"It’s a little black piece of plastic"

Thank you to Larry L. Beane @ Lew Rockwell.

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
~ George Orwell

Evil has only the power we give it.
~ Ray Bradbury

In the 1940s, when television was still in its infancy, Orwell foresaw    the power of the screen as a means of mind-control and political demagoguery by dictators pushing central economic planning and treating human beings like soulless cogs.

What he perhaps did not foresee (though others like Ray Bradbury did) was the voluntary nature of our mental imprisonment: the role of entertainment. It is as though free people willingly chained themselves in Plato’s cave to escape reality.

I think this explains a lot.

If all of the sudden, everyone turned off the TV, if we were to simultaneously stop being cud-chewing television watchers, if we were to cut our ties to degenerate actors and content-producers and opinion shapers, there would be an almost immediate revolution: cultural and perhaps even political.  We would come to our senses, rediscover objective reality, and reclaim our minds, our souls, and our liberties in short order.

Our lords and masters certainly know this. We are in a prison of our own making, and the key is in our hands. It’s a little black piece of plastic with an aptly named button: “power.”