Drowning in a Sea of Irrelevance

Fellist, on his blog 'Songlight for Dawn', has posted several pages of Peter Hitchens' book 'The Abolition of Britain'. I have a great deal of sympathy with the ideas behind the book as the more I've researched the more I've realised that there is a clear objective of subverting and destroying Britain.

The subject of the post is, essentially, the role that television has played and continues to play, in the subversion and destruction process, both collectively and individually. I certainly recommend reading the whole thing but there was one short paragraph that stood out for me. It managed to express a conclusion that I had been slowly coming to.

"[American commentator Neil] Postman returned to the assault in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he warned that we should not be complacent just because we had avoided George Orwell's nightmare totalitarian society, which he had predicted for 1984. What was actually coming true, he suggested, was Aldous Huxley's alternative nightmare in Brave New World, where nobody even realized that they were being oppressed.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture.

Huxley, in fact, warned directly of 'man's almost infinite capacity for distractions.' Postman believes that capacity has been fully engaged in the last twenty years."

I'm not sure we have avoided Orwell's nightmare just yet. It seems to me it is being slowly constructed all around us. What is true, however, is that the overwhelming majority of people don't realise they are being slowly repressed. Mixed in with that number are some who have an idea that 'something's not quite right' but who shrug their shoulders and go back to the distractions of their choice.

Then there are the very few who both know what is going on and who are eager to do something about it. Hitchens himself would fall into this category but how many would easily dismiss anything he says as the (mind control trigger) words of a 'right winger' or 'conservative'. I know I used to.

The scariest of all is the idea that there is no need to ban books as there are very few who want to read them. I've tried countless times to interest friends and acquaintances of mine in the New World Order, World Government agenda (of which Hitchens' observations is a small part of) with little or no success. Nothing, it seems, can penetrate the need for the myriad distractions that surround them. They are, indeed, drowning in a sea of irrelevance.

I'm only grateful that I'm slowly managing to break free from it all.