Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What’s wrong with the media?“

Accelerated by the Internet, the media has become steroid-pumped with power, acquiring freedom, influence and control like never before.

Anyone can promote anything they want. If you are paying, you can control the media, and by doing so, control public opinion: society’s psychology, awareness and subconscious.

Individuals and groups guided by wealth and power motives thus methodically change public opinion, even using the media to manipulate legal proceedings and government elections.

People of law, such as judges, police and lawyers, have become involved in the media’s brainwashing machine, and all human systems have come under the media’s influence.

The media has become the influencer following us everywhere we go, in our hands and pockets, ears and eyes, all day, every day.

And who or what controls the media?

Money. Not an ideology. Not a plan aimed at educating and raising society to better connect and enjoy happier lives. No, just money.

Money is the worst fuel for a system. It is just quantitative units, where the more of these units you have, the more value you have.

How the Bought Media Has Contributed to Society’s Decline

Since so many people pump money into the media, and the media plays such an influential role in shaping public opinion, the media is increasingly feeling the power it has, and it has begun using its power in the most aggressive and egoistic way possible. Today, there is regular behind-the-scenes buying-and-selling in the media, manipulating power at the highest levels.

The egoistic use of the media is a major disease-like problem spreading throughout human society. It confuses people, since anyone can promote whatever they want, as long as they have enough money.

The more money a person aspiring for a position of power has, the more he can influence his opinion on society. Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s statement at a recent ADL conference contextualized the severity of what this means: “If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”

Since we value money and power so much, then we live in a world where those with more money—not wisdom, knowledge, expertise and experience, but money—control.

We see situations today where judges, i.e., people who need to be “untouchable,” have become influenced by the media to pass judgments with the fear of what could be done to their image in the media.

If we would start setting boundaries to limit the media that we consume, so that it would aim at benefiting the public and not merely the self-interests of those who take advantage of it, then we could prevent any further blind acceleration toward an oncoming wall.

The Solution to Bought Media – The New Media Review Organization

Although it seems unrealistic to discuss any kind of regulation on the media today, it would become more realistic if another major financial collapse struck.

The world as we know it today would come to a complete halt.

Picture the scenario that the stock market crashes. Money flow stops. Our exchange system—buying and selling by means of money—stops. Advertising stops. Nothing fuels the systems we’ve built to connect us. Everything stops.

Our constantly flowing competitive, materialistic and self-interest energized value system, based on money, gets shocked.

Since money stops moving and we wouldn’t be able to buy or sell anything, we would stop valuing money, and then we would be able to see how much money got out of hand.

At that point, we could envision a collective of people around the world forming, creating a new media review organization. Due to seeing the error in the way the media was bought by anyone who was paying beforehand and how our money-focused lives led us to a shattering, we would be more inclined to reach an agreement that the media needs to be reviewed and filtered in a way that cannot be bought by money.

Their role would be to make the media informative, and not act out of interests. It would start by closing off the Internet as we know it, so that there would be no fake political, economic and national promotions.

This new organization would define laws and boundaries for filtering out anything that could incite the public, with the focus on giving the public the information it needs, events described as objectively as possible.

The main team would of a diverse group of people from all backgrounds. They would be expected to argue regularly, but the leading principle they would be continuously reminded about would be that they need to reach a common agreement on what’s most beneficial for the public, and thus, the organization reviews and passes on information to the public in an unbiased manner.

They would also engage in learning about how to work together as equals, regularly checking to make sure that everyone in the decisive committee had equal weight.

Where Does That Leave Us Today?

The question is, do we need to wait for a financial collapse, where everyone becomes desperate from not being able to live the materialistic lives we currently live in order to undergo this change?

It all depends on how much we can raise awareness of the kind of connections we need to establish in human society. If we aim to connect human society to be as interconnected and interdependent as the technological, economic and cultural connections naturally revealing to us, then we would experience harmony. Likewise, on the contrary, anything we do that doesn’t head toward better connecting people will have negative side effects.

The media crisis we find ourselves in today comes to show us that we are nearing the end of an era of unconscious human development, one where the egoistic system based on money is positioned between all of us. It is a system that has no value other than the ego of the person who outcompetes others.

The more we suffer today from this system increasingly malfunctioning, the more we will have the opportunity to consider what it would take to wake up from our coma-like state and realize unity.

Human society today is gradually nearing this new awakening. All society needs is that its mental and emotional development match the connectedness of its technological and economic development, and then distances between people will fill up with the unifying force dwelling in nature.

Also, as I regularly explain, the Jewish people hold the key to pioneering this process of unity, and it depends on Jewish unity (“love your friend as yourself”) before expanding to the unity of humanity (“light unto the nations”).

Filed under: Q&A, Quora | Add Comment →