Violent images - violent behavior, the question answered

                                                                                        The entertainment industry

                                                                       Do violent images inspire violent behavior?



Eskimos are said to have 60 words for its’ texture, the ways it falls and how it settles. No two of its flakes are exactly alike. Every language calls it by a different name and every person experiences it in a unique way.   Yet despite of all its differences it is one thing. It’s snow.  If Thursday’s blizzard dumped 3 feet, we might say that it snowed and snowed, but we don’t think of that blizzard and Friday’s flurries as snow and snow.   In our minds it did one thing both days; it snowed. 

60 types of snow and 30 types of rain differ in 90 ways but in essence they are all precipitation.  The clouds part, the rain stops and the sun peeks through and we see an essential change in one thing; the weather.  An effort to include and consider the many aspects of life is a movement toward defining their more singular essence.

 Humanity is another single concept.  It contains every facet of every person’s life, the world over and throughout time. Even when divided and at war we neither perceive nor think of ourselves as “two” humanities. We are like snowflakes, no two the same, yet our humanity defines us inclusively as one essential thing.

Humanity is a part of the whole of life, life is a part of the whole of creation, which in turn makes up the whole of the universe.  The universe is the all-inclusive singular essence of all things.  Universe means A Song of One.     

 Singular essences are pure.  They have no quality attached to them.  They can be cognized but not recognized until they express themselves is in the field of duality.  For instance the essence of Gender is defined by non-gender but it is without quality until it expresses itself as masculinity and femininity. Direction is the same until it goes east, west, up or down.  

The single essence can evolve infinite expression because qualities are like the paint on an artist’s pallet.  From gender we achieve our unique as a snowflake individuality.  From one we get two, from two come many and from many comes the entire field of mathematics.  In this light I wish to comment on the violence; its presence, its absence and its infinite expression. 

Violence ranges from benign to viciously malignant and no two of its’ expressions are ever exactly alike. Wednesday it’s a light flurry of violent images; Thursday a blizzard of violent thoughts and intent, Friday it escalates into a white out of verbal threats and Saturday its lifeless victim lies snowbound in a pool of blood. A single expression of violence related to twenty people is experienced in twenty different ways.  Yet despite all its degrees, manifestations and its frequency, we know it as one thing; violence.

                                                                                                            ***

On a first name basis what is seen and what is done can appear unrelated.  But when image and behavior betroth themselves to violence, their singles status comes to an end.  Their marriage begets a union that precedes and overshadows their separation. All images, concepts and expressive behavior that espouse violence are known first and foremost by their surname Violence.

Conjoined by a surname, image and behavior become like the Smiths in the phone book; One big happy family.  It may appear that certain Smiths are unrelated, but the very essence of our humanity makes it impossible to prove they are not. Travel back sufficient in time and we find that the Smiths are in fact related to the Jones’s as well and even to the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s. It is likewise impossible to generate proof that violence has no relation to violence. 

A family name places its members under a single heading.  That’s why, although expressions of violence approach an infinite number, we do not think “violence and violence” because it’s a singularity. If I behave violently in public, many might be witness to images of my violent behavior on the evening news.  If I view an image of violence on TV, be it real or staged, my witnessing is an experience of violent behavior?

Being that violence is a singularity, it is absurd to presume an unbridgeable gap between its images and its behavior?   If in truth there’s no gap in the first place, then what is behind the entertainment industry demanding proof of a clear connection?  What and where are, how and why have, marks of absolute unrelated delineation arisen in the huge family/singularity known as violence?   A singular essence cannot be dissected into exclusive non-related parts.  Marks of distinction may exist between image and behavior but when they espouse violence they only characterize parts of a one body. Such distinctions can only be relative, not absolute as the industry claims and wants us to believe.     

Seeking a link in what is not severed is the elephant in the room. Being urged to establish a link within an absolute singularity is what distorts our focus. It dizzies our intellect, keeps us in a dumbfounded partisan state of mind and it shoves us into a revolving door with no exit, a debate that will not cease.  The clarification of this dilemma eludes us simply we are being directed to establish it where there is no foundation.  The industry is pushing us find absolution elsewhere, but it is not elsewhere. It’s not deep complex or obscure.  It is right here before our eyes in the question itself.  We are made to seek answers where they can’t be found.  We need only clarify the question. The answers we seek are within the question itself.  Looking too deep for what is apparent is what blinds us to the obvious Truth   

The quest to prove this phantom link plants a divisive seed in our mind that takes root prior to our thought process, which in turn affects our insight in its entirety.  To this tiny but blatant seed of redundancy is given the power to completely shroud what is obvious and blatant, namely the truth. Its motive is to generate the confusion necessary to drive the current debate in endless circles and to keep it revolving so it can’t be settled.

Confusion is a non-indigenous mental state. Once this divisive seed germinates in our mind it grows and spreads like a rampant weed that quickly overshadows our tender indigenous mental clarity.  It order for confusion to perpetuate its species it produces a sweet fruit that contains its own seed and it often falls ripe into the courtroom.  This fruit is highly favored to the yeast of falsehood, but poison to obvious truth. Sophisticated and highly patronized courtroom rhetoric is a master brewer.  It is highly adept at distilling the fermented lie into a high proof, rotgut, mental elixir. 

Often the more trained and exercised one’s intellect is in the art of debating  “the lawyers way”, the greater its talent thirsts to be quenched by this elixir of divisive rhetoric. Such an intellect tends to believe it can “think” truth whereas an intellect established by pure reason knows full well that truth can be seen but not thought.  

“Thinkaholics” are notorious for relying exclusively upon rational thought to absolve a debate.  That’s why they tend to guzzle this divisive elixir.  Such intoxication  cripples one’s effort to link cause and effect and that’s what binds one to unresolved debate.   Pure reason can’t stand a drop it because it knows first hand the hangover that follows the mental intoxication of pointless redundancy.  After a heavy imbibing of rational thought to substantiate a lie there comes a great headache of conscience.

                                                                                                          **SO**

                                                                                                   The debate is;

                                                                       Do violent images inspire violent behavior?

This debate has not, cannot and will not be resolved by minds that swim laps in the pool of divisive redundancy.  The entertainment industry knows that all too well. It is not their goal either to win or to exit the pool of this debate.  They simply want to maintain a flotation devise filled with the victorious air of reaching no conclusion.  For in merely staying afloat they achieve their goal. To avoid a loss and a win they stay in business, so their real goal to keep the question unresolved.    

To break this stalemate, we have only to understand that their challenging us to unite what was not severed in the first place is the core of their deceit.   It’s our acceptance of the challenge that they’re after. For in it a responsibility that belongs to them is placed on us. It is absolutely not our responsibility to prove there is a clear connection between violent images and violent behavior.  It is the industry’s responsibility to prove that there is NOT a clear connection.   It is for them to prove the link between image and behavior is severed in the first place and that cannot be done. Therefore their only option is the slight of mind shift of responsibility from their shoulders to ours so our minds are set to a pointless grindstone. 

This is a practice of subtlety in such a high form, that even its practitioners see it as honorable.  Our setting forth to prove a link between violent illicit images and violent illicit behavior is the very thing that lets the industry’s lawyers sneak quietly around back and conjure the phantom gap that they claim exists between them.  Being that its seed confusion is planted prior to intellect, it’s not only fundamental to the entire intellectual process, it yokes the intellect to serve its deceit. 

Proving a link where nothing is severed is a powerful redundancy that feeds an even more powerful form of cognitive dissonance.  In other words in hitting us before we think, it profoundly affects how we think of all we think, so it makes how smart you are mean nothing.  As we see in the court of law the intellectual elite can be hit hardest.  We assume the Supreme Court has the greatest capacity to clarify confusion.  In truth the very arrogance of its position may not only make it least immune to confusion, it may in fact make it confusion’s most valued employee.

We assume only that our eyes can paint mental images, but is a blind man without imagination?  Every sense we have paints an image within our consciousness and life is nothing other than a huge event of images inspiring behavior.   Image inspires change and evolution and it is all that life is.  Yet we seem to assume all things must hinge on proof, proof there’s a link between image and behavior and proof it’s either harmful or harmless.   

As we see, none of that has reached conclusion and none of it can for the same simple reason. The obvious truth stands on its own two feet; firm and balanced, whereas proof is a crutch that truth has no need of.   Only lies and half-truths crave proof in order to stand erect and that’s because they’re imbalanced.  But if you shove a crutch hard under an arm of one who stands firm, he suddenly strains to keep his balance and often topples over to one side. So we see that the lie can only compete with the obvious truth by demanding it be proven.  Why? Because it makes truth loose it’s balance, topple into the arena of debate.  Shouting Proof! Proof! Give me Proof,  it generates a no-win scenario. 

If a lawyer walks into the courtroom and demands proof for what is clearly obvious to all, he’s laughed right out the door. If it’s in his interest to keep from getting laughed out the door, he must make what’s obvious and apparent suddenly seem obscure and questionable. Likewise the industry knows the only way to distort and shroud the obvious, blatant and unquestionable link between v.i. (violent illicit images) and v.i. behavior is to demand a link between them be proven.  

Knowing quite well there can be no proof of a link in a non-existing gap, is what emboldens the industry to demand that we substantiate such a proof.  We’ve only to see clearly to the core that in so doing they create the phantom gap.  Seeing is our greatest weapon because it doesn’t offer the lie the resistance it needs to grow and be sustained, it instead strips it naked. We must clearly realize that in essence what the industry does is it sets us up to prove a connection in a gap that doesn't exist, which in fact was never there in the first place. 

     

Presupposing a phantom gap creates a stifling double negative in thought.   It fabricates an equation that can forever be considered but never be solved.  Our attempt to cancel it instead of seeing it for what it is manifests the unreasonable form of cognitive dissonance that plagues us.  It leaves us struggling to bridge a gap, unable to prove the clear connection, because there never was a gap or disconnect in the first place.

My hat’s off to the industry for demanding we establish what is already established.  It’s the subtlest and most clever “slight of thought” trick I've ever seen. It’s like they put a wine glass on the table and tell us to "Make that glass"  and we ask, "You mean make one like it?" and they reply "No, make that glass, that one there". It’s like some mysterious evil Zen Koan born of pure diabolic genius.

This phenomenon is rampant. I see it practiced by the fossil fuel and  petrochemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry as well.  One must pause and ask how it has come about that we are made responsible for anything whatsoever concerning their creative endeavor?  It’s absolutely not our responsibility to prove their product is harmful, it is for them to prove it is harmless and they can’t.  So they all present us the same challenge and the very instant we accept we’re made blind to what’s right in front of our eyes.  

We are looking too deep for answers that are apparent and obvious and elsewhere for reasons that stand firm and unquestionable right here on the surface of things. Thus violence is reaching epidemic proportion because we’re trying to prove it is as communicable as the Black Plague as opposed to just seeing it is. We’re dropping like flies from the side effects of the entertainment/herbicide/fertilizer/prescription drug cash generators because they yoked us with their responsibility. To understand and realize absolute justice in this issue, we have only to re-burden them of their responsibility by refusing to accept their challenge.

I am not clever, highly educated, nor am I a deep thinker.  I’m more the guy who sweeps floors, cleans toilets and focuses upon the obvious.  I merely discovered the essence of the entertainment industry's divisive mystique in, of all things, paint chip samples.  I’ll only say it was by chance that I brought some home to show my wife and by accident I noticed this phenomenon.

There were two shades of blue green that caught my eye; one paint company’s 1113 bluegrass and another’s 1129 Paradisio.  At first I thought I was seeing things but I tried it out on my wife.  I “clearly connected” the two color samples, side by side, no gap between them.  Then I asked her, "What's the relationship between these hues of color?"  She said, "It's clear and obvious that bluegrass has a wee hint more green, Paradisio is a slightly more blue."

Then I spun her around, severed the “clear connection” and held them just a half inch apart. I covered the names with my fingers and asked her, "Now, tell me which is bluegrass?"  She looked, paused, and said,..  "I don’t know.  I can't see or define how the two relate to one another unless I see them clearly connected".   

That’s when it hit me that I was seeing the very essence of the entertainment industries practice of deception.  I saw it in the way our minds processed the relationship between these two siblings in the family of color.  It’s the same way the mind defines the relationship between infinite forms of violence.  The link must first be presumed in order to clarify their true relation. If the gap is given precedence the mind is made helpless to define how the siblings in the family of violence relate. 

Presuming a gap first and foremost divides the mind to see the siblings in two distinct lights whereas truth is revealed in one light, in a single frame of thought.  For the mind’s eye to be single, it must premise the connection as opposed to the difference. The industry does to two hues of violence, what I did to two similar colors. They hold violent illicit images and violent illicit behavior a half inch apart and challenge us to define their relation.

They premise the gap by demanding we prove the connection. We accept the challenge and the premised gap is established. When the eye is divided, the gap remains one that reason cannot bridge.  This forces us to think violence and violence, to split and see a single concept in two distinct lights.  It is as absurd and redundant as thinking “snow and snow”. We’re left unable to define the relationship between V.I. images and V.I. behavior for the same essential reason my wife couldn’t identify the distinction between the two shades of blue-green after I spun her around gapped them and covered their names.

So the entertainment industry is 100% right on the money when they claim there's no proof of a link between image and behavior.   Why?, because there is no gap in the first place.  The deceit is too blantant for eyes that are focused on depth.  It’s right there in front of our eyes in the industry’s challenge.   The instant we accept it, a shift in responsibility takes place and we are tossed the hot potato so it doesn’t burn or bandage their creative hands.

     

Now let's touch on the industry's hypocrisy.  Is it a mystery why people watch pornographic images or is it obvious?  If images really don't inspire and feed behavior, then how is it the industry depends almost entirely upon how well they do for its livelihood?   How can it be possible that commercial fast food commercials perform their billion dollar sideshow act so damned well and efficient, yet there’s no clear connection between tantalizing images of appetites stuffed, the fact I’m craving a Big Mac and the reality of skyrocketing obesity.  Monday night I watched 8 paid actors eat one 4 times and my mouth watered.  Tuesday I experience a sudden craving for one at lunch time.  Are you trying to tell me that your commercial image, my appetite stimulation and sudden craving have nothing to do with 10 billion burgers sold?  The truth is obvious. Image affects our behavior.  You know it, I know it and my mother knows it.

                                                                                                        ***

One day a lone mountain chapel finally got the bell they longed for.  It was a big bell that rung in a low key of C.  And so it began that each evening a monk pulled the belfries rope and sounded vespers at 7 pm. People in the valley below to the east heard the ringing loud and clear.  Then it bounced off a foothill, back up the mountain and all the monks heard it echo.

On certain rare overcast days the echo hit a cloud, crossed over the peak and down the other side.  But by then it pitched way below the ear and no person could actually hear the ringing. Nonetheless a mystery happened.  At 7 PM, in a village on the western side of the mountain, people heard their doorbells ring a little.  They went to answer but no one was at the door. 

At first they suspected it was mischief, but they found no culprits and no hidden strings. When science failed they began to suspect it was ghosts.  Then finally summer came and a man crossed the pass with news of the big bell that rang vespers at 7 PM.  The obvious truth was revealed and the mystery was laid to rest.

Turns out these little bells were just resonating in sympathy with the big temple bell.  The ‘clear connection' to the big chapel bell was identified. Although invisible, inaudible and intangible, the link between cause and effect was brought to light and realized.  How?  By bridging the gap between sound and sound, by knowing the essence of sound as one thing.

                                                                           Some words, questions and a warning

I would like to speak this directly to the entertainment industry itself.  Violent, immodest, illicit and gluttonous tendencies are in each and every one of us.  They are like dormant doorbells waiting to resonate. They are within both sinner and saint. You set to tolling your great entertainment/advertisement bell and it rings heavy with violence, consumption, immodest Narcissism and every imaginable illicit and perverse sexual undertone. We in turn resonate

I will say your images are so entertaining, your special effects are so realistic and the gratuitous violence that you portray is so intoxicating I find myself helpless and hypnotized.  You do this because it sells and the ratings show it’s what people want but you see this as if everything we want is good for us.  It brings to mind the many dependency addictions, drug addicts whose want is so overwhelming they would rob their own mother for a fix.  Their addiction is their greatest remorse.  They watch their lives in full distraught and helpless awareness as crack cocaine, heroin and meth amphetamine send them spiraling downward.   

Fattening unhealthy foods are a delight to the tongue, but they are a time bomb to the body. Alcohol loosens the tensions of life and gambling is a rush, but is the fact they are a lucrative business that offers people “what they want” justify what the world suffers because of them?

 Everyone has in himself a capacity to be honest.  Even sexual predators and homicidal sociopaths have an honest side and it has come to light that many have admitted you to be their great source of inspiration.  So you see the same entertaining images of beastly inhumane behavior that you portray on film, have turned and are stalking us like hungry wolves. They prey upon, consume and oppress our innocence with feverish lust. The word Trust is fast becoming foreign to our tongue and we can’t escape anxiety even in our sleep. We're apprehensive to send our children to school.  We fear to let them play in the streets.  We’ve even moved our couch and kitchen table away from the window and you're telling us the reason is a complete mystery!!!!???  

I no longer suspect mischief or ghosts and as far as I’m concerned the veil of your deceit has been parted before my eyes. You hide beneath the apron of Free Speech, a well intended constitutional right that has crossed over to become an inconsiderate, imbalanced, one sided tyrant.  Free speech is like the well-intended conservation effort to introduce white tailed deer into our eastern forests.  They have now become a destructive ravaging plague. 

Expression is just half the story.  It demands and is given all the attention because of its aggressive nature.  Impression is the gentle and silent other half whose immunity to predation is weak.  Expression and impression are like the two sides of a rare coin whose value depends on both sides sustaining mint condition.  When freedom of expression overtly hogs consideration, what must receive a lesser focus?  What is trammeled?  What is overwhelmed and violated?  The answer of course is impression. 

Only expression can violate. Impression, by its very nature, does not and cannot violate.  What can possibly starve as a result of expression’s gluttony other than the element of impression and what, and only what, is subject to impression but innocence?  Pure innocence is like a nondescript lump of clay or a blank chalkboard that has not been impressed upon.  It is that golden part of us wherein lies our spiritual freedom and it is the only aspect of our self that is subject to violation? 

Expression and impression are only checked and balanced when the freedom of both is equally considered and what can do that but Modesty?  A loud obnoxious mouth permitted to deafen our ears is expression in excess inflicted upon helpless impression.  That cannot happen in reverse.  Therefore tell me to my face what needs protection and rights. Is it your unbridled right to blurt out or is it my young child’s ears and eyes?  Is not the freedom of innocence is violated by a wholesale consideration of expression?  Who bought it out?  Who, but the one sided tyrant.

Whining “freedom of expression!, freedom of speech!”, you are let to trample and adulterate our freedom to be impressed according to our will. You have taken away our choice of what to see and hear.  Yet you have the audacity to defend unbridled expression.  You argue we have the choice to look away.   Well, don't insult our intelligence.  Don’t tell us we need only change stations or that we even have a choice in the matter, because you have taken over.  You are in effect everywhere. There is nowhere to look or listen that is not permeated with the residue stench of your lucrative, exploitative endeavors.

Your immodesty is insidious. You have long since crossed the illicit line. You have sent the social norm in a violent downward spiral. Your immoral ways cling to people like smoke to a wool sweater.  If I pluck out my eyes and shove ice picks in my ears, be assured some repercussion of your rampant communicable immodesty will end up shoved in my face.

I’m sure you will argue that the blame cannot be put solely upon your shoulders. I agree that violence and perversion has expressed itself long before the advent of the TV.  Nonetheless your guilt is un-detracted.   It lies in your divisive agitation of what our humanity yearns, prays and labors to settle.  We want the oppression of our innocence to cease.  If our evolution was true and proper, our children should be once again relaxed and free to play in the streets, but it is not true and proper. 

The truth is, the images you portray for amusement, do inspire, instigate and complicate a behavior that needs to be dethroned and put to rest.  If we are to achieve peace and equity and the establishment of true human rights, tell me, where does the blatant bold stirring and accenting of its very antithesis fit into the picture? 

I agree it’s impossible to define illicit expression relative only to expression. You cannot render an absolute conclusion from data that is one sided and self-relating. Using expression as a reference point to define expression is an effort to form a whole considerate truth from an inconsiderate, one-sided, half opinion.  It’s like trying to define east without the concept of west, to describe day without knowing night. 

As we measure degrees of light by absolute darkness, degrees of temperature from absolute zero, we can only define degrees of expression by absolute, unadulterated, un-infringed upon impression, (which just happens to be the definition of our innocence). 

East and west, light and darkness, are bound as the head and tail of single coins. It is the same with expression and impression and each individual is that coin for we both express and are impressed.

However, because expression alone has a voice, it alone is capable of demanding rights and consideration, but because impression is it’s opposite in every sense, it is effected but never truly heard. Because it is not heard, it must be thoroughly considered and represented.  Sad to say it must look to expression for it’s own defense.   However, expression like many things cannot help but be self biased so it’s a little like trusting a Republican to defend a Democrat. Therefore to equate these rights and freedoms, we must in the strictest and first sense see the equation within ourselves.

Unbridled speech and expression is freedom’s big joke. There is only one justice, one element alone that equates all freedoms. That element is MODESTY.  Modesty is speech and expression fully bridled. It considers expressed behavior in the light of innocence impressed. It’s the full consideration of our innocence factor, which has no voice or aggression.  Innocence is like the natural world that must be considered in light of our exploitation.  

It is said that pornography cannot be defined but we sure as hell know it when we see it by its psychic stench. Illicit expression may be impossible to define but modesty is an easy concept to codify.  Why?;  because it considers all in the light of all.  Modesty considers our rights in the light of both sides, expression relative to impression.  It is the clear definition of east by the concept of west.

In epitomizing a balanced perspective, modesty makes justice whole, fair and balanced. By modesty we judge the entertainment industries malignant immodesty and we see just how imbalanced the whole idea of freedom and justice has become.  Seeing how rapidly immodesty intensifies and permeates our culture we can only wonder how long till innocence becomes the stuff of legend.

It is not that we must suppress evil, (“Resist not evil in the world”) for it is as important a part of our nature as is our good half.  Evil must, by our preference, be let to fulfill it’s own destiny, to become a reference point by which we know and define what is good. Evil embraced will recede to assume it’s recessive role.  Evil resisted will not. Embraced, it will becomes as a recessive gene resting quietly within, accessible and identifiable yet ever dormant, recognized but not denied, content never again to feel the need to rage and assume a dominant role fed by our very effort to resist it.  The fate of evil is to become,no more and no less harmful than the paper in a book. 

What I accuse the industry of is obstructing this establishment of equal human justice, of stirring up and instigating what both wants and needs to be put to rest, of portraying addictive images of what by law is illegal behavior, of being solely concerned with what is good for them in the lucrative sense, to the ignorant, inconsiderate, exclusion of what is good for us in the spiritual sense.

In concluding I’d like to say I believe there’s a great difference between Michelangelo’s David and “Debby does Dallas”.  The difference is art and perversion. They are each known by what they stir within us and the difference is so completely obvious it screams. 

Both deal with “sinful dirty judgments”.  One settles, the other stirs.  Whereas Art lifts our dysfunction gently into the healing light, perversion gives them amphetamines and sends them into suppressed dark worlds. Whereas art encourages us to forgive ourselves, to embrace everything evil as part of our nature to the end that struggle subsides and we come to inner peace,.... perversion sells whips, black leather and tools of the sadist trade to the end it pours gasoline on the fires of self loathing. The difference between art and perversion is as between a sweet note and a sour note, between what is pleasing to the eye and what is intriguingly offensive. 

The difference is obvious. Those who argue it isn’t have issues unresolved. A judge with issues is biased, therefore unqualified to judge. Behind the voice that argues against truth you will find a hidden motive, a clothed agenda hell bent on perpetuating it’s own self-delusion.  The bottom line is this, ..There can be complete modesty in a nude depiction and illicit immodesty in a fully clothed depiction. The absolute truth is the depiction’s relativity.    

I’d like to address individual proponents of pervasive pornography and gratuitous violence, those of us who revel in expressions of illicit immodest behavior.  I’d like us to ask ourselves what we honestly suspect is behind our demand for right of unbridled expression?  This satisfaction we seek, this somewhat orgasmic release we experience in our pollution and destruction of our innocence, is it really freeing or is it slavery completely disguised behind a freedom mask?  To liberate and incite our violent impulses and to express our illicit perversion, might it simply be a foaming out our own shame, a release of some intolerable pressure built up by a choice resistance to self-loathing?  Might it be that this release that makes it a bit easier for us to stand our own self and what we’ve chosen to become in light of truth?   Having made such spiritual predation an acceptable norm, is it good to feel we have achieved some element of success?  Please be honest to yourself.