From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 13

Cold, slow overwhelming by exhaustion counts on wear and tear. Gutta cavat lapidem, the Romans said: the drop carves the stone. Whatever the duress we resist, it just takes keeping on with it indefinitely, and sooner or later you crumble, without even noticing it, and you too finally utter the last sentence of Orwell’s 1984: you love the Big Brother. It could be said that again we’ve been hypnotized; only, by way of time instead than by way of impact. As an “innocent” example, take notice of it in advertising: suddenly the media start hammering us with something, and we may even find it laughable or annoying; but it’s just a matter of time before we find ourselves considering not only it is a taken for granted part of our world, but above all it always has been. In the beginning, we were offended by the baseness of a jingle; in the end we hardly noticed we were humming it. Should the span gone by be significant enough within a lifetime, then we may find ourselves even nostalgic about it. Who cares? The Big Brother is not in a hurry al all.
And it’s well worth mentioning that it also works for us the other way round: nothing like media dropping an uncomfortable issue to let us drop it too. Indeed the media carpet bomb us with a continuous avalanche of other issues and so, as one problem drives away another, we let go of each one of them even before the initial impact has burned out and thus well before our being informed of it can be of any other use than further pushing us into apathy; but our condition is such that the media dropping it would be enough to let us forget about it, well before confronting its importance or doing something about it.

And finally we can be quantitative to the point of betraying ourselves dishonourably. Quite a case in point is the “Big Brother”, provided one knows George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s Big Brother is the quintessence of suppression which, in addition to being a horrible great likelihood, is there to describe evil in absolute terms, so that we can detect its mechanisms at work whatever the circumstances. As such, it is the product and the symbol of our highest ability to observe, analyse and stigmatise.