Duane HelmerSoft-State

“I’ve seen the future and it is now.” Ray Bradbury could have said just this at the

first publishing of The Fireman in 1950, but I believe it is even truer today.

Have some people always tuned out and been unaware of past and current

national and world events? Of course the answer is yes. Have some made a choice,

conscious or not, to see only that which immediately effects them? Again the answer, I

think, is yes. It was true for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, true in 1950, and is even truer

today. As more and more people tune out real world events while simultaneously tuning

in to the soft-reality of mass media and its many variants, the fabric of our social

construction becomes less objective and meaningful and the fundamental nature that

connects us, less adhesive, the threads more fragile and tenuous. Like weeds choking

plants in a garden, the ebb and flow of shifting values, social positions, and cultural

correctness further dull the senses and cloud the mind allowing more and more

unessential information to occupy people’s thoughts. Just as two objects can’t occupy the

same place at the same time, so to, only one thought can occupy a single mind at one

moment. So while the pseudo facts and values of the soft-reality fill the mind, the hard-

reality is pushed out, becoming more and more un-real by the very lack of consciousness

that is given them.

For instance, let’s say that on the same day; Harris Pilton1 is arrested for

drunk driving, while at the same time a health-care bill is vetoed by the president.2

Which one will be perceived as more interesting, important, or relevant; which will be

given more network coverage, discussion and analysis; which will be the main topic at

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the water cooler? Why, Harris Pilton of course. (I do not know this to be a scientific fact,

but I think few would argue.) Which though, of these events will have any genuine or

hard effects on real people’s lives? Again, I don’t think I would get much argument that

children being denied health-care would have a more serious, existent, and lasting effect

on the real world than does the legal status of Harris Pilton. So why all the focus and

energy on the one and not so much on the other?

Plato’s cave and Bradbury’s wall-V’s, are essentially the same thing. Neither is

real in a hard sense and both sovereign a dream like condition of awareness. A soft-state,

filled with images, issues, and information that while they may be titillating and

salacious, are useless for effecting or understanding the world people actually exist in.

And like any good addictive substance, the more one consumes, the more one needs to

consume to maintain the desired effect, thus the less time and energy one has for anything

else. Until the occult of each individual self is complete and society is made up of

persons who exist in a self-reinforcing soft-state ready to be shaped and molded as

needed by the tyrant d'jour.

Why? Well the answer may be as simple as, why not? Which is the

easier, simpler, safer, one to be conscious of? Which item lends itself to hundreds of

automatic thoughts that seem to appear and disappear effortlessly like shadows or

floating lights, and then having done so, leave no trace or imprint behind, as though they

never were? Which one is the equivalent of an existential free lunch? Not the denial of

health-care for children, or the war in Iraq, or a country’s dependence on foreign oil. No,

thinking about these and other issues like them requires effort, concern, and deed. They

demand the thinker take a next step, they refuse to simply be let go, dropped off, or left
out. They insist on more, and there is the consequence for thinking them. Unlike soft-

state issues they change the thinking of the thinker. A change that takes an effort to

restrain. In fact once infected by one of these virulent type thoughts, a person must shape

all kinds of new measures and extend new efforts in attempts to halt the cascading effects

it may have on their adjacent ideas. Like dominos, one change after another until

suddenly one would have no choice but to wake up!

The alternative is to fill that space with soft stuff, stuff that

if bumped into, gives way. Stuff that oozes and flows around things. Stuff that’s neither

hot not cold, that doesn’t disturb or upset. Stuff that’s distant and being distant it’s safe.

All the while attaching false meaning and import to the stuff giving it the illusion of

significance and relevance, and thus allaying the doubt and guilt one naturally feels about

consuming such things along with its resultant decay of hard-reality which has thus been

left unattended. The white Bronco or North Korea? The promise of fidelity

to my wife, or Britney’s shaved head? The choice is simple, even simpler because it’s

nearly made for us. By the time he or she is eighteen years old the average child in the

United States will have spent as much time consuming TV as they have spent in

classrooms or interacting with their parents.3 The intellectual, spiritual, not to mention

physical effect of this much “consumption” of soft-reality creates its own inertia. An

inertia of immobility, of futility, resulting in a deaf and mute like state of self-awareness.

Which once established, doesn’t whish to be perturbed, jostled, or provoked by that

which, once introduced into thought, won’t, without delay, evaporate into the void. Just

as in Plato’s cave, Bradbury’s 451, or The Wachowski Brothers Matrix. The easy, soft-

reality gets accepted based on the preceding consumption of fun-facts, trends, pseudo
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Society The Basics
issues and fantastical thinking that has proceeded it. Now who in their right mind would

want to stop that.!? Of course there are many other factors not

accounted for here. The effects of poverty, race, economics, not to mention systemic

problems in the legal, educational, health, and political realms, which sometimes alone or

together contribute to a flinch like reflex of the mind. Maybe we should stay in the cave,

and leave on the TV, else reality, hard-reality might come crashing in.