29 SPORTS and ENTERTAINMENTS
It is to be hoped that Parts I, II and III have developed or reinforced in your mind an attitude to automatic reality which has enabled you to go along with or approve this Part's criticisms of its institutions. If so you will readily understand that whilst these institutions would have no place in a humantrue reality they are necessary working parts of the Machine and its automated human society, so that such criticisms of them are held by realists to be unrealistically naive. Realists are not so blinkered as to see the world as altogether good but as a mixture of good and bad which is the best we can hope to achieve, and they fear that radical reforms would throw the good baby out with the bad bathwater. But capacities for pleasure and delight that are peculiarly human, over and above the basic and direct ways of satisfying instinct which we share in common with the animals, are relative and not absolutely fixed; they are not inseperable from their automatic causes and sources of satisfaction, or inevitably counterbalanced, as they presently are, by misery and dissatisfaction. I repeat - this present is the wrong reality and the humantrue alternative is not a Utopian dream but an attainable state.
For intellectually unfulfilled human units of the Machine reality, practical processes of living become less and less satisfactory and reasonable as they become more and more automated. The Machine, here in the 'developed' nations, conveniently provides the majority of us with our food, warmth and shelter. We personally are no longer wholly preoccupied with the entire process, as are animals, normally to their complete satisfaction. We are given small, isolated, generally repetitive and boring jobs. Or, especially in the 'underdevoloped' nations, we are denied both jobs and any other lawful means of providing adequately for ourselves. The Machine remains highly competitive but it is increasingly the competition of automatic interests served by humans, decreasingly a matter of human initiative. Many individuals give to charity for the relief of poverty in the Third World, for example, at the same time as they work for interests which cause or contribute to that poverty. Nevertheless we are still subject to a strong life-force impulsion to live. You can see how the Machine harnesses us to the money economy in return for satisfying our survival instinct. Now consider how Machine entertainments have contrived to satisfy, and turn to similar account, both our competitive urge (strong in males, less developed in females) and the logical appetite of an intellectual faculty for stimulation.
We have ten or fifteen thousand years of conditioning by a predominantly competitive civilisation and millions of years of evolution through natural competition before that. Now our competitiveness is kept alive by the Machine, so as to maintain our support of the concept of existing reality and to profit the money economy, by way of Sport with a capital S. Sport seems harmless but it preoccupies the minds of many people to the extent of being a strong cord that binds their lives together and persuades them to stay with reality. Much of human automated life can be lived in a blank state of going through the everyday motions with the minimum of thought and effort, punctuated by artificial highlights that have the persuasive effect of making it all seem worthwhile. So Sport is far from harmless for it not only keeps alive the unintelligent concept of competition but also keeps us from seeing clearly that our reality by itself does not give full satisfaction. Full awareness of this would give us the will to discover what was wrong and put it right.
The wide popularity of Sport in the most automated parts of the world could reinforce the belief that to compete is natural to us. But natural competitiveness is strictly related to vital need, whereas ours has developed largely out of greed and now fills human need of a different kind. The growth of Sport into an industry is the result of a pursuit of excellence for the sake of winning, propelled by the prospect of status and reward on the part of competitors, and money profit on the part of the industry. The whole human world is a competition, an automatic rat race in which to be a winner is to have the best that automated living can bring. The money that makes Sport a viable entity in the competitive economy comes from the public. They are willing to pay in the hope of seeing their idol or team win and so fulfil a strong emotional need, for to be identified with winning at second hand as a spectator is important to the majority of individuals who are existing reality's losers.
Competitiveness is so ingrained into us by instinct and the teachings of reality that it is hard not to take sides, especially for males for it is still they who mostly have to run the rat race. Since we are subject to a money economy that takes every opportunity for profit, even as spectators we are encouraged to involve ourselves financially in Sport by gambling. We try to add profit to pleasure by betting on horses and going in for football pools. The Stock Exchange represents the conversion of finance into a Sport in which spectators of the rise and fall of commodities and companies try to profit from predicting events. We have a habit of identifying with winners that is common to both sexes and understandable in a competitive society where the desirable objective is to win but most are bound to lose. This habit is indulged by other kinds of entertainment. The chief characters in novels, magazines and films are daring, successful, brave and beautiful, because these are supposed to be and accepted as being the most attractive and interesting characters. Those who write the stories and produce the films are in a similar kind of Sporting business to games promoters and stock brokers, banking on profiting from reality's winners.
Pop music is an entertainment that both expresses feeling and satisfies our conscious appetite for stimulation of the most direct and crudely simple kind. The popularity of its changing form but constant basic character is not inevitable because it is the counterpart of an equally strong and vague dislike of the oppressiveness of automatic reality. In a humantrue world it might well lose its appeal and be replaced by something quite different. Pop music belongs to youth because the young have surplus energy to express in rebellion against the oppressive norm, and are not yet fully strapped into its harness nor weighed down by all its burdens. It hammers out rythms like the pounding of the blood, and dwells on the ever powerful and urgent theme of sexual love whose excitement drives us to mate without thought of the aftermath. But it also bangs out ptotest, voicing some elements of truth in condemnation of false reality. These are the simplest part-truths; they have to be. If the words got too seriously deep and heavy they would not fit the music and its purpose emotionally to draw us into a sort of dream-world, like meditation. When young people go about with stereo headphones over their ears they are holding out in their dream world, fending off the normal adult conformity which they despise. But they generally have no answers and no real resistance because their rebellion is not against the Machine as such, only against its more blatant wrongs and its restrictions on their freedom to do what they wish, or to seek what they think and feel they want. Their minds are not determined on understanding the Machine and finding a better alternative world free from automatic conditioning. They live in consciousness which instinctively responds to material and other automatic attractions just as it is attracted to the primitive beat of pop music. Their flimsy moral reasoning is outweighed by these attractions, to experience which they become all too soon harnessed to the Machine and trapped by adult conformity.
Literature, cinema, music, theatre; aside from any pretensions to Art with a capital A, these are entertainments supplying a demand for emotional satisfaction and mental stimulation which everyday life normally lacks. They explore the actual dramatic and vivid conflicts of the Machine and the consequent struggles of automated humans, and seek to portray them with realistic excellence. Taken together they approach reality on a much broader front than Philosophy but do not go deep, for ultimate truth is not their aim either. They are forms of liberation from limitations of the individual's personal horizons but not of escapism from the facts and concepts of overall automatic reality, for that would not be comforting or entertaining to audiences who are, because they believe they must be, harnessed to the automaton. These entertainments are firmly related to reality, so that spectators experience happenings and sensations that may not occur in daily life but belong to a common, familiar framework of attitudes and values. Yet an added attraction of entertainment of this kind is that it is remote, enabling us to go through difficult experiences at second hand, in safety. Being just one amongst the Machine's losers, one can nevertheless cushion oneself from despair by assuming the imaginary role of winner.
We shall not escape from this reality except by moving into an alternative. Before we can make that move the alternative reality has to be prepared and before that can be done we have to envisage it. But to envisage an alternative that really is wholly good, and not just a variation on the same automatic themes, requires that the truth be discovered so that existing reality is exposed as false. Serious attempts at true discovery are not popular because truth, until it is generally understood, can not be recognisably familiar. The people who produce or take part in presenting entertainment may be trying truly to fulfil their minds but are allowed to do so only to the extent that they cater to public demand so as to be viable in terms of the money economy. The existence of a money incentive means that the entertainment industry remains chiefly concerned with and skilled at projecting emotive realism and little interested in true enlightenment, because the former brings financial success, not the latter. It also means that the public appetite for easy entertainment is increased disproportionately to a natural advance in critical awareness, and the stimulation of that awareness. This further reinforces the money economy's practices of supply meeting demand in accordance with the profit motive, and of demand being attracted or persuaded to consume supply, which perpetuate a reality that allows superficial modifications but not any change in its automatic basis.
In this way almost all sports and entertainments are geared to automatic reality for whose shortcomings they are required to make up. Even books of science fiction, when they depict alien life, transpose human concepts of Earth reality to planets elsewhere in the universe. By depicting these planets as enmeshed in conflicts of a money economy or locked in leadership struggles just like ours here on Earth, such stories fail, in these and other ways, to shed light on automated life's ignorance or falsification of truth by comparing our reality with something far superior. And now autoprogressive science and technology has brought all forms of sport and entertainment into every home over half the world by way of television. That the numbers of channels and total hours of viewing time have already rapidly increased makes it easy to imagine a time when humans shall hardly move out of their homes, being almost totally dependent on the Machine for emotional experience and mental stimulation - the automatic takeover.
To present-day realists all this may appear as the threat of a puritanical ideal to remove all the pleasures of life. Supraconscious individuals will understand that, on the contrary, a humantrue world would generate its own and better delights and fulfilments from within. How far these would arise from everyday life and to what extent we would indulge in some forms of sport or formal entertainment is difficult to judge. These questions are considered under Part VII, Realisation of Humantrue Society. The task of this chapter has been to reveal that sports and entertainments as we currently know them relate to instinct and automatic conditioning; are artificial counter-balances to a fundamentally unsatisfactory norm; and that the interests and tastes they have inculcated, and the habits and practices they have established, can not be taken to indicate our true nature and state.
Pt.IV REVELATION
THE AUTOCULTURE
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