We Are Pavlov's Dog
Ivan Pavlov is most famous for
something known as conditioned reflex and
the term Pavlov's Dog. The story has it that Pavlov rang a
bell just before feeding his dogs causing them to eventually
associate the bell with food and to begin salivating at the bell in
anticipation of receiving food. The truth is Pavlov probably seldom,
if ever, used a bell. He used other things though, metronomes,
tuning forks and electric shock. He was a Russian monster posing as
a psychologist and physiologist who abandoned a religious career and
decided to pursue a career in the sciences performing bizarre and
groundbreaking experiments on dogs' digestive tracts by shuffling and
re-dealing their organs and observing the results. He also made some
uncomfortable modifications so that he could collect saliva. It's
thought that he also performed some of these Frankensteinian
experiments on children. Lovely guy. He won the 1904 Nobel Prize in
Physiology and Medicine.
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| One of Pavlov's modified dogs, preserved at The Pavlov Museum, Ryazan, Russia Not creepy at all |
We are Pavlov's Dog. We, as a society,
have become so conditioned to reacting a certain way to certain
stimuli that we have stopped thinking for ourselves. We are led
around by our noses and told what to think, how to act, how to vote,
how to dress, how to talk...we are Pavlov's Dog. Where do
conservatives come from? Where do liberals come from? Why do they
all act and think so similarly? You can go from one area of the
country to another and engage in conversation with different people
and have the same conversations with them almost verbatim.
It's like a hive mentality, group-think. Mention capitalism, ending
social programs, lowering taxes or
gun owner's rights and conservatives will fall into lock-step and
start a pep-rally. Mention social programs, green planets, women's
rights, gay rights, more gun
control and liberals swoon.
It's not even really the issues that get the ball rolling, it's the
catch-phrases: Legitimate
rape, illegal aliens, assault
weapons, sequester, 2nd
Amendment, Constitutional
rights, Fiscal Cliff, False
Flag, Military Industrial Complex, Red
State, Blue State, and so on. Mention one of those or any of the
dozens of others and you are lighting a fuse.
Where
do these notions come from? I would say 20% from news media and 80%
from word of mouth via conversations but mostly from social media
like Facebook or Twitter. These avenues are rife with disinformation
and barely formed ideas that get snapped up by rabid sycophants and
shared and copied and pasted. They do this without fact checking or,
apparently, giving it much thought at all as long as the blog, meme
or article is one that agrees with their ideologies. They feed each
others fears and paranoia through cloak-and-dagger conspiracy
theories and they join
in the boorish bullying and stereotyping of the other guys using
terms like ignorant southerners, commie liberals, gun-nuts, Muslim
sympathizers, they display the worst of human nature.
Cranial Friction Burns
Information,
news, entertainment, gossip, weather, global crises, all day every
day. How fast can you process information? How fast can you discern
what is relevant? Do you still have the ability? According
to Mitchell Stephens' book A History of News,
in 1481 a letter reporting the death of a Turkish sultan took two years
to reach England and in 1841 it took three months and twenty days for
Los Angeles to learn of President William Henry Harrison's death in
the east. Now, we can get instant updates on the Kardashians and
Lindsay Lohan in real time, split-screen,
crawler along the bottom of the screen telling us about the
middle-east, stock ticker in place, the latest from Capitol Hill,
C-Span, Weather Channel. No
time to think. How...fast...can...you...process? We
are being conditioned to respond to hyper fast information with
knee-jerk reactions. Anything less and we're dealing with
yesterday's news. No one has the time to digest what is being fed to
them any more. By the time you hear of such-and-such law being
passed or this scandal or that crisis it is already beginning to go
stale. The
so-called news media is in such a rush to be the first to get stories
out they fail to fact-check or verify. They are all obsessed with
live on-the-spot news coverage that they put out pictures and stories
sometimes so full of mistakes and disinformation that the record is
forever muddied and never corrected. Ron
Nessen, President Gerald Ford's Press Secretary, said,
“Some stories, you don't want to spend too much time checking
because you don't want to find out you're wrong.” That is how so
much false bullshit gets so much mileage. People don't want to learn
facts that may weaken their position. They'd rather trot out some
half-assed report or chart that bolsters their opinions than learn
something that may contradict what they believe.
Then,
there are the conspiracies. Sometimes,
when the news media tries to
do damage control and update
information as it comes to them and try to correct things after the
fact, it gets picked up and becomes part of the big conspiracy, the
cover-ups, the black-ops that are being perpetrated on America by its
government. It's out there, right or wrong, it's out there. Once it
is seen it cannot be unseen. If they show a video or a picture of
someone who happens to be near the scene of a “happening” they
can become
part of it. Later, when they edit them out or issue a retraction, it
is conspiracy. Who was the umbrella man at Dealy Plaza the day
Kennedy was shot? Who was the man wearing camouflage running through
the woods at Sandy Hook? Who was the naked man arrested in the days
after the Boston Marathon bombing? Was Trayvon an innocent, smiling
kid or a dangerous thug? Is Zimmerman a racist child-murderer or a
citizen who's only guilty of killing a person in self-defense? Does
the gun kill the people or does it just facilitate the means? We
may never know any truth any more because of the way things are
presented to us and how skewed it is.
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| I get my news unfiltered from CNN |
Our
24-hour-a-day news channels
are not news, that's right, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC are not news. They
are news entertainment,
the same way that wrestling is not sports, it's sports entertainment.
The programming on these networks is
geared toward further polarizing people. Ram-feeding
propaganda to a starving fan-base, they
pander to the hot-button issues that feed the suspicions and emotions
of already biased people pushing
the left further left and the right further right, obliterating the
middle, the place where, in my mind, rational discourse lives.
They ring the bell, we salivate. We are Pavlov's dog.
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| Vast eye candy |











