Culture of the spectacle
Life in the modern world is life in the culture of the special.
Its primary forms are the state and the commodity thought its existence every where and at all times. It exists as a totality of modern life so ubiquitous it is impossible to imagine life without it. It is in its practical reality the practice of the commodity.
It creates new forms of exploitation serving only the persistence and interests of power because power does not care how it rules only that it does. The spectacle rules by ideas and by creating spectators who are not simply passive viewers but are active patricians who are overwhelmed and dominated by false ideas created to perpetuate the spectacle.
The spectators have created a world of their own false notions of reality enforced and perpetuated by the institutions who seek to reinforce the exploitation of the spectator. Thought their activities ideology is materialized.
The spectator is forced to live in a perpetual schizoid state. At one moment he is encouraged to be master of his circumstance imbuing a false sense of efficacy through their own participation in the special. The false assumption of choice one is encouraged to make choices of carriers commodities and ideologies all furnished by the spectacle. This is known as daily life.
At the next moment he is cast in the role of a passive witness to an unending series of global historical catastrophes reinforcing his dependence on the very institutions using the spectacle and his participation in the spectacle as a tool for domination and exploitation. This is known as being part of history and is a daily reminder that his life is a refuge from and a compensation for his inability to participate in the institutions of power that control his life.
The spectator sees these institutions as a beneficent protector from the contrived enemies of his comfortable life and thus submits freely to the exploitation of those institutions that would use the spectacle as a tool for domination.
Spectacle is democratic and makes all the same choices available to everyone. All the word is brought gradually to the same conclusions everyone everywhere is encouraged to have the same hopes and dreams of obtaining consumer products. They are presented with the same dream of happiness that has never existed and can never exist as lone as the culture freely submits to the explosions of the spectacle.
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To postpone disaster the spectacle has disguised itself as the consumer society. The commodity speaks and human beings listen.
The spectacle does not only exist in illusory images but in the flesh of every consumer. It adopts the guise of human interaction.
It is a grand totality that states “that which exists is good and that which is good is that which exists”. |
Even as the spectacle increasingly manifests the toxic basis of its existence to perpetuate its own existence it continues to create new conditions to further assault and demean the human spectator. The spectator is given reasons for the existence of this sorry state of affairs. The spectacle offers various marginal factors designed to logically explain rational patterns for misery and suffering.
The spectator is made to fear those factors outside the scope of the individual control such as criminals, evil dictators, evil ideology, poverty and natural disasters. These are explanations to facilitate the false assumptions that the individual owes his elegance to those ideologies which will protect him from the random tragedies portrayed in the spectacle. The spectacle is even able to reinforce these fears through the false decomposition of itself. Greater adherence to power is the ultimate goal of the spectacle.
The human will discover commodities which insolate him from his own misery even as they poison him. The more the spectator acquiesces the more abuse power is able to heap upon him. The master must have his slaves in order to dominate them and perpetuate his power. Without the willing participation of the masses the master has no power.
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