Life as a series of emergencies

Dominant features of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston are this huge defibrillator sign and the constant dunning of announcements warning travelers not to trust others with their bag. Anything to raise the traveler's adrenalin levels.

While I waited for my connecting flight, I saw two emergency vehicles drive up to the plane, lights flashing. The reason? A passenger felt slightly ill. I wonder if all the noise made her feel better, or worse.

This atmosphere is not just in international airports, and the paranoid propaganda isn't prevalent only in our neighbouring nation. Here in formerly laid-back Vancouver, for instance, there is a sign advertising CPR on the floor of Cambie Station.

Marshall McLuhan was right about the nature and power of the media, though few understood his prophetic words, "The medium is the message." Though most of us would deny the idea, we are the products of the media.

Media mavens, themselves products of the information age, use the media to shape our behaviour, and our very thoughts. The influence is pervasive and insidious, and largely unconscious.

The worldwide belief system, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake points out in a recent book, is now scientific materialism (or promissory materialism, as Karl Popper ironically christened this unproven view.) This set of beliefs has far- ranging consequences.

Ironically, while the media beat the drum of the social danger comes from the old religions, Islam in particular, they appear unconscious of the real danger comes from our widespread and unquestioned belief in science -- that is, the quasi-religious version of science that the media and society currently inculcate.

The major tenet of the new quasi-religious belief in science is this:
       The purpose and meaning of life is to get more money and acquire more stuff. This entails a whole host of corollaries. For one thing, the old idea of the spiritual quest has been replaced by the quest for money. For another, social life, including marriage, is seen as a shopping trip. If the selected spouse proves over time not to have been a bargain, go shopping for another. Fulfillment and happiness, the rights of all, are to be found through getting more stuff. Expensive weddings and temporary spouses, as well as "friends" on facebook illustrate the trend.

As a corollary to this, we are taught that socially, politically and environmentally, our world is fraught with dangers we must fight against; ergo, we need to be very vigilant, very suspicious, very afraid. Thus TV and the newspapers provide only two main messages: the current thing to fear is x; first, be very afraid of x, and second, buy this solution to overcome your current fear. Fear is a powerful sales pitch.

The misguided but engineered idea that life is a series of emergencies, and that the appropriate response to all of them is to pursue security through material goods and goals is quite simply wrong. It only replicates the fear that keeps it going, and thus, the whole daft system.

Invisible, pervasive, and astonishingly influential, these programs that run silently behind  our conscious awareness are the viruses that have infected our minds. Many of our contemporary problems follow from allowing the media and society to tell us what to think -- and what to be afraid of.