My point is that it is easier to draw pleasure from
*pretending* doing something rather than doing the *real* thing. It is
much safer, no risk. By reading a book or watching a movie you get into
an artificial world, where you can feel emotions, but in fact you cannot
be hurt.
********************************************************************
Your basic premise is correct-- but in the rest of your statement--
Tad:
I have nothing against books, alcohol or drugs. You can have them all
and
*still* think independently (providing you are not stoned at the
moment).
It is *replacing* your thinking with them which is fatal to your MIND
(or
your meme-pool, I should say).
*********************************************************************
-- you outline the basic fear that is behind the eyes of every member of
every censorship board in the world.
The censor has a set belief, once the censoring mind encounters an
abstract model that is different from his or her model, (in the form of
a novel, movie or painting) that is designed to engage the emotions and
thoughts of the reader (the *real* mind) the censor flips out-- "what if
people think this is real and really start thinking like this ??
(Yikes!)
Stories affirm models of the social world and social contracts-- They
ARE our thinking Tad!
Your placement of them in the same bin as recreational drug and alcohol
abuse doesn't prove anything but your academic laziness.
(ooooo. maybe you are manipulating us.... ooooo.....is that Lesson
number 11? Generalization?)
Over all-- it is the easiest thing to identify a threat. To mislabel
things as Manipulation, Control, Cancerous etc. Television has trained
us to believe the Danger Prophets on the six o' clock evening news.
The easiest threat meme to spread is "this is a threat to your
autonomy". Or in your words-- your independant thinking. Tad-- you don't
think independently. At some point you enter the world and you subject
yourself to the Model. Otherwise you would never *do* anything. You
would never live anywhere. Try building just... one *house*
autonomously. A Real house-- not one that exists in your independent
brain.
We did a play about the Amish recently-- Now there's a group you have to
admire from a memetic standpoint. They *totally* understand the power of
the Model. They see it, they totally understand how it infects you right
down to the buttons on your shirt.
There is no such thing as an abstract or unreal experience. There are,
as you point out, vicarious experiences that are less risky, but they
are not unreal. You just refuse to acknowledge them as real texts.
-- Regards +--------------------------------------------------------+ Ken Pantheists http://www.lucifer.com/~kenpan +--------------------------------------------------------+