McLuhan-- All of the Candidates Are Asleep (Part 2)

Saturday Evening Post (August 10, 1968)    p. 34-36   (Part 2)

Marshall McLuhan, from the vantage point of 1968, reveals the sources for the angst behind...the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. He explains the reasons behind the deep ideological divide in our Red versus Blue society. It's all about the stresses imposed by revolutionary change from print media to an all-electronic environment. We are is so deep we cannot see it for.... "the bigger the environment created by an environment of technology, the less aware are the occupants of that environment or technology."

Here is the second half of McLuhan’s article.

All of the Candidates are Asleep
By: Marshall McLuhan 

The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.

Radio politics produced a new race of tribal chieftains who “represented” nobody. They “put on” their public, like any star or any emperor. The media are the emperor’s new clothes, as it were. Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, F.D.R.—these men were made bby radio.

Jack Kennedy was the first TV President. He had that indifference to power without which the TV candidate merely electrocutes himself.. When a man has enormous wealth or power, his human survival depends on his indifference to these things. Anybody who pretends to want such things proclaims his inability to perceive their terrifying responsibilities. In a word, he acts like a somnambulist, a highly motivated dreamer who prefers to remain insulated from a frightening world. But the hum dimension itself has gone from power, in the satellite age. Excess make power, as such, silly and unacceptable.

The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the establishment consisting of highly motivated somnambulists. Any new technology that creates a new environment alters the image the people have of themselves. It changes their relation to others. The gap so created can only be filled by violence. Such violence has no goal except the need to form a new image, to create a new meaning for the individual or the group.

Radio and TV both create global environments of “software.” They envelop us in radiation and information. Radio retribalized world politics, bringing people very much closer together by eliminating space and time. Great violence was released by radio technology, in the course of the pursuit of new images and identity.

The Second World War was a radio war, the first software war, the first guerrilla war of decentralized forces fighting on many fronts at once. War, now as always, is education, an accelerated distribution of data and information. It is compulsory education, especially for the enemy. In this sense war has always been a major “progressive” force, both in ancient and modern worlds. War is also a quest for identity. “Hardware” wars follow the “territorial imperative,” but this is also the quest for a corporate image.

The most creative response to radio was American Negro jazz. Jazz was a syncopated audile-tactile form of cultural gesture-language that cut across all verbal barriers, even more than radio itself. Unlike the language of private and visual culture, the auditory world of jazz is discontinuous. It is a non-Newtonian space-time world of total involvement. Only the visual sense gives detachment. Only the eye cultures, based on the phonetic alphabet, have ever achieved a visual order of civilized detachment and private individualism. Hence the present panic:

The American colonies began with print. The entire educational, industrial and political structure of the U.S.A. stem from the printed word, as de Tocqueville explained long ago. All other cultures had centuries of pre-print existence and political organization. Hence, unlike other cultures, the North American colonies began as a decentralized group and moved toward bureaucratic centralization. In the age of software this trend will reverse, and, of course, the United States has much to lose from decentralization.

An instantaneous electric environment decentralizes any structures, personal or corporate, commercial or political. The old hardware structure of road and rail and print had, by contrast, centralized and specialized all functions.

Hence the dilemma of the TV generation: The Establishment is centralized and specialized in politics, in education and in business. The Establishment is goal-oriented. The new software environment is a total field of simultaneous data in which no goals are possible, no detachment is possible and involvement is mandatory.

Faced with an educational plant devoted to separate subjects, and training in special skills, the TV generation is baffled. This applies equally to the Negro. He is asked to acquire literacy and to detribalize at  a time when the latest technology is retribalizing the entire globe. The backward individual, like the backward country, has no stake in the old hardware, the old literacy and the old specialism. He is immediately “turned on” by the new software electric culture.

By contrast, the possessors of the old hardware, the Establishment, are “turned off” by the new electric environment. Age-old habits of classification, detachment and specialism make it impossible for them to come to terms with an electric technology that offers total integration of life and knowledge.

The TV generation is dedicated to the “inner trip” and the erosion of personal identity. It can only form a new image of itself by destroying the old hardware environment. Yet destruction of the hardware environment is not a goal for the TV generation It can have no goal. It can only be involved in a struggle. The new core of the TV generation is now 12 to 14 years of age. The confrontation with the Establishment will take place four of five years hence. In the meantime, faint indications of the coming conflict are apparent at Columbia and elsewhere.

As Peter Drucker points out in Managing for Results, the bigger the environment created by an environment of technology, the less aware are the occupants of that environment or technology. The global environments created by the new software, or pervasive electric information, are such hidden services. The hardware environments of industry and print had created services such as the postal system, highways and railways. Printing, or assembly-line technology by the use of uniform movable types, became the unconscious model for all industrial activity whatever, for all educational training and all job organization. These hardware environments gave ordinary workers access to goods and services such as the wealthiest person in the world could not have provided for himself.

A vast discrepancy was created between the old image of agrarian man and the new image of industrial man. This discrepancy released a century of old struggle and wars that were necessary to form new images of identity.

Every gap is an interface, an area of friction or ferment. Hardware “communism” existed, that is to say, decades before the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The utopia of Karl Marx, like all utopias, before or since, was an image in a rearview mirror. Communism had already happened. Karl Marx was unaware of the meaning of the vast new hardware environment of communal services, as we are unaware of the global environment of software services or total and instant information.

The sort of theme and issues that the present candidates consider it necessary to mention have nothing whatever to do with what is going on in the world. Moral concern over poverty and injustice and stupidity are now steeped in a software environment of affluent images. The discrepancy between the old and the new images enrages the victims.

The child standing in his crib wallows in TV images of adult life as much as the poor are enveloped in images of physical splendor. The result is that the young TV watcher decides to bypass childhood and adolescence. The poor quite naturally decide to bypass the bureaucratic maze that denies them cornflakes.

The new software environment of images is not nearly as invisible to the victims as it is to the Establishment that witlessly perpetuates it. The effects are the same whether the causes are noted or not. For centuries the literate world in general has been concerned with events rather than causes.

The new Milton Eisenhower Commission to investigate the causes of violence will produce an inventory of violent events plus a moral exhortation. Causes will not be considered.

The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the inventors and managers of an electric software environment of global services. These managers, it cannot be insisted upon too strongly, are highly motivated somnambulists. (The recent psychological studies by Dr. Roger Broughton at McGill University have indicated that somnambulism is a motivated condition.)

Without exception the McCarthys, the Humphreys, the Reagans, the Stassens, the Wallaces and the Nixons, the Rockefellers are men of integrity and good will who find it expedient to sleep out the current time. Why should the ld wake up merely to confront a violent struggle for new identity, which the young and the backward alike find it necessary to pursue in order to attain any image of themselves?