Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Amusing Ourselves to Death

By Neil Postman

In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan's critique of electronic media and Aldous Huxley's warnings about technologies undermining our capacity to think, this more recent description applies these cautions to more modern manifestations. Orwell's 1984 warned against governmental control banning books, Huxley'a Brave New World against people no longer wanting to read, McLuhan's Understanding Media against technology amputating our senses; and, in this book, Postman describes how these warnings became true as a result of television corrupting education, politics, religion and all public life into entertainment. The internet, smart phones, and social media make these ideas seem prophetic and essential to dealing with modern culture, politics, and business.

Themes

Themes: Entertainment

Quotes from Amusing Ourselves to Death

“For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are… To ask is to break the spell.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

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“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Chapters: 72. Helpful Fear

Themes: Technology

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“Myth transforms history into nature.”

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“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”

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“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters worry less about the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. What is and what is not show business becomes harder and harder to see… ‘There’s No Business But Show Business.’”

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“Our world is now marred by many prison-cultures with the machinery of thought control… distracted by trivia, a perpetual round of entertainments… Big Brother does not watch us by his choice. We watch him by ours.”

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“Technology is ideology without words and all the more powerful for their absence.”

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“The message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas… the nature of the medium is that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest, the values of show business.”

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“To maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”

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“We are in a race between education and disaster.”

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Themes: Education

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“We believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”

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Themes: Belief History

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“What afflicted people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

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“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Chapters: 60. Less is More

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“When news is packaged as entertainment, the inevitable result is disinformation—misleading, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, superficial information. We begin to take ignorance as knowledge.”

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