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Title
THE PROJECTION OF MASS EVENTS AND THE GLOBAL THEATER
Release Date
2005-03-31
Time
10:36:00
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Article Text
MARCH 31, 2005. Below, I'm re-posting a piece I did in 2003. Reading it over myself this morning, I saw a number of places where I wanted to make corrections and clarifications---but I decided against it, because I originally wrote it to provoke myself and readers to sense that we were all living inside a vast Theater.
The 2003 piece achieves that aim, and more.
But here is a new intro:
The Internet and reality TV are two examples of the widespread desire to invent new spaces in which people who were formerly part of the "theater audience" step forward and become actors, players.
When this happens, you get a partial fracturing of the idea of a single and unified space-time continuum.
You get new space-time settings.
These new settings may be wonderful, they may be bizarre, they may be awful, they may be boring. Which is exactly what you get, say, in a city where small theater suddenly sprouts like weeds and you have many productions mounted in little venues.
I would like to see 100,000 new little theaters popping up all over America. It would create a nice phase-one shift in a many-phase project to get outside the overall theater
There is, however, an androidal programming that is operating. The programming demands that we titillate ourselves (a form of porn) with the idea of stepping out of the shadows and creating these new space-times---but then we lapse back into the equal and opposite impulse to be the audience and defer to central authority that hands out reality like donuts.
The alternation of these two impulses is the titillating porn. We have control, oops, we just lost it. We want control, no we don't. We want to get up on the stage, no we don't. Get control, lose it. Step forward, step back.
When you DO step forward and DON'T lapse, part of the androidal programming sputters and short circuits.
To put it another way, you recognize that reality is a theater, and you choose to set up your own theater.
We made the choice (bought the ticket) to this continuum precisely because it is a theater. That's what we wanted. To get inside a theater. To be the audience and to, perhaps, be an actor. And to get that titillating effect when we come out of the shadows of the audience and then melt back into the dark.
AUDIENCE ACCEPTS A CENTRALLY DIRECTED SPACE-TIME.
ACTOR LIVES OUT STORY IN SPACE-TIME.
A PERSON, WAKING UP, INVENTS HIS OWN SPACE-TIME(S).
A PERSON, WAKING UP, TELLS HIS OWN STORY.
CREATES HIS OWN THEATER(S).
A PERSON, WAKING UP, TELLS A STORY THAT RE-CONNECTS HIM WITH PARTS OF SELF THAT HAD TO BE LEFT AT THE DOOR WHEN HE BOUGHT THE TICKET TO THIS CENTRALLY DIRECTED SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.
Hence, my upcoming workshop on THE PARANORMAL WRITING PROJECT.
Outside this commonly accepted Big Theater laughingly called reality, there was a hawker:
"Get your ticket here. New play opening. Four-dimensional space-time continuum. Get your ticket here. New play opening. Check your coats and your larger selves at the door. Ladies and gentlemen, this play is a sure winner. Thrills and chills. Laughs and tears. Pleasure and pain. Heroes and villains. Lots of underground plot lines. Unpredictable events. Check your ability to see the future at the door. In this wild and weird play, energy is forever. Can't be created or destroyed. Check your ability to invent and un-invent energy at the door. For the duration of the performance, no one will be permitted to leave the theater. Check your ability to enter and exit from any continuum at the door."
Then there are large signs posted in the theater. "Audience members may tell their own stories, but they may not tell their own STORIES."
That means there are rules against telling a story long enough and big enough to re-introduce yourself to those larger parts of self you checked at the door.
As a substitute, you're allowed to consult with any number of therapists and organized religious groups who will SEEM to get your story from you but will ultimately leave you securely fixed as an audience member.
You're also allowed to surge forward during the play and take over sub-stories within the play. In that sense, you can move from becoming audience to actor. But the overall effect will be to stimulate you to take over and BECOME the sub-story---and then when that pleasurable sensation fades, you'll move off hunting for new sub-stories you can take over. In this restless hunt, you'll never really stop being the audience that bought the ticket. You wind up in your seat in the dark.
I frankly think this whole stage play has gone on long enough. We get the idea. We've banged from pillar to post through many lives. We've written our personal reviews. Two stars, three stars, four stars. We've won, we've lost. We've been through the mill. We've seen what it's like to bury those parts of ourselves that would otherwise expose the whole deal as a tattered charade. We now know, in staggering and stultifying detail, what it's like to live inside someone else's story.
We're now ready, each one of us, to tell our own stories that will get us to meet, once again, our full selves and our full power.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2003. In this article, I’m going to put the examples first, and then describe the principle at work…
When health authorities, in the early 1980s, began to talk up a new syndrome called AIDS, they falsely assumed it was one unique condition, and they began looking for a virus that caused it.
In my archive, you will find a number of articles about the massive false science that ensued and the fraudulent declaration, in 1984, that HIV was the cause.
To boil it down, the media began to present AIDS as a single scourge that was sweeping the world, when in fact people were getting sick and dying from a variety of immune-suppressing factors. HIV was not one of them.
The media were projecting a mass illusion---and there was a vast audience for that illusion.
Part of the audience was: gay men in America.
Within a few years, that specific audience began taking over the media story---not only through demonstrations demanding more government money for research (into a fraudulent virus), but by leading the way to the formation of AIDS organizations that dispensed advice about what medicines to take.
The medicines---AZT being the primary drug---were exceedingly toxic and had the ability to create the very immune suppression that was being called AIDS.
These AIDS organizations, some of them, reached out and obtained significant dollars to fund their work. AIDS Project LA, for example, landed very large $$ donations.
Some employees and executives of APLA found themselves, for the first time in their lives, working at significant salaries and wielding influence.
They, once the audience for the AIDS story, were now leading the story. They had it in their hands and they were running with it.
The audience was now the actor.
Major AIDS organizations became settled bureaucracies, and those who worked there---like any employees of any company---were relying on the organization for their livelihoods.
And all of this was wrapped around the original mass projection of an illusion---that AIDS was one unique condition and HIV was the deadly cause.
Since this was false, and since the meds were killing people, a real treatment blockage was created as well.
But the illusion was powerful.
One might say, in any great media illusion, the audience feels compelled to take over the story.
And I would submit, to cite another example, that in Iraq today, the people who are standing in the way of American occupation are not only acting from their anger, beliefs, political ideals, and so on---THEY FEEL A FORCE WITHIN THEM THAT DEMANDS THEY TAKE OVER THE STORY. That demands the “audience” should be the central actor.
This is what has happened to American television as well. Who do you think is starring in all those reality shows that are flooding the channels? People who were previously the rapt audience for glamour shows and ads of all kinds. They’ve taken over. They are acting out what they imagine are the roles for a “starring player.”
And speaking of activist organizations, you can find a whole spate of them in the medical arena. I’m talking about groups formed around all sorts of diseases, often funded by pharmaceutical houses who peddle the drugs to treat the diseases. In these groups, you’ll discover laypeople who have made a second career out of “sounding like doctors.” These adepts can talk the talk, they can spout all sorts of technical terms, and they impart the impression that they are, in fact, experts. They take great pride in their expertise. All they are lacking are the white coats.
And who are they? The audience. The audience that has taken over the story. And the story, originally, was a mass projection beamed by the media, who promoted the disease and the research and the treatment in multiple ways.
This passage from audience to actor is not always a bad thing. What is the Internet? To a degree, it is composed of people who were part of the faceless audience for news and then stepped out of the shadows.
Another example: There are any number of Hollywood bars you can walk into, if you’re a gossip writer, and you can find a bartender who will sell you a tip on a hot little story involving some celeb. Audience becomes actor.
If you were to comb through the files of frivolous lawsuits, you would again find people who had tired of being the audience and wanted to have a moment on center stage. No, it isn’t just about the money.
The rise of the sports agent is another illustration of this principle. Once thought of as a man behind the scenes who quietly worked on behalf of his athlete-client, the agent (in a sense, an audience member for sports) moved into the limelight. If you showed the movie, Jerry McGuire, to a crowd in the 1950s, they would have looked at it as nearly incomprehensible science fiction.
And what about giant rock concerts? Audience members, starting in the early 1960s, saw themselves as actors in the vast arena.
Watch any NFL game on television. Do you think all these people in the stands who have spent hours applying body paint and putting on masks and home-grown costumes think of themselves as merely audience?
Last I knew, the biggest sports radio station in NYC was called WFAN.
The most popular and ingenious sports radio host in the US is Jim Rome. He features, front and center, listeners who call in and deliver well-prepared monologues on current sports topics. Rome, at the end of every show, replays what he decides is “the call of the day.” Once a year, he invites his best “clones,” as he titles them, to take part in a “smack-off.” To see who wins the championship. The loyalty of Rome’s audience is legendary. And why not? They are taking over the story.
Okay. Enough examples. You can find your own. The rest of this piece is about the principles behind the media mask. I gratuitously bring in Bob Dobbs, because he is one of the people on the scene who illuminates this media universe, and also because I like him and his work. You may find the rest of this article a little weird and black-holish, but so be it. If you read Dobbs, you’ll see I’m actually giving you a break. Dobbs takes you over the edge in the first three seconds and you may never come back.
The whole point of the media is MASS PROJECTION OF EVENTS.
This, in contrast to reporting on events.
A mass projection requires several abilities.
You have to reach large numbers of people.
You have to ensure that your particular projection is more or less uniform. You can’t have 12 different accounts of the same event circulating to millions of people.
THE PRESIDENT’S DOG DIED.
THE PRESIDENT KILLED HIS DOG.
THE PRESIDENT’S DOG IS AN IMMORTAL MACHINE PROGRAMMED TO DISPENSE INFALLIBLE POLITICAL ADVICE.
That’s a no go.
If ten million people on the internet read a version of an event that differs considerably from the major media account, you have to make sure they don’t all get together and copyright a brand name and start broadcasting under one roof.
So far, that’s pretty easy to guarantee, although shows like Coast to Coast AM are flirting with building a wide planetary roof.
And events like 9/11 are being reported in shades that differ from the Central lie.
When a mass projection occurs, you get a MIRROR EFFECT. This has been described, at least partially, by a number of writers, including Bob Dobbs (by way of M. McLuhan). (Dobbs, at the same time, is juggling a number of balls. For example, he does modern Zen. And the answers to his koans are not published in a little booklet for the lazy students.)
(Dobbs’ analysis of media is guaranteed to drive you away from your normal orientation---you may thank him for this or run for a psychiatrist. I advise against the latter course.)
At any rate, here is my version of the mirror effect.
The audience becomes part of the projection. To put it another way, an event saturated by media makes no sense unless there is an audience.
The audience is actor (straight McLuhan). The audience radiates back the media version of the event to its own members and to the original projectors of the mass illusion.
When enough radiating beams bounce off enough mirrors, the event (whatever it originally was) takes on the added chunk of being an archetype. It feels, and is, myth.
The meaning of the myth may be unclear, but that doesn’t stop the juggernaut. People everywhere plug into the mirrors and take a taste of mythical reality.
Whatever was lower case in the original event is now upper case.
Myth is hypnosis of a certain kind.
Enhanced projection of anything, when the enhancement is fostered by the mirror effect, is stunningly theatrical.
Soon enough, the original event disappears.
Each audience member becomes a “source for the story.”
“After the explosion, I contacted my sources. I talked to everybody.”
Most reporters are audience members who collect a paycheck for being another mirror.
If you scramble the signal of a reporter, you get something like this: “This is Dan Rather. In today, hundred after people devastating which in towers authorities were still looking nine fell cars outage World assurance…” (See William Burroughs, B Gysin for cut-up details. They invented it.)
Scrambling the signal might be a strategy for waking people up, but if the scrambled message is projected often enough, it becomes a new story and the mirror effect gears up to handle it.
“You can say anything.”
In other words, the message is already scrambled.
Try this: write out the two lead paragraphs of an imaginary story in which an earthquake flattened a broad area of villages in China. Adapt the lead for Dan Rather. Include all typical phrases.
You’ll notice you’re already dealing with a projection of whatever happened after it’s bounced off many mirrors.
When a certain critical mass is reached, the audience takes over a story. The story is the audience. The story disappears, then the audience disappears (more Dobbs and McLuhan, I think), and we’re left with echoes, out of which people are convinced they can draw the Truth.
Ask any broadcaster what happens after he’s aired 5000 UFO stories. They all start to sound the same. Really, all it took was one honest account to completely turn the government lies upside down.
But with 5000 accounts, the audience is now firmly in control of the story. Then the audience begins to decay.
The audience is now looking for another illusion in which---THIS IS IMPORTANT---all control is out of their hands.
No control=feeling of perception of truth. Hard to believe perhaps, but true, among the androids.
How do you achieve no control?
You hear about something that happened that is so clear and “objective” you want to embrace it. HURRICANE KILLS 400 IN FLORIDA. HOUSES DESTROYED. GIANT TREES UPROOTED.
Or you adopt a pet authority and believe everything he says.
Since the primary search of androids is for connecting with an outside source of control---a parade of crystalline factoids or a parade of authorities---the object of the search PRECEDES THE DESIRE FOR “WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.”
In other words, at the dawn of time, people were looking for a way to lose control, not for the truth.
The rise of democracies programmed androids to seek two goals---control over facts and loss of control.
The early descriptions of neurosis flirted with, but did not encompass, this exact contradiction.
Every page-one story in the Times is a titillation that occurs when the reader wants both control over facts and loss of control.
This is pornography.
When the page-one story sinks in far enough, the reader becomes the story. Here is a quote from McLuhan: “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
After enough readers have entered the equation, they control the story.
This upsets the pornographic balance, and so the audience moves off in search of another story.
The most popular fiction portrays the hero as both controller and bumbler. He embodies both ends of the android formula.
Media are ads for androids.
PLUG IN HERE. YOU CAN GAIN CONTROL AND LOSE IT.
Another version of this is: “I see what the problems are now, but what can I do?”
An excellent pornographic balance.
Here is another one: “I really like what he’s saying, but I don’t understand it.” Porno balance.
GET CONTROL----LOSE CONTROL.
“Tonight we’re going to present all the facts about a shattering mystery that baffled investigators…you’ll get control and lose it. And you’ll love it.”
Every well-produced sentimental movie invokes the effect: I’VE GOT IT---I LOST IT---I’VE GOT IT---I LOST IT.
That alternation makes up a wave, a frequency, and it eventually solidifies into a cupcake you can put on the mantle. Stick a candle in it and light it. Pray to it.
Among the well-heeled in the Europe of the Great Church, this theme was a winner: YOU’RE A SINNER---YOU CAN BUY YOUR WAY INTO HEAVEN---YOU’RE A SINNER---YOU CAN BUY YOUR WAY INTO HEAVEN.
Matter and anti-matter.
The veil of tears=the android in perfect sync with the goal of finding control and losing it. And the android is programmed to harmonize with the actual matter of the universe, which is built on the principle of YES and NO or I’VE GOT IT, I LOST IT.
Try a chant. Stand up in a room and chant---with feeling---YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO. Space the words far enough apart so that you really put some feeling into it. But don’t pause too long or you’ll lose the effect. Do it for about ten hours.
You’ll definitely notice something. You may also go crazy or reach a temporary state of enlightenment or fall down crying or go to sleep or become enraged. Don’t get back to me.
Tantra works on a similar principle, but is more enjoyable, at least in the early stages.
If you have about 300 million dollars and want to punch a hole in androidal programming, create six simultaneously broadcasting cable TV stations on which, 24/7, regular people interview one other---the primary trigger being, TELL ME YOUR WHOLE LIFE STORY. That’s all. No other shows.
Make a guarantee that ANYONE can get on the air.
If the audience is the story, MAKE THE AUDIENCE THE STORY.
Make the covert op overt.
Bob Dobbs once told me that NYC cable access has pretty much evolved or devolved into this. Plus a lot of screaming.
WELCOME TO THE AUDIENCE NETWORK WHERE YOU ARE THE STORY.
Everybody got it? Good.
McLuhan once said, “All advertising advertises advertising.”
He also wrote, “If it works, it’s obsolete.”
A mass projection from the media works only as long as it takes for the audience to move into control of the story. After that, the projection is obsolete, because the audience has now upset the androidal balance of GOT CONTROL---LOST CONTROL. At that point, the audience goes off to seek a new illusion/projection in which, for a few moments, it can re-instate that delicious pornographic balance between CONTROL and NO CONTROL.
McLuhan gave us this gem: “The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” Not only does this remark summarize what is happening in the endless war on terrorism, it explains the power of all those memorials and public funerals and impromptu roadside altars set out with flowers and photos---after a tragedy like 9/11 or the Columbine shootings. These ceremonies help make the story into something THAT IS ALL ABOUT THE AUDIENCE. And as I say, once that happens, the audience roves off to find fresh meat. The original event (and its hidden perpetrators) is obsolete, only an echo, and the desire to discover what really happened is, to a significant degree, deflated.
Realizing this, there are several ways to go. You can try to suppress all media that project mass illusions. You can also decide that media are basically fabulous entities. If our world were fashioned on a principle of abundance----pretty much as Bucky Fuller spelled it out in Utopia or Oblivion----the essentials of survival available to all for pennies---we could embark on an acceleration of media….and I see the goal of that as COSMIC UNIVERSAL, DIVERSE, DECENTRALIZED AND CENTRALIZED AND CONSCIOUS THEATER IN ALL POSSIBLE FORMS….STAGES EVERYWHERE, NUMEROUS PARTS FOR ALL, ORIGINAL PRODUCTIONS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME…BE IN A PLAY, A MOVIE…BE IN 1000 PLAYS….TAKE ON ROLES, WRITE PLAYS, DIRECT THEM….ON AND ON AND ON…..AFTER ALL, IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING ALL THE TIME, SO JUST MAKE IT CONSCIOUS…AND I BELIEVE EVERYTHING WE WANT TO KNOW AND FEEL AND EXPERIENCE WOULD COME TO LIGHT……AMONG OTHER RESULTS, WE WOULD INHABIT OUR ANDROIDAL PROGRAMMING FULLY AND WE WOULD EVENTUALLY FIND OTHER PARADIGMS OF EQUAL AND MORE ENTICING SUBSTANCE….NOTHING TO SACRIFICE, NOTHING TO LOSE…..
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com