Though specialists have long been toiling behind the scenes, recent findings are only now sketching out an exciting new field of psychological inquiry: Mediology reveals an emerging picture of the human psyche never before conceived.
Its obscurity is due to its diffuse and complex nature — but make no mistake — while the deeper, image-forming recesses of the psyche remain impervious to Cat-scans and MRI’s, Mediology is quietly plumbing the invisible depths of the unconscious mind.
Below the radar, modern icons have replaced the clumsy religious images of the past to become living models for a new generation of hands-on believers. Moses may have led a rogue band of spiritual wanderers out of Egypt, but who bears that flesh and blood reality for the socially oppressed today?
From the scriptures of antiquity to a sophisticated modern media, an archetypal social nature lurks unseen behind every human whim. Cultural conditions, according to Mediologists, can be likened to mirrors reflecting historic changes in the way we see the world — often in stark contrast to the inside-out perceptions of just a generation ago.
Just as modern technology revived an uncertain ego from the fearful state of self-reflection it briefly flirted with after WWII, Mediology shows such cultural spurts to be compensations for unconscious transitional stages. A new vision is replacing the metaphysical images once thought vital to spiritual growth with a more direct form of idolatry. Though the older forms held some crude value in the socialization process of an evolving consciousness, they serve only to isolate the contemporary individual.
Mediologists now confirm that our modern commercial/industrial era began, not with the technology of weaponry and the unconscious backlash of guilt, fear, and confusion that came with a new-found capacity to decimate millions with the push of a button while rendering the earth uninhabitable for generations — but with television.
The new medium saw cultural innovators create visions of human functioning previously acknowledged only by social outcasts and miscreants. The Sleepy Society of the fifties and its dream-like depictions of family life was startled from its slumber. By the time Elvis the Pelvis was done, the geriatric gyrator had altered the spiritual outlook of an entire generation. He became a living personification of the natural, instinctive urges that lurked beneath the repressive religious regimen of the time. WWII was neither the formal nor the final cause it was presumed to be.
The causal connections ascribed to mass movements in general, according to Mediology, can be viewed empirically as acausal processes of a purposive nature that reveal the causal standpoint to be only partially applicable. The individual prototypes of primitive collective conditions symbolized by kings and priests in antiquity now herald the possibilities of new vistas of social equality. The continuity of thousands of years of such dual developments can now be traced through cable re-runs.
Worn-out myths and fables such as personal gods, sacrifice, rebirth, and ever-lasting life exaggerated individual qualities while ignoring the deeper animal, sexual, and collective social realities describing a more profound instinct to consume and be consumed. Scientific proof of the innate drive to be a particle-in-the-mass, while consciously maintaining the illusion of personal freedom, was the first glimmer of the task of ridding humanity of an effete philosophy of the soul.
In the projected metaphysical language of the past, for instance, the relatively benign Satan of Christian theology described in the Privatio Boni symbolized a repression of the negative consequences that were the result of one-sided ego-ideals. Though the primitive philosophical paradigm was a developmental necessity, happiness on a universal scale remained a utopian dream. It did, however, engender a universal psychic truth: evil could be completely wished away by the identification with an ideal.
This simple, no-nonsense vision has been proven empirically to be the brick and mortar of civilization. Once the ego-complex mastered its abilities to turn its fantasies into concrete realities pervasive enough to control everything but itself and the weather, a new social enlightenment could begin.
Quirky, real-life compensations for antiquated ideas of the soul such as the history of police-state dictators and their violent purges of political opposition soon faded. Personal power-complexes, bigotry, and fear were supplanted by a collective commercial vision of mutual greed and cooperation by the few for the benefit of the many. Life could finally be experienced in the abundance Christianity’s rude prototype promised but failed to deliver.
Television sparked a new horizon of empirical study which would define natural parameters of what a healthy society could and should be. The old artificial notions of ego-consciousness were one-dimensional images of deeper psychic symbols, survival-products of the dark ages of the last century. A desperate humanity had little choice but to violently expel its pent-up, self-fulfilling anxieties. It is the new reality-show of a conscious animal struggling to free itself from an illusory conscience through a new medium.
Little wonder that instinctual nature hastened to the rescue. It had happened many times in the fits and starts of human evolution. According to Mediology, we can learn much from our violent, turbulent history. It’s science in the strictest sense — if science still means the observation and recording of past experiences and the accurate prediction of future events based on them.
As Mediology illustrates, the psychological method of tediously evaluating rote statistics based on unaccountable unconscious variables, the subjective nature of suggestion, and artificial conditions designed to fit preconceived assumptions into articulate but deceptive theoretics only to rationalize subjective conclusions given in the premises is a carousel of confusion which only obfuscates a deeper psychic reality.