Been pushing around some concepts about current culture today in my head, centered around reality television breaking our society. Notions of nuance, de-escalation, humility, and common service have been completely turned around by reality “TV” in favor of engineered conflict.
When reality TV broke on the scene, it was derided by many in the TV community as “cheap” in terms of quality and the production costs. But the concept of putting people who are socially oil and water together to engineer conflict and normalizing that was far more insidious.
Reality TV took advantage of a fundamental property of our nervous system... We look for differences. This is true on the behavioral level, and it is fundamental to how our nervous system operates.
We find differences, whether those differences are sensory input differentials to allow us to look at brightness or color or feel differences in texture, temperature or vibration, and this is carried through all the way to behavior.
That programming exploited differences to normalize, and more importantly, model socially unacceptable behavior from MTVs Real World, Big Brother, or The Apprentice. It said: “get your own way, push your agenda, screw the other guy and “win” at any cost, and you will be rewarded.
People have taken these lessons, they have learned them and are implementing them in their daily lives. Society is now paying the price for that modeling. This is fundamentally unsustainable for societies and will lead to downfall.
There are those who implicitly or explicitly understand this and exploit this for their own advantage. These individuals are monsters like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, and a host of other enablers like Mark Burnett or at the bottom, like Alex Jones who feed off of the dregs.
Now we've reaped our reward and we have, as the leader of the USA, a reality TV show POTUS who has deftly taken all this modeling and has expertly exploited it for his own advantage and benefit. This will not get better unless we start modeling better behavior for all of us.
