STAY TUNED

The concept of this drawing came to me as I sat wondering about all the wrong in the world and why we as fellow human beings choose to do nothing about it. War, famine, poverty, disease debt just to name a few and most are man made and preventable. I found myself asking, if the power of our understanding and minds could take man to the moon, which in the times of the earlier civilisations would have been an act of god, why is it so difficult to prevent these things today? and then it hit me. We all know these things exists. We all know that while we sit with our extra large pizza in a warm environment with our heads against a cushion, millions around the world possibly starve laying on a cold solid ground with their head resting upon rocks. We live opposite lives, rich and fulfilling and we work very hard to maintain that lifestyle. Simply meaning most of us are always too busy or too stressed with our own problems to care enough. But this is just the way life is right? it's just the cold reality and so let's talk about something else for a while.

A Austrian-American by the name of Edward Bernays, combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud to invent modern public relations and propaganda as we know it. Edward Bernays understood that it was possible to connect to a persons inner emotions with objects,materials, information and services. Though this understanding could have been used to heal man's negative emotions, man's desire for success and power built a system to profit off them instead. Even now,advertisements and propaganda dominate the mechanical metropolis built on the very system, tempting us to give in to our every desire and make a purchase regardless of the consequences and controlling our flow of information in various ways such as censorship. Today this system has gotten so big it has dominated almost every corner of the globe, specially through the means of visual media.


Our sight is the most influential sense on our perception of reality because it plays a huge part in how our brain interprets and calculates our physical orientation. So we believe what we see to be more real than what we hear or smell. With this and the first paragraph in mind, could it be that with Edward Bernays's modern public relations and propaganda methods broadcasting through every television set on the surface of our planet , we have simply accepted it as our reality and have become mere consumers? We see or hear, we buy, we consume. The sad part is, most of us work our lives away to maintain this tiresome hobby until we take it to our graves. 

It seems we have evolved to a state of ignorance in order to maintain our comforts or to satisfy yet even more of our desires. In a world where we trust the information of a person we have never met over the wisdom of a man in person, we must all ask ourselves, do we knowingly choose to ignore the true reality because we are so happy with the one we make for ourselves? In a speech by the famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, he said:

"We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed."

Capitalism is a game of monopoly and the aim is to win as much as you can if not all and Edward Bernays's methods of propaganda ensures that the game is justified or controlled from many and every angle. It's hard to solve problems when one doesn't know they exist or when it is defined to be a solution. With all that is truly going on in the world and what we are told is going on,  It has become a task in itself to keep in tune with the true reality and thus why the drawing suggests the viewers to "stay tuned" within the television, implying there are two realities and clearly displaying the more demanding.

These were the thoughts that were on my mind whilst creating this drawing. Feel free to give me feedback as to what you see when you look at it.