Liars

It struck me yesterday that there are two professions in the world in which you are required to lie: politician and actor/actress. Professional liars. In much the same way I would never take a politician at his word, why would anyone instantly believe an actor or actress? Of course, there is increasingly little difference between the two as politicians are required to do so much acting and actors are (seemingly) required to do so much politicking. I'm deathly afraid of a country which seems to be rapidly headed into some sort of "mediacracy" (a word which should be pronounced suspiciously like mediocrity or mediocracy.) I think about the old Max Headroom TV series with amusement. Imagine a country ruled by the media...

It requires an existential moment... just as our mind can only interpret the world based on our sensory input, so can we only percieve the world through the media input we have access to. Newspapers, TV, books, radio... we rely on them to keep us informed. We implicitly trust them to be objective. But can we be sure that they are? Someone in the throws of an LSD trip may swears he sees (and believes that he does) that you are melting in front of his eyes; his senses are lying to him, or his mind is inhibited in it's ability to interpret the sensory input he's getting. The reality is that he doesn't know whether what he sees is really happening. This is further complicated if the things he is seeing are disturbing or upsetting him and short-circuitting his ability to calmly make this judgement.

I think if you watch TV news for a few nights with this analogy in mind, you might get a brief whiff of paranoia... no matter what channel you watch. I've noticed over the last 5 years, that a single word in a newscast can dramatically alter the tone of a report. I spend a lot of time wondering why a certain word was used. The decision to use the word "alleged" in a report is always interesting, for example.

The theory of drama, whether on stage or on the screen, is the "willing suspension of disbelief." I shudder at the possibility that politics and current events may require suspending disbelief. Read 1984 again...