The Image of The Beast: The Lying Mirror

by Frank Ragoczy

I don’t watch much TV, unless you class a computer screen as a TV, which I don’t. Yeah, it’s a Cathode Ray Tube (or “CRT,” as we Techno-types call it) but the similarity ends there. When I use my computer, I more-or-less tell it what to show me, rather than letting various commercial and political entities choose for me. I tell my 3D modeling program to make me a shape and make its properties thus-and-so, and most of the time I get something pretty close to what I ordered. (They tell me version 5 is even better and the program doesn’t crash (wiping out the last seven hours of painstaking work because you were concentrating so damned hard and were so deep into the spiritual creative processes that you forgot to do a backup) anywhere near as often as it did with version 4.03. Lord, I hope so; I just finally ran out of cuss words and ordered version 5.)

The damned TV isn’t anywhere near as cooperative. To the extent that I credit the Book of Revelations as a source to remember when reading the daily news (I do, by the way, but I haven’t yet been able to form an clear opinion on whether John of Patmos was watching CNN or Babylon 5 in his vision), I tend toward the opinion that TV fills the bill quite nicely as the “Image of the Beast,” fueled, as it is, almost without exception, by insincerity, avarice and vanity, it provides that most dangerous of human diversions, a mirror that lies.

Television, unlike the original magic mirror, doesn’t just testify verbally as to the identity of “the fairest in the land;” it shows the Queen what she wants to see. “Yes, you can have the triple-decker banana split with macadamia nuts, dear, see how slim you look in the black dress”

It’s just a matter of time until you will be able to surrender your perception of reality to an existence in a virtual context, where you can choose your physical appearance without having to exercise or diet and be able to do all sorts of athletic things there without even moving a muscle here. From that point on, as the techies get really good at it, it’s obviously inevitable that people will sometimes not want to come back from the framework and take the suit and goggles off.

As far as we know, mostly from studying dreams and dreamers, it appears that time doesn’t have to be experienced linearly to seem normal to us. It seems that each experience brings its own sense of past history and future expectation, so we can have an experience that would take months in the real world within the scope of a single dream, taking mere minutes of one night’s sleep cycle. This suggests that within a virtual reality a person could have the experience of being thousands of years old and, to all extents and purposes, immortal, by skipping from high-point to high-point, each view with its full present-time-sense, looking both forward and backwards, allowing the experience of an entire lifetime to take a few hours or less.

Humanity hasn’t done a very exemplary job of dealing with vanity and self-indulgence, individually or in groups or nations, thus far. I wonder if we can manage to survive the advent of yet another even more refined and controlled lying mirror. The practice of the art of real journalism has fled underground in most local areas in the face of an almost entirely suborned national press: erstwhile guardians whose souls were discarded in the attempt to compete with the broadcast media for the attention of a fickle, shallow public and their advertising revenues. More and more, we’ve been suffering as a society from honest-reflection-deprivation. I think we can’t afford to lose any more truthful mirrors and we sure don’t need new ones that can tell us our favorite lies even more convincingly.

But then, the Darwin Award can be given to a whole species, can’t it? That was originally, if I remember correctly, the whole idea, wasn’t it?

-Frank Ragoczy e-mail = frankr@liberty-in-our-time.com