Cultural Vehicles: Self Consciousness vs Channel Zero

I’ve been thinking about writing this blog post for a while now. I often break one of the biggest cardinal rules of blogging which is 1. To make your posts frequent. I’ve broke that rule some time ago, but I’m going to make the effort to not only make these posts more frequent, but more diverse. (inshallah)

So about 3 months ago I listened to a lecture by the late Dr. Amos Wilson on understanding the roots of power in culture. By far Dr. Wilson was one of the premier experts on human consciousness and many other pan-African related areas of interest. One very eye-opening area of interest was his explanation of how there are “vehicles” that are used in society to augment and distort your sense of values, consciousness, and level of cultural morality.

Now when he says “vehicles” he is not referring to Maybachs, Hondas, or even an investment vehicle, he is actually referring to mass media vehicles like television, music, print media and societal indoctrination vehicles by cultures outside of your own. One of the reasons I found this topic so interesting is I often find people discounting how the power of imagery and words can control minds and human behavior. A post I did a while back called “True Cost of Music”, touches on this topic quite a bit. This past Friday at Jumu’ah, (an obligatory congregational prayer/lecture that Muslims attend for Duhr [noon prayer] ), the Khateeb (speaker) said, “There are three areas that you need to watch out for when it comes to proper worship”:

1. Nafs (ego/self)
2. Satan
3. The people you keep as friends

For the sake of this post, I want to stay focused on the 1st bullet in regards to culture. There are 7 heads of evil when we talk about Nafs, and they are the following:

1. False Pride
2. Greed
3. Envy
4. Lust
5. Back Biting (Gossiping)
6. Stinginess
7. Malice

The main head I want to talk about is False Pride. If you listened to the entire segment by Dr. Amos Wilson, the root of what he is trying to explain is this: Ideas of self, role of self, and identity of self can be augmented through vehicles under the consciousness of your mind. Not only can your identity be manipulated to your own demise, but you can be used as a conduit to empower the standards of others. Meaning: Just because you think something is not happening from a physical standpoint, while you are unable to identify the point of manipulation does not mean you are not being manipulated. Central to the term, Quiet Weapons for Silent Wars. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped actively listening to music and have severely pulled back on what I watch. My wife and I restrict our viewing to mostly documentaries and other “Front-line C-SPANian friendly” material. Like Pinocchio being a puppet, human beings can be a puppet by identifying with an “Artificial Identity”, hence False Pride.

This is not a light matter, a recent study by Standford and Princeton university came to the conclusion that men objectify women by observing semi-nude images. How is it that a culture of objectifying women has now become normalized?

The research, conducted by a team including Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske, who first presented the findings in mid-February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found that pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or tools.

Keep in mind that these are “semi-nude” images (e.g bikini) and not full blown nudity. I’m curious what that study would have revealed with full blown nudity. These results by Dr. Susan Fiske have been posted on hundreds of blogs, and the responses are quite dismissive. Not surprising, considering the average person is unwilling to have an honest level of self-critical analysis regarding their personal sensibilities. I have to be honest, I walk by those newsstands on the NYC train platform and the advertising windows are riddled with imagery after imagery of “soft-pornesque” women draped across various covers for profit. I can guarantee that they’ll be a bunch a men hanging around like a bunch of deviant vultures drooling over the next breast or booty sex pose.

Not to say I didn’t dabble in such material in the past, but I’m not going to deceive myself and act like these images did not augment my view of women in a negative light. In the words of Thomas Sowell, This is Stage One Thinking. To think that society is not paying a price for the often hyper-sexualized identity of women is quite shocking. Obviously I am not the gate keeper of women’s identity or sexuality. That is not my role, although many might accuse me of such acts because they misinterpret my language. I just think we have mountains of evidences from many areas of thought (scientific and religious) to realize that a behavioral change is due on the type of images we bring into our minds, and our household, irrespective of gender. To discount the negative impact is being dishonest. There is a severe level of cognitive dissonance when a man says he respects a women, but then indulges in imagery that is the exact opposite of what his belief claims to be.

The study above is just one example, but “False Pride” can fall into many other categories like child rearing, personal finance, culture, morality and various other behavioral sciences. In many instances, certain types of behavior not only disempower you, but destroy the glue that keeps your community and your relationships healthy. Sometimes we want to see an immediate result, like turning a light switch on and off. Self deception is a characteristic that can happen over several years, not to mention your entire life. Like a stream of water that smoothes the surface of a jagged rock over hundreds, if not thousands of years. These changes are gradual and cannot be captured in a moment. It’s not until you pull back, will you then be able to see the bigger picture.

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
• Al-Ghazali on Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires: Books XXII and XXIII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences by T. J. Winter
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Advertising by August Bullock
• Applied Economics: Beyond Stage One Thinking by Thomas Sowell
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell