increased vari-
ety of different viewing methods, more digital recorders, DVR, and TiVo
devices, and a tanking economy creating the need for low-cost diversions.
For several years, I’ve asked children and adolescents what they do
each day. For a school day, the average is: seven hours in school; one
to two hours homework; six to nine hours sleeping; two hours eating/
personal hygiene; four to six hours television and video games; and one
to three hours on the Internet, cell phone, iPod, or other technology.
Researchers˚ report that children in North America average eight hours

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a day on television, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods,
and other technologies (not including school-related use).
While many young people are passionate about their friends, I have
found that after school, they often do not go outside with other kids
in non-organized activity. During weekends, there may actually be an
increase of television and video game activity. There are young people
who are not passive, incommunicative “zombies,” and who actually know
how to interact with others, create things that they are proud of, and think
clearly; these young people are almost always the ones who are not spend-
ing much of their free time watching television and playing video games.
In˚ 1950, about 10 percent of American homes had television sets; now˚
it’s more than 99 percent. The number of TVs in the average US house-
hold is 2.24, with 66 percent of household having three or more sets.
The TV˚ set is turned on in the average US home for seven hours a day.
Two-thirds˚ of Americans regularly watch TV during dinner. About 40˚
percent of Americans’ leisure time is spent on television. Husbands˚ and
wives spend three to four times more time watching television together
than they do talking to each other.
How does the United States compare to the rest of the world in TV
viewing? There aren’t many cross-cultural studies, and precise compari-
sons are difficult because of different measurements and different time
periods.
NOP˚ World, a market research organization, interviewed more than
thirty thousand people in thirty countries in a study released in 2005. In
this study, average TV viewing was significantly lower than most other
studies because certain kinds of TV viewing were excluded. The United
States was one of the highest TV-viewing countries (along with Thailand,
Egypt, and Turkey). Americans watched approximately 63 percent more
television than Mexicans, who watched the least of all those surveyed;
and Americans watched 54 percent more than Swedes, 43 percent more
than Indians, and 36 percent more than Argentinians. Another˚ cross-
cultural comparison, reported on NationMaster.com more than a decade
ago, examined only the United States and European countries, and found
that the United States and the United Kingdom were the highest-viewing

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nations at twenty-eight hours per week, with the lowest-viewing nations

being Finland, Norway, and Sweden at eighteen hours per week.
The majority of what people view on television is through channels
owned by six corporations˚: General Electric (NBC, MSNBC, CNBC,
Bravo, and SciFi); Walt Disney (ABC, the Disney Channel, A&E,
and Lifetime); Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox, Fox Business
Channel, National Geographic, and FX); Time Warner (CNN, CW, HBO,
Cinemax, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT); Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon/
Nick-at-Nite, VH1, BET, Comedy Central); and CBS (CBS Television
Network, CBS Television Distribution Group, Showtime, and CW, a joint
venture with Time Warner). In addition to their television holdings, these
media giants have vast holdings in radio, movie studios, and publishing.
While many progressives are concerned about this concentrated
control by the corporate media, the major anti-democratic aspects of
television may actually not be in its content. Specifically, the mere act
of watching television—regardless of the programming—is the primary
pacifying agent˚.
One of my first experiences of how powerful television is at keeping me
locked in was when color television became popular. I remember going to
department stores with my parents and immediately leaving them to find
my way to the television section, and then becoming so transfixed by this
thing called “color television” that I would have stayed forever glued to it
rather than get back to real life. It didn’t matter what the program was;
it was this extraordinary technology that kept my attention. Thankfully,
my parents couldn’t afford a color television until I was much older. With
today’s high-definition (HD) televisions, real life must contend with even
stiffer competition, and real life is routinely getting defeated.
Whatever the content of the program, television watching is an isolat-
ing experience. Most people are watching television alone, but even when
watching it with others, they are routinely glued to the television rather
than interacting with one another. Television keeps us from mixing it up
in real life. Television keeps us indoors. People who are watching televi-
sion are isolated from other people, from the natural world—even from
their own thoughts and senses. Television produces isolation, and because

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television also reduces our awareness of our own feelings, when we start
to feel lonely we are tempted to watch more television so as to dull the
ache of isolation.
Who among us hasn’t spent time watching a show we didn’t actually
like, or found ourselves flipping through the channels long after we’ve
concluded that there isn’t anything worth watching on the air? Television
results in a kind of zombification—not a great thing for a genuinely demo-
cratic society. Researchers confirm that regardless of the programming,˚
viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic
state. That’s part of the explanation for why it’s so hard to turn the tele-
vision off even when it’s not enjoyable—we have become pacified by it.
People literally lose their will, mindlessly continuing to watch television.
Television viewers are mesmerized by what television insiders call
“technical events”—quick cuts, zoom-ins, zoom-outs, rolls, pans, anima-
tion, music, graphics, and voice-overs, all of which lure them to continue
watching even though they have no interest in the content. Television
insiders know that it’s these technical events (in which viewers see and
hear things that real life does not present) that hypnotize people to
watch. So it’s not just through the content of programming and advertis-
ing that viewers are being manipulated—the very nature of television is a
constant manipulative assault to keep a viewer watching.
Television is actually used by various authorities in our society to quiet
potentially disruptive people—from kids to prison inmates. Managers in
both public and private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing
inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep
them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards.
In a truly democratic society, one is gaining knowledge directly
through one’s own experience with the world, not through the filter of
an authority or what television critic Jerry Mander calls a mediated experi-
ence. Mander is a “reformed sinner” of sorts who left his job in advertis-
ing to ultimately write the underground classic Four Arguments for the
Elimination of Television. Television-dominated people ultimately accept
others’ mediated version of the world rather than discovering their own
version based on their own experiences.

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For a variety of technical reasons, Mander explains that authoritar-

ian-based programming is more technically interesting to viewers than
democracy-based programming. War and violence may be unpleasant in
real life; however, peace and cooperation make for “boring television.”
And charismatic authority figures are more “interesting” than are ordi-
nary citizens debating issues.
Television is of course financed by advertising, which is the engine of
the consumer culture. For former advertising insiders such as Mander,
television is the “delivery system’s delivery system.” It’s an ideal medium
for getting products—and the desire to buy them—inside people’s heads.
Television can make products seem more appealing than they really are.
The hypnotic nature of television watching diminishes one’s critical
thinking. Television keeps people from focusing on their own thoughts
and relationships; and this makes for inactive and passive people more
likely to take seriously what is being sold to them.
Television is a “dream come true” for an authoritarian society. Those
with the most money own most of what people see. Fear-based television
programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another,
which is good for an authoritarian society depending on a “divide and
conquer” strategy. Television isolates people so they are not joining
together to govern themselves. People become broken through both isola-
tion and sensory deprivation, and television creates both. Television puts
one in a brain state that makes it difficult to think critically. Television
quiets and subdues a population. And spending the majority of one’s free
time isolated and watching television interferes with the connection to
one’s own humanity, and thus makes it easier to accept an authority’s
version of society and life.
A genuinely democratic society needs people who are connected to
one another, who respect and have confidence in themselves and others,
who know themselves, who actively experience life and gain wisdom from
it, who can think critically, and who can reject exploitative manipula-
tions. Television watching creates pretty much the opposite kinds of
people from those who can make genuine democracy work.
The good news is that television is something that one still has the

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legal right to reduce or eliminate from one’s life and one’s family. There
are people who have simply given away their televisions. Others have
restricted its use to one hour a day, or a couple of specific programs a week.
Some parents have ensured that no televisions are in bedrooms and that
there is no television watching during family meals. Some parents watch
together with their young children and teach them a certain “sensory
cynicism” by discussing the manipulative components of television. My
experience is that adults teach best not by their lectures and rules but by
what they model, which means parents should be watching as little televi-
sion as possible. All of us should keep in mind that television, similar to
psychotropic drugs, has enormous adverse effects, and so we may want to
think long and hard about just what benefits we are receiving from any
particular program content.

Helplessness in the Age of Isolation, E-Relationships,

and Bureaucratization

“What if the problem is not so much with being “beaten down”

as with being socially isolated? There are few settings where
most USAers can hold a safe, honest, face-to-face, substan-
tive discussion about politics and government . . . People are
encouraged by being part of a group of like minded people,
less afraid to say what is on their mind because they have been
validated to some extent by sharing with others. Isolation leads
to fear of standing out and being then being “beaten down” .
. . Without a tribe we are more-or-less in the role of outcasts
and that’s not a situation that encourages much of anything
other than suicide or desperate attempts at survival or joining

”
a cult.
—iforgetwho, AlterNet, December 13, 2009

The 2000˚ US census reported that approximately 25 percent of Americans

were living alone, compared with only 7 percent one-person households
in 1940. Some social scientists were unconcerned because living alone

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