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O'Malley's Best Brainwashed? You're Crazy No doubt the Church is in the propaganda business. It's just not very good at it. No show of hands, but if it brainwashed you, how many go to Communion every day? If you had a choice some weekend between a retreat and a rock concert, well.... The only good "brainwashing" is the thought-control you'd swear you never got. Madison Avenue's expert at it. So's Playboy, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, "The OC." Good brainwashing takes command of your whole value system and makes you thank them for it. Even pay for it. As H. L. Mencken said, "You'll never go broke under-estimating the taste of the American people." When I was your age, the Church was a crackerjack brain-washer, almost as good as Big Brother in 1984. I actually did go to Communion every morning, and I guarded my "holy purity" like an atomic secret. But in those days the Church had no credible opposition. The voices around us all sang in harmony: government, schools, even the minimal media. We were all exhorted by politicians and advertisers to the Boy Scout virtues: trustworthy, loyal, friendly, et cetera. I don't recall any teachers handing out condoms. One perfectly innocuous, wordless song called "Blue Tango" was pulled from the radio because it just sounded dirty. Propaganda's really a neutral word Josef Goebbels gave a bad name to. It only means to spread around information. Nothing wicked in that. The question is the content of the information: Is it life-giving or is it life-constricting? And you have to be very careful in assessing that, because what's life-giving is usually initially repellent, and what's life-constricting is usually attractive--like the choice between three hours in the library or three hours shooting the breeze. I attack Madison Avenue a lot. Really not quite fair. If thrift, commitment, and honor sold as well as greed, self-absorption and oneupmanship, Madison Avenue would give us thrift, commitment, and honor. Hard to blame even Hitler. All he did was see which way the parade was heading and get in front of it. So did Mad Ave, Hugh Hefner, and whoever was shrewd enough to recruit Paris Hilton. What John the Baptist's asking for when he asks for repentance is not that we start making lists of our petty shortcomings but that we drop out entirely from that brainless parade toward money-fame-sex-power and head the other way. It's called conversion-turnabout. We think growth is inevitable; it's not. Everything in the universe is subject to the law of entropy--the second law of thermodynamics which says things wear down. By nature, a stream just flows downhill. If we want to get the water back up to the top of the hill, that takes work. The same thing's true of the human psyche--the soul, the self. When you have a suspicion you're "off the track," the only thing to do--often with considerable embarrassment and effort--is go back to the first wrong turn and start over. A turnabout. A con-version. But we're also subject to two other influences we inherited from our simian forebears: narcissism and inertia. Narcissism is self-absorption: unwillingness to admit one's even made a mistake. And inertia is unwillingness to make the effort to start over. To feel guilty and feel responsible for changing course. There's where the other brainwashers outclass the Church: they've liberated us from guilt. Seniors tell me (these are actual quotes): "I consider guilt unhealthy because it slows you down and keeps you from living your life properly....Doing the actual sin was bad enough, so why should I think about it at all?...Guilt is very unhealthy. You'll always be down." Fighting that Olympic-class brainwashing is tougher than trying to recruit the Grand Dragon of the KKK into the NAACP. Guilt is a very healthy urge--when I truly have misused something or somebody. Valid guilt is an honest realization (however unnerving) that I'm personally wrong and should do something to set things right again. That's where the other brainwashers succeeded so well. Their sales depend on narcissism and inertia: on our enslavement to surfaces like looks and image and personality. They have to convince us we shouldn't even be inconvenienced, much less challenged. Too bad, really. Because without an honest sense of guilt what you get is graffiti-defaced walls, rivers turned to industrial sewers, a victim-junkie to every subway car, two million unwanted pregnancies a year (three quarters aborted), politicians and "Survivor" contestants and exam takers you just assume are lying, an eight-trillion-dollar debt. What you get without guilt is Auschwitz. And every tiniest trickle--every seemingly trivial self-deception--helps get us further away from where we were meant to be. Every time we say, "Well, just this once...," we're one of them. Perhaps Advent isn't a bad excuse for checking the lay of the land, seeing if this is really the direction our souls want to be taking. If not, maybe the answer to narcissism and inertia is honesty and effort--to turn around and go back to that first wrong turn from our most basic values. Nobody's gonna do it for you.
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Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
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