Just like 90% of drivers consider themselves above average, nearly all intelligent people fall into the sticky trap of "knowing" they're too smart and sophisticated to be persuaded (and much less fooled) by modern media. This book must be read in order to understand the informational water in which we all swim.
Strongly recommend reading The Image along with Walter Lippmann's excellent 1922 book Public Opinion and Errol Morris's wonderful book Believing Is Seeing. All three books will deepen a humble reader's understanding of what really goes on in our media-driven society; all three will help you see propaganda to the point where you can no longer unsee it; and all three will help you better navigate an increasingly propagandized world where all things made to seem real actually aren't real at all, and most "news" is mere ersatz information, unworthy of your or my attention.
Again: once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
In The Image, Daniel Boorstin focuses on how pseudo-events, pseudo-celebrities (Boorstin famously described a celebrity as someone "known for well-knownness") and pseudo-information are all easily manufactured and all easily mess with our heads, controlling us, controlling what we think about and, ultimately, controlling what we think.
A well-defended mind must know about these informational tools, tactics and techniques.
Finally, one tremendous takeaway I got from this book is the value of automatically deeming nearly everything I hear about in the media as a pseudo-event. This helps one's brain quickly distinguish whether any piece of "news" that happens to reach you should be cognitively attended to or ignored--and almost always it should be the latter. I've found this to be a robust cognitive navigational strategy for modernity, with the enormous secondary benefit of making me a happier, less alarmed and far more emotionally continent human being. After all, can you really be "informed" by a media whose purpose is anything but?
My wife put all this much more pithily when she thanked this book for "helping me get my head out of my ass." A laudable goal for all.
(A friendly warning: do not bother to read any further: the rest are just my notes and musings from the book--and there are more than 150 bullet points below. For the love of all that's good stop reading now and go outside!)
Notes:
Foreward to 1987 Edition:
1) "This book was my own exploration of the momentous changes in the American view of reality."
2) The "pseudo-event" as new vocabulary of the new rhetoric of democracy.
3) A celebrity: "a person who is known for his well-knownness."
4) Pseudo events multiplying with more and more media technology
5) "The author never really knows what his book means."
Foreward to 1962 Edition:
6) A "how not to do it" book; how we hide reality from ourselves. "I do not know what 'reality' really is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one."
7) "...what dominates American experience today is not reality." [On how we are sensorily dominated by media events to the point where we lose sight of the real--even to the point where we alienate/self-atomize and self-isolate ourselves via media-induced fear-mongering. COVID offered us a great example of this over the past two years, but social media has enabled us to be fooled by the simulacrum of interaction, substituting it for the real thing.
Introduction: Extravagant Expectations
8) "In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life."
9) As a culture we have extravagant expectations in every sense of the word, we expect the news to be momentous the moment we turn on the radio, we expect comfort (warmth in winter, cool comfort in summer), we expect our homes to be lovely, "we expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless." Jesus, is he ever right.
10) Our extravagant expectations are contradictory and impossible: spacious compact cars, economical luxury cars, etc.
11) "Never have people been more than masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed." And this is 1962! Holy cow if this author were alive today... And think also during this era of The Fourth Turning while the worm turns and life and society start really not working so well, we'll find ourselves not quite the same masters of our world that we thought we were. Great times make weak men...
12) We pay others to deceive us, we create our own demand for these illusions.
13) Lots of good examples of the ludic fallacy: like thinking a travel guide book is a thing, that a leader is who he or she appears to be, that journalism or news conveys what actually happens. We effortlessly mistake these things for the underlying reality, while (equally effortlessly) thinking it is reality.
Ch 1: From News Gathering to News Making: A Flood of Pseudo-Events
14) When you read a boring newspaper is it the newspaper or the world that's boring? "There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'"
15) On chasing novelty, on our expectations for a substantial amount of novelty in our world. Today we might think about this in terms of dopamine (thus the necessity of dopamine fasting).
16) From thinking that what's in the news is what Divine Providence permitted to thinking that news is anything that makes a reader say "gee whiz!"
17) Reality as created by "newsmen": if an event or an earthquake doesn't happen then you can actually make an event happen "by the questions he asks of public figures" or some "human interest he unfolds from some commonplace event." These are obvious synthetic events and ersatz knowledge, but we don't see it as such because it's "in the news." "Synthetic happenings to make up for the lack of spontaneous events." Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan talked about how you can tell almost all news is fake because if it replicated reality one some days the newspaper would be two pages long, on other days it would be as thick as a phone book. The fact that the paper (or worse, a nightly "news hour") is always roughly the same length means that it is fabricated to be so.
18) Also in a world of eight billion people there's so many things that can happen that the choosing of specific things makes for an illusionary representation of reality.
19) "The new kind of synthetic novelty which has flooded our experience I will call 'pseudo-events.'"
20) See Edward Bernay's example in his book Crystallizing Public Opinion of a hotel which wishes to increase its prestige and business: instead of actually doing a "thing" like hiring a chef or improving the plumbing, they "celebrate their 30th anniversary"--an indirect technique to plan an event which can be widely publicized. A good example of a pseudo-event.
21) This is super interesting because it's self-referential: the celebration becomes "evidence" of the hotel being distinguished, because, well, you'd only celebrate a distinguished institution in the first place! Per Boorstin: "The occasion actually gives the hotel the prestige to which it is pretending." And the value of the pseudo-event only occurs if it is photographed, reported widely, etc. [Thus if a pseudo-event happens in the forest and no one is there to hear it, it obviously makes no sound.]
22) "The power to make a reportable event is thus the power to make experience."
23) Working definition of a pseudo-event:
1) not spontaneous, but planned planted or incited. "...not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview."
2) it is planted for the purpose of being reported, and its success is measured by how widely it is reported.
3) its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. "Concerning a pseudo-event the question 'what does it mean?' has a new dimension."
4) usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; see the hotel's 30th anniversary celebration example above.
24) What Boorstin calls "the graphic revolution": man's ability to make, preserve, transmit and disseminate images; of print, of landscapes, of events, of the voices of people, combined with photography (see the daguerrotype era), and then within only a century moving to color television. Thus the "vivid image came to overshadow pale reality."
25) Actual western cowboys are inferior replicas of John Wayne, the Grand Canyon in person is a disappointing reproduction of a Kodachrome photo.
26) The "planned release" of news: planned preparation in advance of what was expected to happen, giving rise to around-the-clock media whereby information could be released in stages. Also, the news could give the impression that events were changing constantly. See for example James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, using the Robinson-Jewett murder case to "pyramid stories" and build circulation for his paper.
27) 1828: Lord Macaulay describes reporters sitting in Parliament as a "fourth estate"; in the United States they had already made themselves into a type of "tribune" (in the Roman Empire sense) of the people with "supposed detachment" and "supra-constitutional powers."
28) The 1907 invention of the news release (which more accurately should be called a "news holdback" an awesome insight): precooked news kept until needed, conveyed in the form of a handout. (!) Thus what "happens" is something that was given out in advance, a type of prepared script acted out. Note how this is such a great example of how we are fish in water unaware of the water, since a news release is something today that nobody thinks about at all...!
29) "Our successful politicians have been those most adept at using the press and other means to create pseudo-events." FDR as the first modern master at this; Heywood Broun called him "the best newspaper man who has ever been President of the United States"). FDR adept at using the trial balloon, exploiting the ethics of the off-the-record remark, developing the fireside chat, helping newspaper men manufacture news. FDR gifted at using implications and background, giving the impression of frankness and spontaneity, and making his presidency far more effective as a result... he gave people extra "meta" to think about.
30) See also Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose political career was based entirely on pseudo-events: he'd even host a press conference in the morning for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference. If no news developed by then, he'd come up with an explanation that fit his existing propaganda framework ("The State Department is stonewalling and has made no response to our reports..." or whatever).
31) "We tend increasingly to fill our experience with contrived content." See for example the perspective of the MacArthur Day Parade in Chicago on television versus in direct experience: on TV there was pageantry it seemed like a lot was going on, people waving, cheering etc. In reality it was mostly apathic crowds that "turned on" applause when the cameras were rolling near them. The telecast of this parade was a manufactured/contrived version of the viewers' expectations, and thus the performance was much better on TV than the actual event. But of course the TV viewers were being told how great the excitement was of actually being there! A double irony. Thinking of most media as purely "contrived content" is tremendously helpful.
32) News as synthetic commodity, overplaying racial tensions in a community, in New Orleans, for example.
33) See also news leaks as typically the most elaborately planned way to emit information.
34) News leaks as pseudo-events that create additional pseudo-events, see the back and forth between Eisenhower and admiral Robert B Carney about the likelihood of communist China attacking islands in the Pacific in 1955: first in the form of unattributed background discussion at a reporters' dinner, then in Eisenhower's response given in response to Admiral Carney by his press secretary. Layers of pseudo-events that generate their own meta-commentary, all of it contrived "news."
35) Boorstin has a different definition of propaganda, a far more pejorative one, than Edward Bernays' definition in his (useful) book Propaganda.
36) "The masses, however, with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas."
--Adolph Hitler, in Mein Kampf.
37) One can't help wondering why, today, we've constantly heard "thousandfold repetitions" of phrases like "95% safe and effective" or "I'm grateful to be fully vaccinated and boosted because my infection would otherwise be much worse"...
38) I wish this author had had the phrase "a post-truth society" a phrase that from my recollection emerged over the past 10 years: he could have used it and it would have been accurate: "The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses... We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being 'informed.'... the efficient mass production of pseudo-events--in all kinds of packages, in black and white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms--is the work of the whole machinery of our society. ...Most pleas for 'more information' are therefore misguided."
39) Useful review of Walter Lippmann's concept of the stereotype in his book Public Opinion: a crude but sufficient pattern in our minds that helps us find meaning in the world and also gives "definiteness and consistency to our turbulent and disorderly daily experience." One way to think about why we egoically need stereotypes to navigate reality is because they help us remove cognitive discomfort (or epistemic discomfort), and they protect our egos in that they make us feel like we have the answers, that we understand, that we hold an accurate picture of reality... or that we're less clueless than we really are.
40) What's interesting about propaganda or a stereotype (in the Lippmann sense of the word) is that when we understand how it is made it definitionally becomes less believable. And yet, weirdly, information about the staging of a pseudo-event actually adds to its interest, adds to its believability and also creates more meta-pseudo-events that can be written about, talked about, etc.
41) This author sees "Lippman's brilliant analysis of the stereotype a legacy of a simpler age." Interesting comment here: we all love to think we're part of a more complex, more nuanced age that our predecessors couldn't comprehend. I wonder if this is a constant fallacy across civilization? Kind of like Hesiod complaining about "the youth these days" back in the 8th century B.C.
42) More characteristics of pseudo-events--they are:
* more dramatic,
* easier to disseminate,
* easier to make vivid,
* you can repeat them will and thus their impression can be reinforced,
* pseudo-events cost money to create, and somebody has an interest in disseminating them (they are therefore advertised in advance, and rerun in order to get your money's worth),
* they seem more intelligible than actual events (which makes them more reassuring),
* they are more convenient to witness (their occurrence is planned for our and the news channel's/the Sunday newspaper's convenience, etc.),
* knowledge of pseudo events becomes the test of being informed,
* they spawn other pseudo events in geometric progression,
Thus pseudo-events dominate our consciousness because there's so much more of them. This is like an informational version of Gresham's Law! Jesus, I never thought about it that way!
43) This phenomenon is driving some of the greater power of the Presidency/Executive Branch: not from his literal power but from the rise of the media reporting on the president; see also the growth of power in Congressional investigating committees which have no legislative role and sometimes no assignment legislatively--but they create excellent news. They feed the news industry and thus live in happy symbiosis with it.
44) Presidential debates as distilled, oversimplified pseudo-events, like a quiz show, little more. They make for great "news" and great television, as well as weeks and weeks' worth of meta-pseudo-events afterwards (about the impact of the debate, who won, meta-commentaries about it, etc). Note also that the great Presidents of history would have done miserably at TV debates, but demagogues would have shown up very well. Thus the pseudo-event of a televised presidential debate led to pseudo-qualifications for being president. (!!!)
45) Noting how television and radio abhor silence and dead time. This drives rapid snapbacks of questions and answer-backs, when cognitively (and in real conversation) the most thoughtful and responsive answers always come after a long pause. [Related to this, I've noticed also that among the people I know, those who watch a lot of TV literally talk differently: they interrupt more, they talk in a more argumentative style, they are more combative, they also tend to believe they know more about things (they feel more "informed").]
46) "Pseudo events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence... Once we have tasted the charm of pseudo-events we are tempted to believe they are the only events."
Ch 2: From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event
47) "In the last half century we have misled ourselves, not only about how much novelty the world contains, but about men themselves, and how much greatness can be found among them."
48) Fame as mistaken for greatness; well-knownness: well-knownness can be manufactured in the post-Graphic Revolution era, and we mistake it for greatness. [Maybe one can think of "well-knownness" as kind of like the fake boobs of greatness: manufactured, synthetic, a supernormal stimulus but with fundamentally empty calories.] And then when we confuse the supernormal stimulus for the thing itself, "We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great." [Thus if someone's not famous by definition they can't be truly great. Tremendous insights here about our cognitive/informational environment.]
49) "The qualities which now commonly make a man or woman into a 'nationally advertised' brand are in fact a new category of human emptiness."
50) [I can't help thinking here about one possible criticism of this book--although not a criticism that I hold--is that this book is a long form complaint about "kids these days." Basically this criticism might be something like "in the past we had real heroes, but today we only have celebrities that are tautologically known for only their well-knownness; in the old days men traveled and they really traveled--they didn't travel like the wimps of today who just get a similacrum of travel" and so on... everything done in the past was done better, nothing done today is done well nor is it authentic in any way, etc. One rebuttal to the book would thus be due to this "kids these days" problem, we never detect greatness except in retrospect as the years roll by, so therefore no one seems great today. Therefore we have a perspective or even an illusion, that no one is great anymore, but in reality our heroes are here, just that they will only be revealed to society as time passes. I'm working on these thoughts and they are not complete obviously.]
51) "'Isms,' 'forces,' and 'classes' have spelled the death of the hero in our historical literature." As an example, take someone like Andrew Jackson: instead of seeing him as the great man he was, we today see him as just a representative of many possible representatives of the rise of the West.
52) 20th century fiction also tends to offer us victims rather than heroes. See the plays of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, the novels of Hemingway, Faulkner and John O'Hara. I hadn't thought about this but he's right.
53) Note also that "the great deeds of our time are now accomplished on unintelligible frontiers"--thus we struggle to understand the actual heroic act (Godel's theorem or Einstein's General Relativity for example, or the literally bureaucratic building and production of the A-bomb). It's not tangible like battlefield heroism or the easily conceivable invention of the light bulb.
54) [Interesting that the author cites Dr. Tom Dooley (author of the book Deliver Us From Evil, and seen as a great humanitarian in his day) as a rare exception of intelligible heroism: and yet (later) it turned out that Dooley was an acknowledged agent of the CIA who carried out a disinformation campaign by "manufacturing" atrocities supposedly committed by the North Vietnamese! Even those who try to tell us we're being fooled can be fooled...]
55) Also many works are done by collectives today: e.g., who developed the nuclear chain reaction? Or: when a political leader gives a great speech, the credit goes to his team of speech writers. Public figures write books that are really written by ghost writers. Even the most obvious examples of messages that reach the largest number of people (advertisements, TV shows, political speeches, etc.) are written by teams of people, with individuals rarely named.
56) "Our age has produced a new kind of eminence" and that eminence is celebrity, in the pejorative sense. "The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness." (This is the book's money quote right here.)
57) The celebrity "is the human pseudo-event." [A good recent example could be someone like Jared the pedophile who became a celebrity as a spokesperson for the food chain Subway. His arc of celebrity gives us several layers of meta-events, meta-discussion, and so on.]
58) "In the democracy of pseudo-events, anyone can become a celebrity, if only he can get into the news and stay there." Ironically modern actors will "overshadow the real figures they portray." George Arliss overshadowed Disraeli, Vivian Leigh overshadowed Scarlett O'Hara, etc.
60) [Note the various tautologies across this domain: celebrities are known for being known, their chief claim to fame is their fame, they are notorious for their notoriety, the most familiar of them is the most familiar... And all of this trends toward nothingness, vacuousness]: "What is remarkable is not only that we manage to fill experience with so much emptiness, but that we manage to give the emptiness such appealing variety."
61) "Before the Graphic Revolution... it was a mark of solid distinction in a man or a family to keep out of the news. A lady of aristocratic pretensions was supposed to get her name in the papers only three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died." We're all trashy now by comparison.
62) Robert E. Lee as an example of the old model, and one of the last surviving examples in United States history. Southerners deeply admired him for retiring from public view, for his character, and for his refusal to write (and therefore profit from) his memoirs ("I should be trading on the blood of my men" Lee said).
63) Note also how the entire rules of the game changed in the mid 20th century: General George C Marshall shunned publicity during a time when few people considered this a virtue any more, and this left him a victim of the slanders of senator Joseph McCarthy.
64) See also how the media can make a celebrity but then unmake him "by suffocation or starvation." Ironically this gives rise to further meta-pseudo-events like "whatever became of...?" articles and shows.
65) Note also you can "overfeed" the audience and ruin your celebrity: thus FDR was careful to space out his fireside chats; comedians like Jackie Gleason would avoid weekly programs lest "they wear out their images."
66) See the subtle differences between the personality of a hero and that of a celebrity: George Washington does not have a vivid personality from our perspective, but that serves him in his heroic role. See Emerson's quote about every great hero becomes a great bore. Celebrities must have idiosyncrasy while at the same time they must have trivial differentiation in personalities: this is why a celebrity is the same as a personality, they distinguish themselves from others essentially like them by the "minutiae" of grimace, gesture, language, etc.
67) Celebrities are also known for their relationships to one another, they live off each other in symbiosis: as the butt of someone's joke, someone else's ex or paramour, etc. See how Elizabeth Taylor is known for her zillion husbands, and Arthur Miller became a celebrity by marrying Marilyn Monroe.
68) "Just as real events tend to be cast in the mold of pseudo-events, so in our society heroes survive by acquiring the qualities of celebrities. The best publicized seems the most authentic experience. If someone does a heroic deed in our time, all the machinery of public information--press, pulpit, radio, and television--soon transform him into a celebrity. If they cannot succeed in this, the would-be hero disappears from public view." [Jesus, not only can we not tell the difference between a genuine hero and a celebrity, today we have to make the hero look like a celebrity lest we never see him at all!]
69) Charles Lindbergh as a textbook example of a hero degraded into a celebrity who then disappeared. Across his life he was a gigantic human pseudo-event. Everyone knew about the trans-Atlantic flight he did, but his celebrity came from geometrically spreading pseudo-events about him and his well-knownness later: how Lindbergh reacted to the news and publicity about himself, how he responded, several quickie biographies appeared, the news was mostly meta (news about news about him). All of it amounting to the "the tautology of celebrity." (A great phrase!)
70) And then the kidnapping of Lindbergh's son was an equally tautological pseudo-event: the news information content was very limited (his son was kidnapped) but the meta-information was tremendous, despite the fact that were literally hardly any facts available about the story. Much of the pseudo-stories were about sub-dramas and meta-dramas, all created by the media itself. All this reminds me of the O.J. Simpson pseudo-event: The vivid car chase in the Ford Bronco, the legal case, the production of pseudo-celebrities like Kato Kaelin, and the team of attorneys on both sides, etc. Worst of all, it really seemed like a real thing back then when it happened. Now it's the butt of an extended (and admittedly hilarious) joke by Dave Chappelle.
71) [I think maybe one way to think about celebrity (and this entire broad taxonomy of pseudo-events) is to think of it as "product," kind of like print media or online media as product. A weekly news magazine has to pump out a certain quantity of pixels or pages of "product" and dump it on you, regardless of the informational value therein. It's all just product: think of it like ground mystery meat, extruded through a media company and squirted right onto our brains. If anything using that kind of imagery makes it easier for us to stop consuming it.]
72) "Mainly do we make scores of artificial celebrities grow where nature planted only a single hero."
Ch 3: From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel
73) The central oxymoron of "making the exotic an everyday experience" ... another example of how we defeat ourselves with our own exaggerated expectations.
74) On how we travel. Per Boorstin, travel "used to" broaden men's minds, open their eyes, enlarge their thought... today travel has made no difference in our thinking and feeling.
75) [Another competing interpretation for what Boorstin describes throughout this book might be: the more you democratize something, the less anyone "gets" out of it: democratize travel and it stops broadening people's minds; democratize heroism by turning it into celebrity and we lose our heroes (they become just like us normal people except prettier and with specific idiosyncrasies).]
76) On how travel has become diluted, contrived and prefab. I think we can all understand this when we think of the modern cruise ship and what will thus be put in place at cruise ship ports of call around the world in response to the arrival of these ships (and the tourists on them): you'll get excursion platforms, souvenir stores and other simulacra of what is actually in that country. Thus the travel experience migrates more and more towards prefab simulacra.
77) See also how travel for, say, the average American tourist, is filled with pseudo-events, starting with the central false idea that a lifetime of adventure can happen "in just two weeks" and that the exotic and the familiar can be made to order with old world charm (and air conditioning, of course). Pretty soon you have ziplining and Starbucks everywhere.
78) Then again, see Casanova's memoirs, which contained his record of travel through major capitals of Europe in the early 1800s--perhaps we haven't declined as far as I think in our pseudo-experience chasing?
79) "It was the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist. There is a wonderful, but neglected, precision in these words." "The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him... He expects everything to be done to him and for him."
80) [I think Thorstein Veblen would have a field day with thinking about the "invidious comparisons" involved in how people stack up travel experiences as a form of conspicuous consumption in the modern era. Further, if travel becomes an easily obtained commodity, then it becomes subject to what Veblen would call "marks of superfluous costliness".. thus travel gets segmented into 4 star (or 5 dollar sign) hotels, flying first class or on the Concord, or private jet, etc. Thus the entire travel experience gets tiered out so you can demonstrate your status.]
81) It's fascinating, actually, that there's absolutely no mention whatsoever of Thorstein Veblen at all in this book! A significant oversight by the author.
82) "Going by railroad I do not consider as traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel."-- John Ruskin
83) It seems like shooting fish in a barrel to mock American travelers in the modern era, it feels mean and gross, kind of like picking on disabled people or Star Trek conference-goers.
84) The travel chapter could be cut down by half.
85) It's unclear with the author wants to be true here: does he want travel to be as difficult as it was for the Mayflower passengers? Does that mean that, to him, travel actually counts? Is an overnight flight to Amsterdam bad somehow because it robs him of seeing the landscape? See also how the author hates museums too: somehow it's cheating in the author's eyes to bring the paintings of Botticelli, Rubens and Titian into the same room--it's too easy! You can see them all in just a few minutes! The author considers this a misrepresentation of reality because these works are taken from their context. You need to see these masterworks individually, in their original individual settings, like hanging on a wall in some castle somewhere. Otherwise it's too easy and it doesn't count.
86) That said, I do agree with him about the World's Fair-type exhibits that are designed to attract foreign tourists, propagandize them (see how awesome our country is!) and get their money by showing "a self-conscious and contrived national image." This is a clear, pre-fabbed pseudo-experience.
87) There's certain ironies here about travel in this book that resonate with me as a reader in this era. For example in the past they had the Baedeker Guides; today we've market-tiered out our guidebooks, so the Lonely Planet is there for the hipsters, for the upper middle class there's the Fodor's guides, etc, and of course the really real hipsters get all upset whenever their favorite bar shows up in the Lonely Planet guide because then it'll be "discovered" thus full of pseudo-hipsters. And so on.
88) This quote about how we come to prefer meta-representations of things to the actual things, really rattled my brain: "By the mirror-effect law of pseudo-events, they tend to become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time. The tourist's appetite for strangeness thus seems best satisfied when the pictures in his own mind are verified in some far country."
89) Also, now we've thoroughly marketed and productized "foreignness" for American tourists everywhere, so this leads to a genericness worldwide. Likewise we get a homogenization of the USA across the entire country (the author didn't have the word "Generica" back then to describe this, but this is exactly what he's describing).
90) The author also hates cars and hates the numbered highway system, replete with bypasses and super highways that avoid any city center. I really wonder what he would think of the modern GPS traveler, who doesn't even have to know the way to anywhere.
91) This is the weakest chapter so far mainly because of the author's lack of logical coherence.
Ch 4: From Shapes to Shadows: Dissolving Forms
92) On the fact that works of art and novels are changed into other forms with reckless abandon; literature is "abridged," books are made into movies. These works thus are losing their "unique, imitable embodiment" and can by remanufactured into any form for us. Basically we are dumbing down art and literature such that it can be made intelligible and inoffensive to all. Works must be made "in the vernacular."
93) See as examples the Victorian era's "age of the fig leaf," also see Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and his "Family Shakespeare" which was why we now have the world "bowdlerize" to describe the act of modifying, abridging, (over)simplifying, or distorting a text or argument.
94) Books as "furnishings" where people display complete sets of Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. (this idea stings a little, I have to admit!). See also encyclopedias, prints of fine art, mass-produced reproductions of sculpture. Suddenly the original loses its originality and the copy becomes more familiar and popular.
95) [It's a fine line between democratizing things (and making them less expensive and available to all) and somehow diluting or debauching them. I think the author is on very thin ice when it comes to this process with literature and art, he's on thicker ice on the democratization of travel, but he's on very firm ground criticizing these phenomena in our media and in the tautological world of celebrity.]
96) Interesting conceit here from the author that as film, television and photography came about to replicate the visual world, the novelist began to explore a non-visual world of psychology, stream of consciousness and introspection. Hence we have autors like Joyce, Faulkner, etc. Intriguing.
97) Abridged works (beginning with legal digests dating from the era of Byzantine emperor Justinian), later law books, but now in the modern era a Dickens novel or War and Peace can be condensed... Of course the other problem is that there's too many things to know about, yet the citizen still must to be "informed" and "literate." Thus you have things like the prefab Reader's Digest, founded in 1922, when "a new era of abridgements began."
98) The Reader's Digest became "far more popular than any of the magazines it digested" [hahaha] and this leads to a certain inelegance in the sense that "the shadow outsells the substance" and the reader wants the digest not the thing itself (!) which means "the shadow has become the substance." Thus Reader's Digest is an epic example "of the production of pseudo-events, of the dilution and tautologizing of American experience." [How is this different from cultural snobbishness however? It doesn't count if you don't read the real thing? (Maybe yes in this case.) It doesn't count if you see a print of the great work of art? (Much thinner ice here.) Or it doesn't count even if you see something in a museum? Or as I wrote above, now we can only see a great painting by itself in some out-of-the-way castle somewhere, because to put it in a museum steals the context of the work somehow... the author is on very thin ice here in this last example, but the debate here about the nature of authenticity is very interesting.]
99) Interesting how people quickly started gaming the Reader's Digest system, and would thus plant an article in a publication so that it would later be abridged into the Reader's Digest, and thus get more exposure--a type of pseudo-event of a pseudo-event.
100) The Reader's Digest also spawned other digests in other domains, which the author claims drove the decline and dissolution of literary form: readers would get only "the nub of the matter" (in other words, they'd get the idea without its proper form, kind of like summarizing War and Peace into a paragraph: see note #102).
101) The author parallels this with the decline of scientific and naturalist works: we no longer have a John James Audubon on ornithology or Charles Darwin on biology, we just have "a dissolution of form in a search for the essence" in the world of science too. What is the author's point here though? That you can't summarize things--even if they're masturbatorily verbose? Is it somehow inelegant to convey certain ideas tightly?
103) Movies as another example of the dissolution of literary forms: they can boil down a book into a 2-hour passive experience. Even worse: the form gets bastardized from the get-go: books are written with the idea of doing a movie (see Andy Weir's book The Martian for example). See also an interesting contra-example: The movie On The Waterfront was made as a movie first, but the author wanted to write the real novel he had in mind, and it ended up five times as long as the script.
104) See also the intriguing irony of paperback versions of the book Gone With the Wind with Clark Gable and Vivian Lee on the cover, thus this blurs the distinction between which is the original--the movie or the book? See Disney's Swiss Family Robinson which is a barely recognizable version of Johann Rudolph Wyss's original. [I guess the author is trying to describe these examples as a type of pseudo-event involving the loss or bastardization of a literary form, but to me it's kind of fun to think about what is the best way to represent a given story! Sometimes a movie version of a book better the book, even though this involves a loss of "form." Again I think the author is on thinner ice here with art/literature, which we know are already artificial, and so the pseudo-event phenomenon is less dangerous here than it is in the news media world that is not supposed to be artificial and is supposed to have the duty of "informing" us. The latter pseudo-event category is much more structurally misleading and unethical.]
105) [One can easily criticize this guy as a snob who can't stand the fact that the lumpenproletariat has access to "great works," great art, travel, etc., that it aesthetically bugs him that people can fly somewhere for a weekend getaway, and that travel isn't the travail that the root word is (per the author) supposed to imply (I'm not even sure I agree with him on the etymology of the word travel here honestly). Somehow to the author it's better aesthetically to travel via oxen-pulled carriages through a roadless landscape to see unique words of art in their original environment owned by the original owner. God forbid a tourist can practically "bicycle through the Louvre"--or even worse own his own prints of this artwork...! Again, the author's arguments are compelling in general but they sit on much thinner ice when he delves into art and literature. My take here is that art and literature are fundamentally ennobling to the human race, and thus any way we can get them into more peoples' hands is probably a good thing rather than bad. So what if people "bicycle through the Louvre"? Just be sure to make a stop at the Oath of the Horatii.]
106) [Another way to think about this stuff: aren't all works of art pseudo-events in themselves since they are replications, distillations, dramatizations, "digests," of actual real life experience? E.g., a novel is an artificial form, an artificial structure, on some level the very form of "words that give the reader a psychological experience" is a type of artificial form. So where does the pseudo-event begin, exactly? Is the pseudo-event then the movie-fication of that thing? Is the original painting okay, but the pseudo-event is the print hanging on a lumpenproletariat's wall? Or to put in another way, I'm sure there was a Daniel Boorstin-type critic in the 18th century decrying the novel because it was an artificializing form, just like Daniel Boorstin himself decries the movie-fication of novels in the 20th century.]
107) [Maybe one definition of really good art is that I can survive various changes in form, that it is rich enough in content and value to survive a transformation to a range of different embodiments, and still bring the audience something interesting or something worth contemplating. In other words, maybe Boorstin has it all wrong: these works that reform into different "forms" are actually showing some adaptive quality and an indication that the work is truly valuable. Just a theory.]
108) [I'm admittedly contradicting myself here and now agreeing with the author in one example of a loss of form that I decry: many people over the course of my business career would only read "executive summaries" of things (they were too busy or important to read books). These people often had little idea what was going on but yet held a very strong illusion that they did.]
108) Even in 1931 novelists were writing novels with one eye on Hollywood and future movie rights. And then "a high price paid for movie rights" became a pseudo-event itself: it must be good if they paid so much. This led to the manufacture of more pseudo-events: signing rights contracts, photos of the signing of the contract, media articles about it, just like with sports stars and their contracts. Pseudo-events built on pseudo-events.
109) "...by the law of pseudo-events, the winner in the viewer's consciousness is the embodiment most remote from the naive, spontaneous product of an author." This is an interesting conceit where the author is trying to say basically that a movie about a novel is more "real" to the consuming public than the novel itself. There is something to this, however, there are certainly examples of works that improve from adaptations to other media. One can't help but think of the works of Philip K. Dick, which, frankly, are in mediocre form in the author's original hand, but were developed into far superior works of art via the medium of film (see for example Blade Runner, Minority Report or Total Recall).
110) Stars as a "species" of celebrity "spawned in the world of pseudo events." Some of the examples of stars the author gives as the prototypical celebrity or star ironically make the case for him, since the modern reader has no idea who the people are that he's referring to! One really good example is the quote "Charles Boyer received a letter addressed to him c/o Mayerling, Hollywood, USA." This is an obscure reference to a 1936 film that was famous in its day (and that made the actor famous), but is totally forgotten now. A modern reader today would understandably ask "who the hell is Charles Boyer and what does 'Mayerling' even mean?" Which makes for a convincing argument that all of this stuff is pseudo-information.
111) Fan clubs, fomented by press agents, with "useful idiots" organizing them to produce the very pseudo-event that a star or celebrity needs to gain fame. Fan magazines as meta-pseudo-information based on the pseudo-event of a film star or celebrity. Fan mags quickly grew into a tremendously large trade magazine category.
112) On the pseudo-event of best-sellers: "Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A 'best seller' is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness."
113) [It's interesting to think about best-seller lists today: people might say, for example, "I avoid best sellers." A real literary hipster would avoid anything on the best-seller list just like a musical hipster would avoid any music on pop radio ("I liked U2 until they sold out"). We also can have political narrative driving some of this too: just as "one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one" we can make a book not be a part of the the political narrative by not calling it one, and the New York Times has been caught playing favorites with contra-official narrative books that it doesn't want on the best-seller list, but that should be if it honestly accounted for unit sales. As Boorstin phrases it: "Inevitably, best seller lists are a tissue of falsehood."]
114) Also, if something is on a bestseller list it's more reflective of us as a people perhaps than anything else: Boorstin quotes James D. Hart saying "the most popular book in the short run tells us what we already know." I think I'd go even further and say it tells us what we want to be true.) The best sellers are "not an art form but an artifact" per Albert Van Nostrand. (See The Denatured Novel below.)
115) [This further leads me to a very consistent heuristic for massively increasing the quality and usefulness of things you read, watch, and the information you ingest: if the marketplace brings it to you, avoid it. See also Victor Niederhoffer's dictum: don't read anything less than 100 years old.]
116) Interesting and harsh take on photography, which the author thinks is a form of narcissism: "He is impressed, not by what he sees... rather by the extreme and ever growing cleverness of his way of seeing it." Also the notion of reducing travel to a collection of pictures that you can show to someone after. Or post to social media...
117) See also how these concepts apply to recorded music. Take a recording of a Leopold Stokowski performance of Beethoven: how does it "compare" to the original... What even is the original in this case, and in the world of perfect digital copies, what is the difference?
118) Lamenting the decline of first-hand consumers of music (the actual musicians who use the composer's notation to perform the music themselves), and the rise of second-hand consumers who "consume" the music through recordings or via radio or television... Of course the recording is on some level dishonest (I guess?) because it can be done over multiple takes, can be edited, parts of it can be redone. etc. Just like a movie which is done with the best takes of scenes done over and over again, this is totally different from the gestalt of a play that is done live in front of an audience. And then there's a very crude, awful example of this in the pseudo-event of a television show with dubbed in laughter and applause.
119) We can take this still further if we think about music as a pseudo-product that creates a mood or a vibe: the author cites the best example possible, Muzak and its "functional background music," a genuinely vile artifact of the 70s and 80s. Ironically the world is still full of background music today: "music to hear, not to listen to."
120) [Another good heuristic I'm learning by reading this book: whenever I hear about a some news event or see any medium of communication (a film, book, show, event or whatever) the first thing I'll automatically ask myself is "is this a pseudo-event?" I'll also remind myself that the people selling this media to me see it as a commodity, and they see you and me as commodities. Thus this is a way to protect ourselves from the theft of our time and attention via this process of commodification and marketing.]
Ch 5: From Ideal to Image: The Search For Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
[This chapter covers advertising, branding, corporate image-making, etc]
121) "...the climax of our extravagant expectations" is that we can make our very own ideals, where, basically, our life is a movie where we ourselves make the props, we are the main character, the center of attention, and the whole thing is a tribute to our own narcissism." Christopher Lasch would be happy to see this quote.
122) Boorstin takes this one huge step further: if we can make all this stuff for ourselves we can also make our own God, and God himself thus becomes a pseudo-event with all the familiar characteristics: he becomes like a television show available at our convenience. The author is going full on Nietzsche here...
123) What is "an image" (in the sense of a company's "image")? Boorstin cites Mack Hanan's 1960 lecture series on Building a Corporate Image: advocating building not a positive image but a neutral image, one that is impartial and repels no one. [Hanan is the author of the book Consultative Selling.]
124) "What the pseudo-event is in the world of fact, the image is in the world of value. The image is a pseudo-ideal... It is synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified, and ambiguous."
* Synthetic: see for example the trademark IBM as a clean, impressive image. See also the tyranny of perceptions of an image (for example Harvard University).
* Believable: an image serves no purpose if people do not believe it. It must stand for the institution or the person imagined. Also: "One of the best paths to believability is understatement. [see for example the slogan] 'Ask the man who owns one.'" The understatement takes advantage of everyone else's "reckless use of superlatives." [Boorstin really turns a good phrase!]
* Passive: the corporation is supposed to fit into the image rather than strive toward it... the consumer likewise is supposed to fit into the image, and marketing experts and executives who have made the image are custodians of this relationship. See Standard Oil paying $600,000 for a 13-week sponsorship of the New York TV program Play of the Week to build its "image." "In an age when the average consumer has only the vaguest notion of the actual activities of a vast, complex corporation, the public image of the corporation substitutes for more specific or more circumstantial notions of what is actually going on. Most corporations today, like most scientists, operate on unintelligible frontiers....we are usually grateful for the image. It is a concrete, graspable picture, taking the place of our amorphous notions." See also indirect persuasion using an image that you would conform to: here in this example the indirect selling of Standard Oil through the maintenance of its image in a way that has nothing to do with the core business.
* Vivid, concrete: the skin you love to touch, the Old Dutch Cleaner Girl with the slogan "Chases Dirt"
* Simplified: it must be simpler than the object it represents, it has to be remembered, yet not seen as a natural symbol for the whole class of objects it describes (like Kleenex or Band-Aid, both of which lost their image capacity because they became "too" representative).
* Ambiguous: it can't be offensive, it has to sit somewhere between expectation and reality, "it must be a receptacle for the wishes of different people."
125) See also various behind-the-scenes examples of how an advertising image is contrived, how trademarks are designed, the stage machinery used in an ad, etc. You can even show this to the advertising consumer ("the making of Apple's famous 1984 ad"), and we get to look behind the scenes... thus it becomes a pseudo-event of a pseudo-event, marketing to us all the while.
126) Also: knowing more about the tricks of image building give us more satisfaction about the image itself because we're "in on it." "This is the first great seduction in history where the seducer's appeal is increased by disclosing his arts."
127) Contrasting image-making with what it has displaced, which is "thinking in ideals"... An ideal is not synthetic, it's something that's already there, created by tradition, or history, or God, something perfect, something we strive toward. An image is something that serves our purposes, we have a claim to an image whereas an ideal has a claim on us. Boorstin makes the claim that during the last century we have seen "the rise of images and the decline of ideals" as the Graphic Revolution multiplied images everywhere. Interesting thought here.
128) "Advertising flourished, then, from the effort to produce apparent distinctions. Competing products were now more precisely similar and more unnoticeably different." Thus requiring image-making to produce distinctions where there were no differences.
129) "Man's power to produce graven images exceeded the most diabolical imagination of Biblical times. And while image is multiplied and became more vivid, ideals dissolved." And then the image continued to displace the ideal. This is a really interesting conceit here.
130) We started thinking of ourselves not as students of ideals (or people who emulated ideals), or of individualized portraits of people in history, but rather the academic world began thinking of things and categorizing things in terms of social science images, economic classes, socioeconomic groups (like the suburban housewife, a business owner, an executive, a frontiersman, etc.) and other basically stereotyped caricatures into which an individual is expected to fit. Rather than an ideal, a taxonomic category.
131) On living in a world where people talk constantly not of things themselves, but of their images. The images have become more vivid than the originals thus we prefer to speak of the more vivid copy. (!) "More important than what a Buick really is, is our image of it. We are sold it and we buy it and enjoy it for its image and how we fit into the image. The language of images, then, is not circumlocution at all. It is the only simple way of describing what dominates our experience."
132) Advertising is the primary example of the rise of image-making and its displacement of ideals. Advertising as widely misunderstood: we say that they are deceiving us, rather than admit that we are our own deceivers; advertisers "are at most our collaborators, helping us make illusions for ourselves. In our moral indignation, our eagerness to find a villains who have created and frustrated our exaggerated expectations, we have underestimated the effect of the rise of advertising. We think it has meant an increase of untruthfulness. In fact it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth." [Again a really interesting, and humbling idea here: we are co-conspirators in our own deception and since we all blame "Madison Avenue" for it, we fool ourselves--and we give away our power and agency in doing so.]
133) A brief history of advertising here: where James Gordon Bennett, who founded the New York Herald in 1835, got rid of the "standing ad" and required advertisers to change their notices daily. Thus the ads started to become a lot like news, and thus readers would look for it, pay attention to it.
134) See also PT Barnum with his gift for turning any event into his advantage, even though today many would look at his actions as crude. His primary discovery was "not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived." See for example, the manufactured mermaid, which was fake to the point of total obviousness. Barnum as "the first modern master of pseudo-events, of contrived occurrences which lent themselves to being widely and vividly reported."
135) "The Graphic Revolution has produced new categories of experience. They are no longer simply classifiable by the old common sense tests of true or false."
136) [To summarize in my own words: We see advertising as dishonest and the "fault" of advertising purveyors, and this obscures the real truth: that we are participants in it and that it has shifted our entire nature of experience.] Or, as Boorstin puts it: "Accusing them [advertisers], we fail to see with their activities can teach us about ourselves." Those "who say the essential problem is false advertising are firing volleys at an obsolete target."
137) The novel "appeals" of successful advertising:
* the appeal of the neither true nor false:
A new grammar of epistemology, a limbo between true and false, a vagueness that can be designed into vivid images, and a "new uncertainty of relation between the image and the thing imaged"--all of these things make the simple question "Is it true?" obsolete. Advertising does not violate truth, it evades it. See other examples like open comparatives (the better beer), or the pseudo-truth that Schlitz "purified its bottles by live steam" which was also something every other beer brand did, yet it sounded unique to consumers.
* the appeal of the self-fulfilling prophecy:
See testimonial endorsement advertising: the endorsement can make the endorser into a user, especially if he's given a large supply of the product as payment. And then the staging of the event becomes more interesting than the event itself: "How much is the endorser paid?" and other pseudo events further increase interest. See Rheingold Beer's "Miss Rheingold" competition. "Was it untrue for Miss Rheingold to say, 'My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer'?" Thus well-knownness becomes a quality of the product, and the self-fulfilling prophecy comes true.
* the appeal of the half intelligible
"In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzy by progress. If he could completely understand advertising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow." Clearly the company is working for our benefit developing new things, pushing the envelope, etc: see things like the v-type engine, a hydromatic drive, etc., all of which are "scrupulously true statements of fact."
* the appeal of the contrived
Advertising pseudo events play on our puzzlement, a man fishing or playing poker while chained to a large egg ("For a better way to take care of your nest egg, talk to the people at Chase Manhattan"), we like the idea that the advertiser goes to such trouble for us. We replace truth with believability as the test of these statements. Thus advertisers ingenuity is devoted to "inventing statements which can be made to seem true." Thus consumers of advertising "enjoy the revelation that they have seen through the illusion." "The citizen-consumer enjoys the satisfactions of being at the same time the bewitched, the bewitcher, and the detached student of witchcraft."
138) Note how we play with time to the point where it has no meaning: next year's model of a car was something that began years ago with the tooling of a factory; next year's dresses needs to go on to sale this winter, which means they were designed last year, etc. [Great point: this is pure artifice on every level. We start selling Christmas merchandise right after Halloween, manufacturers and retailers always live in several seasons at once, and of course there's meta-commentary on all this stuff too ("God, they have to start selling Christmas stuff already?").
139) "When to be informed is to be knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before." [This quote really gets the nature of ersatz information in the modern era. A person who's "informed" in the modern sense knows almost nothing of importance.]
140) "Do not improved marketing techniques enable manufacturers to know what we want better than we do ourselves?... We are always ready--even eager-- to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it." [This guy would have loved to have heard Steve Jobs's famous dictum "people don't know what they want until you show them."--a quote that is at once both strangely true and deeply condescending.]
141) Expressions of public opinion as pseudo-events: how do we know what people think? We look to what public opinion is as reported. Public opinion as "the most mysterious of pseudo events"... "Elaborate new devices would incubate opinions into expression so they could be reported, discussed, and set against one another."
142) Another example of how history rhymes: see the spectacular failure of Literary Digest 1936 Presidential poll, which predicted Landon to beat Roosevelt by a full 20%. This miss-call actually stimulated more interest in opinion polls! Polls, then, are a type of pseudo-event to be talked about, speculated on, compared for accuracy, and so on.
Ch 6: From the American Dream to American Illusions? The Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige
142) The semantic difference between a dream and an illusion: a dream is something we can aspire to or compare to our current reality, and illusion is an image we mistake for reality, and one that we live in, "we cannot see it is not fact."
143) "We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience." This is some heavy shit. It's like this guy literally sees right through to the vacuous core of modern American culture.
144) American movies as the primary influence of the American illusion. "The motion picture is to real life in America what any image is to the commodity or corporation it stands for. The motion picture, seen abroad, is of course synthetic. It is believable. It is passive. It is concrete. It is simplified, and it is ambiguous. Thus the world has been flooded with images of America. The selling of American images abroad is a remunerative business."
145) The great obstacle of our belief in "prestige": we seek a favorable image abroad, our nation wants to have prestige in the eyes of others, what does this mean? "It means we hope the world will be attracted to, or dazzled by, our image!" Circular, obviously.
146) It isn't that people overseas so much believe our "image," the problem here is that we believe our own image too much and totally confuse it with reality.
147) Interesting and vaguely disturbing anecdote about the author's encounter with a speechwriter: he asked the speechwriter how much he consulted with his clients for a given speech, and the man said it was difficult working for the same clients over an extended period because "if you were successful in writing for him it became harder and harder to know what they were really like. His clients, he said, had an incurable tendency to forget that they had not written their own speeches. When he asked them in briefing sessions what they thought of this or that, they were increasingly inclined to quote to the public relations council the very speech which the council had supplied them a few weeks before. It was disturbing, he said, to hear yourself quoted to yourself by somebody else who thought it was himself speaking: you began to wonder whether it was your language after all."
148) A nation of "secondhandness": "We make, we seek, and finally we enjoy, the contrivance of all experience. We fill our lives not with experience, but with the images of experience."
149) Modern architecture as yet another example: it isn't easy to live in but it photographs really well; in other words the image is more important than its function.
150) "Our outrage when we find that a boxing match was rigged or when an amateur basketball team was bribed comes not nearly from our feeling that our morality has been violated. It also expresses our anger and frustration of being deprived of one of our few remaining contacts with an uncontrived reality: with people really struggling to win, and not merely to have their victory reported in the papers."
151) "As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism." The contrived images and experiences we seek are reflections of ourselves, the newspapers we read reflect ourselves, the adventures we travel on reflect we've paid others to prepare for us, at home we try to live according to the script of a happy family from a television program, etc., all of these are aspects of narcissism.
152) "For too long already we have had the specious power to shape 'reality.' How can we rediscover the world of the uncontrived?" The author says the first step is to recognize our disease, which is the disease of extravagant expectations, and the mere step of discovering what we suffer from may lead to a cure. Unfortunately, however, many of the solutions are simply illusory and are thus not enough to cure our illusions: first, we have false villains (like how we blame "advertisers" for deceiving us when we really deceive ourselves); then, we find false heroes (like celebrities). The hardest part is each of us must emancipate himself; we have to recognize that we are collaborating in this collective deceit. [Like, it's our own fault, and it's a genuine act of agency to recognize this collaboration/self-delusion in ourselves and take ownership of it.]
153) Suggestions for Further Reading (and Writing)
Some interesting thoughts in this mini-chapter: the author makes interesting points on why historians don't talk about revolutionary things like "The Renaissance" or "The Industrial Revolution" until a hundred or more years later after the phenomenon began--somehow either there's no room in history for anything that doesn't fit a known category (interesting!), or we don't see these phase transitions until they are long over. "The great changes in modes of thought are always more easily observed by later ages than by those undergoing them." and "...acolytes of the familiar avoid recognizing the consequences of their own blindness by saying it is quite normal to be blind." This section otherwise goes chapter by chapter, offering the reader additional books and resources to look over, and many of the titles here really grabbed me and I've listed them below in the "To Read" section.
To Read:
Edward L. Bernays: Crystallizing Public Opinion
*Theodore H. White: The Making of the President: 1960
***Douglas Southall Freeman: Lee: The Soldier
**Albert Van Nostrand: The Denatured Novel
Budd Schulberg: On the Waterfront
**Andre Malraux: Voices of Silence
Johann Huizinga: Waning of the Middle Ages
Works of Irving Babbitt
Douglas Rushkoff: Media Virus; Coercion; see also the television documentaries Merchants of Cool; Generation Like and The Persuaders
**Douglass Cater: The Fourth Branch of Government
James D. Horan: Matthew Brady: Historian with a Camera
Thomas Carlyle: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Sigmund Freud: Moses and Monotheism
John W. Ward: Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age
***Kenneth S. Davis: The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (see also his biography of Eisenhower)
Harold A. Innis: Empire and Communications; see also Changing Concepts of Time
**Irving Babbitt: The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts
Ezra Goodman: The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood
*Jacques Barzun: The House of Intellect
**Derek John de Solla Price: Science Since Babylon
Martin Mayer: Madison Avenue U.S.A.
P.T. Barnum: Barnum's Own Story: The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum
***Benjamin Lee Whorf (ed: John B. Carroll): Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
Luigi Barzini: Americans are Alone in the World (see also his better known work The Italians)
