Three Revolutions in Consciousness

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Communications technologies powerfully impact how and what people think, what they view as right and wrong—even what they are capable of thinking and valuing.

Over time, new technologies such as writing, the printing press, and motion pictures and television radically altered individual and social cognition, values, ideology, and behavior and, through them, culture, social organization, and politics.

From this perspective four epochs of human history can be distinguished: Oral tribe culture (“orality”), manuscript culture following the introduction of writing, print culture after Johan Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the printing press, and motion pictures and broadcasting in the 20th century.

From Orality to Writing

Primary oral cultures are cultures that have never known writing.

In the West they are synonymous with prehistory, typically the province of archaeologists. Prehistory, the period before written records appeared c. 3,000 BC or 5,000 years ago, includes the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.

Societies without written records preserved their history and literature through memorized stories, poems, and myths passed orally from generation to generation. Such remembered narratives were susceptible to disappearance, loss, and distortion.

Oral literature included folk epics, folklore, proverbs and folksongs. Well-known oral traditions that were later reduced to writing include the Homeric poems, the Vedas, and the Norse sagas.

By today’s standards, primary oral cultures were comparatively paltry in size, demographically speaking.

Their successors, scribal societies, were characterized by writing but preceded the advent of printing. In such cultures “every book was a manuscript,” though of course not every document was a book (e.g., royal edicts and papal bulls).

When writing was introduced into a primary oral culture that had never known it before, it had extremely wide-ranging effects in every area of life—culture, economics, politics, art, and more. As a result, literacy, written communications, and the preservation of written documents radically altered individual and collective ways of knowing and conceptualizing the world, fundamentally transforming human consciousness and behavior in the process.

Still, significant “oral residue” persisted in scribal societies, producing what Jewish historian Elizabeth Eisenstein called a “half-oral, half-literate culture that has no precise counterpart today.”

Mass literacy characteristic of modern industrial societies was never attained in the ancient or medieval worlds. For example, William V. Harris in Ancient Literacy (1989) estimated that a maximum 20%–30% literacy rate was achieved, but only in Hellenistic cities.

Similarly, Northern orality persisted even after returning Northerners had been exposed to writing through intimate contact with classical civilization.

Because some CC readers adhere to a cyclic view of history, I should mention that Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest-academic who studied the interface between orality and literacy (both manuscript and print), maintained that primary oral cultures are governed by cyclic thought rather than the linear/historical/evolutionary thought characteristic (in his view) of literate societies.

Cyclic thought was a function of orality. Writing, and, later, print culture, generated inward ego-consciousness and individuality.

According to Ong it was the revolution in technology—the shift from primary orality (no writing) to writing that sharply differentiated these two modes of thought.

Ong was a universalist of the Leftist type; he applied his theories indiscriminately to all of humanity, without taking into account racial and genetic differences between groups.

The Print Revolution

The advent of printing produced a second communications-based revolution in human consciousness and social affairs.

The printing press led to a tremendous increase in the number of books, a vast rise in literacy, and extremely rapid propagation of ideas among great numbers of people over large geographic areas.

During the sixth and seventh centuries AD, it is estimated that, on average, only about 120 books (in the form of hand-written manuscripts) were produced annually in Western Europe.

^[2]After Johan Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the printing press in Germany circa 1450, printing presses quickly sprang up all over the continent. Within just 50 years, 1450–1500, about 8 million books were printed. In the year 1790 alone, total production amounted to more than 20 million books. This spectacular growth took place on a pan-European scale.

As a consequence, print technology was responsible for catalyzing most of the salient trends of the modern era: the Renaissance, Protestantism, individualism, democracy, capitalism, exploration, astonishing scientific and technological discoveries, the industrial revolution, population increase, Communism, and nationalism. In a sense print culture created a pan-European pooling of intellectual resources the like of which had never occurred before.

Publication of the Bible for the first time made the sacred text directly and widely accessible to any literate person who desired to read it.

Print culture was also the primary catalyst of the American Revolution, without which it probably would not have occurred, just as white revolution has not occurred in the absense of an electronic media presence, despite genocidal policies adopted in the aftermath of WWII.

Print was likewise the catalyst for the French, 1848, and Communist revolutions, feminism, Zionism, and many other negative social developments culminating in the deaths of tens of millions of human beings and the imposition of unparalleled tyranny and barbarism on millions more.

With the advent of printing, “the press” in the extended sense of the term made its entry onto the historical stage for the first time.

Movies and Broadcasting

Strictly speaking, this third communications revolution encompasses more than just movies and TV, though these seem emblematic of the new media as a whole. It encompasses also highly-influential, culture-changing audio-visual media such as pop music, the Internet, and video games.

In Ong’s terminology, this revolution exhibits “secondary orality.” Though heavily oral and visual, it is secondary because it is dependent upon writing and print.

Secondary orality differs from the primary orality of pre-literate cultures due to its intimate association with literacy and writing—for example, carefully scripted movies, television shows, songs, and video games. Though passively absorbed by audiences in the form of sound and moving images, the underlying productions consist of actors speaking memorized lines or people reading written material.

Television, like radio before it, was immediately popular. A decade after its introduction TV had penetrated into 90 percent of American homes.

Academics invariably assert that television is primarily a commercial medium geared to selling products. But this is profoundly misleading. Its primary purpose is propaganda, social control, and the deliberate insinuation of revolutionary change in predetermined directions.

Even television commercials are saturated with propaganda and politically correct messages and images having nothing to do with the sale of products. The same is true of entertainment programming.

Television and movies are first and foremost about power. Profit, though important, is secondary.

The media industry is dominated by a few giant companies that control the nation’s television and radio stations, broadcast, cable, and satellite networks, and studio and production facilities.

The same companies exert international influence as well. A major international TV network might be available in as many as 150 countries. Some news networks, such as CNN and BBC World News, are also international in scope.

In addition to entire channels and networks, media firms’ tentacles reach into foreign nations through the sale of individual movies or current and past television series.

Very noticeable at present are successful efforts to browbeat China through international organizations into honoring the monopoly “intellectual property rights” of dominant global media firms based outside the country. This is the foot in the door to controlling Chinese politics and culture.

There is a widespread tendency to gloss over, ignore, or perhaps not even “see” the centrality of this culture-shaping media.

Perhaps its most striking feature after its massive reach is the dominance of the audio-visual dimension (moving images, speech, music) that subtly but powerfully affects, manipulates, and alters audiences’ subconscious emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in ways that orality, written manuscripts, and print never could.

It appears to be the most powerful of the three revolutionary communications mediums in shaping and directing human behavior, at least in the prevailing ethnically monopolistic environment. The medium is less geared to rationalism and more spectacularly manipulative than those that preceded it.

The current heavy focus on computers and the Internet misleads in that it fails to recognize that the same types of content—traditional writing on the one hand (like this article) and movie/television/radio-style entertainment, news, pop music, and video games on the other, are mostly being disseminated over a new channel.

A great deal of movie-TV style entertainment and news will eventually migrate to television sets, even if it is technically disseminated over the Internet. It is more comfortable to watch that way. Tablets, smartphones, personal computers, and other devices are likely to remain adjuncts or accessories (somewhat like radios) insofar as heavy-duty entertainment is concerned.

The Internet itself is increasingly dominated by multibillion-dollar corporations such as Google (Jewish), Facebook (Jewish), Netflix, and Amazon. Internet entertainment is rapidly becoming more TV- and movie-like, with content controlled by Jewish producers.

Just as Jews previously dominated motion pictures, radio (the precursor of television), TV broadcasting, and popular music, they are increasingly dominating the Internet as well.

In each case they did not consolidate their power instantly, but over a period of years. Ultimately, they rapidly adapted to every technological change in media, no matter how disruptive it was at the time. Whites, even ethnically unconscious whites, never gained a meaningful foothold.

Insofar as advanced movie-TV style news, entertainment, education, and analysis are concerned, nearly insurmountable economic barriers to entry already exist. It would be exceedingly difficult to compete today with Google, Facebook, Netflix (which is heavily dependent upon the cooperation and goodwill of Hollywood content producers), or Amazon.

Politically, racially, and religiously “incorrect” outsiders are further blocked from equal access to a mass audience by an immense censorship apparatus operated by the likes of the ADL, the SPLC, the Wiesenthal Center, well-funded Left-wing academic activists, domestic terrorists operating with a wink and a nod from the government, and highly selective laws against “hate” (i.e., white freedom of speech).

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Nevertheless, in order to succeed politically—and survive genetically—it is imperative that whites develop an alternative, “broadcast”-based media capable of reaching the masses on a continuous basis. It must eventually extend into television, movies, the Internet, popular music, video games, book publishing, periodicals, and every other form of mass media. It must include entertainment programming and commercial components rather than simply a narrow focus on explicitly racial-ideological analysis or news (like Fox News Channel for neoconservatives).

The media of mass communications must not remain solely the province of Jews and other anti-white elements. The fact that instruments of such tremendous power have been effectively monopolized by the enemies of mankind for a century is an intolerable injustice resulting in untold suffering and millions of deaths.

Ultimately, a bright, sunshiny day must arrive when Jews, Judaism, Leftists, and government receive over a vast segment of the electronic spectrum the same treatment they mete out to others 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year decade after decade.