The Middle Mind

[mr. strawberry]

I'm reading a book caled "The Middle Mind" and I think it's damn good. I decided to paraphrase the first chapter (in case anyone wants to comment on it or to get anyone else interested) Some of what I type will be directly from the book so all credit goes to the Author curtis White

Imagination has the strength of reality or none at all..
We need a shared reality because we need to live together and trust that we are part of a shared world. This is idology...what politics is at its most basic level. Who will have the authority to say what kind of world we shall live in.

We are used to defering what parents, teachers, presidents and media spokespeople like Dan Rather (the bosses in our social factory) say is good enough for us.

When we get in our cars, go to work or the mall, turn on our TVs or computers you don't realize youre being murdered and our entertainment- movies, tv, music is a testement to our ability and willingness to endore bordom...and pay for it.

When was the last time you heard a politition make a public utterance to which you didn't want to reply "will you please shut up or say what you really think- assuming, God help us, you can think at all"?

It makes sence to people to think"it's a good ideato plant corn to make into ethnol to put into our cars so that we can continue to undermine the present and future quality of our lives through (count the marvolous ways) congestion, polution, endless asphaulting, stripping the neutrients from our topsoil, eroding the topsoil, traffic injuries and deaths, and the spiritual damage of endless consumption, debt, and work...simply evidence that as a spicies we are too stupid to live.

There's no need to stop there. What evidence of imaginative wealth does the sea-to-shining-sea strip-malling of America provide? When exactly did we all decide that every main street in America should look exactly the same, with exactly the same corporate eateries-Applebee's unto Bennigans unto olive garden- punctuater by Wal-marts and best buys all sitting on the shoreline of an inexhaustible automobile busyness?

This is what I get for my lost years in the corporate carrel? Fox programming? Reality TV? Hot babes in halter-tops eating insects? COPS? I might as well get a billy club and beat myself up. I think I'd feel better about it all. Enertainment is boring and dishonest, and daily work is unfufilling, resentment begins to grow.

What might we produce if out creativity were free? As capialisms great friend Walt Disney put it, "its off to work I go." Happily. During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good.

What capitialism can do is MANAGE our crativity. Its primary stratigy is to provide the work of the immagination for us, This is a stratigy Hebert Marcuse called "repressive freedom".
Steven Spielberg's dreamWorks has made it possible for him and members of his company to be creative so the rest of us can continue working. they are "content providers".

The programing in TV, steros, computers simulates the human immagination; it functions as an imagination prosthetic. Insofar as your high-end audio equiptment means you wont produce music yourself. It is literally a wooden leg, a dis-ability.
They neutrilize a possible complaint from subjects, allow for effecintsy because the work is done by a few people and they make profits. We arent even Do-it yourself hobbyists. We're a done elsewhere by someone else culture. What the middle mind does is flatten distinctions. It turns culture into mush. The middle mind is a stratige. Its a means to an end, a form of management. Its all useless for the purposes of intelegence...just more content. something to sell.

We are not who we are because of some origional essence; we are determined by our social orginazation. We have subject positions, not humanity, in a vast apparatus.