We’ve been talking about media. There’s some points we hit on that you probably haven’t considered before.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
Don’t let your children watch entertainment that doesn’t support your family project.
Entertainment is by its nature memetic programming and most of you guys are far too casual about what you subject yourselves to.
Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. This will make you and your children feel like they are outside the mainstream in ways that can be uncomfortable.
Good.
One of our steaders writes
I know you all are going to dismiss me as the total weirdo eccentric with good reason but here's where I out myself as a total weirdo eccentric.
95% of entertainment is black malicious mouth of sauron poison. I believe that.
People ask me why my kids are so well behaved and well-adjusted. They can’t believe it when I tell him the answer is we don't do Disney or any other form of [propaganda], which is all of it, we don't let them watch stuff.
The natural state of children and teenagers is happy and compliant. The idea that toddlers scream and scream or that teenagers are naturally surly and vicious is a perpetuated lie. Screaming for toddlers and surly rebelliousness for teens is a sign of major breakdowns. But most American toddlers do scream and scream, and most of those teenagers are surly and vicious. Why?
There are three possible culprits
bad nutrition starting at an early age
bad media exposure starting at an early age (which is *any* media exposure if the age is early enough)
the unnatural social environments of schools
Which do you think is most likely? We believe all three contribute, but the first two most of all.
Famously the widespread introduction of telenovelas and access to TV knocked down Brazilian birth rates. You shouldn't think that the connection is a one-off, just this one inexplicable thing, where media exposure has these deeply warping effects. Propaganda affects everything.
Nerd point: As social creatures with a future orientation, each human spends a lot of their brain simulating how we expect people to react in the future. These simulations are obviously not real because the future hasn’t happened yet. These simulations are also mostly unconscious—people who can’t do them unconsciously are what we popularly call autistic. Simulations are resource intensive so everyone uses simplifying hacks called “narratives.” Simulations also can’t be real choosy about their inputs if they are to maintain high fidelity, which is why the process is largely unconscious, allowing you to hoover up vast quantities of implicit data into the mélange. Because the whole process is simulated, the brain doesn’t make a clear distinction between real inputs and media inputs. Media = simulated narratives, which pollutes the whole process. In fact, in some ways your brain favors narrative simulated inputs over real person social inputs because common narratives make it easier to predict how other people will react—you are running a prediction module that is trying to predict the output of other prediction modules.
All of this means that media exposure will be hacking your social expectations and values at a root level that you can’t consciously control.
If you were happy with our society’s standard values package, then general unmanaged media exposure would be fine. You aren’t. You want children and grandchildren and abundant ambitious lives and that is not what you see around you.
Whether or not those aspects of our society that strike you as the most broken originated in media (they probably didn’t) is irrelevant, since they are reflected and reinforced in media.
Your media diet and your children’s media diet is of the utmost importance. You are going to have to act as your own Minister of Culture. Here are some points you may not have seen before.
Obvious Propaganda Points are Just Canaries in the Coal Mine
Don’t think you can spot all the propaganda. If you were able to see the one or two attacks on values then it’s all attacks on values, the one you notice is just an indicator, and the rest is just too subtle or your receptors are too burned out to know.
If you really were perceptive enough to see all the rot, you wouldn’t be watching, because it would be too enraging to watch.
You don’t think so? Well ...
Here is the Propaganda You Overlooked
Here is a list of media, specifically movies, that you think are fine.
These comments are not performative. They were culled from discussions by Steader dads whose kids are several standard deviations above the norm on healthy family relationships. Think of them as the distilled text of what a great father started ranting halfway through the movie before he turned it off.
We will start with this successful thread, which is mostly accurate except for the movies he defends.
https://www.twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1511478358286163971
The Little Mermaid (1989): Make a pact with a witch so you can date a cannibal. Daddy will come around
Beauty & the Beast (1991): you're too smart to be a housewife. All men are pigs but marry the rich one, you can change him. Your dad means well but is ret*rded
Aladdin (1992): your dad means well but is ret*rded, run away w/ your loser bf
Lion King (1994):
ok this one is pretty basedA Goofy Movie (1995): your dad means well but is ret*rded
Pocahontas (1995): your dad means well but he is racist, whypipo are evil (except your bf)
Toy Story (1995):
life is meaningless, your vision is delusionHunchback of Notre Dame (1996): Christianity is for constipated ugly rapists
Hercules (1997): simp awarded godhood For Excellence in Simping
Mulan (1998): gay/trans allegory so heavy-handed it annoyed me at age 12
A Bug's Life (1998): Literally just the Communist Manifesto for kids
Tarzan (1999): white men just love murder, your dad means well but is ret*rded/racist
Atlantis (2001): your dad means well but is racist, let outsiders destroy your civilization, he'll come around
Monsters Inc (2001): a disturbing confession of Disney's business model
Finding Nemo (2003): your dad means well but …
The Incredibles (2004): pretty based
WALL-E (2008): extremely based
Up (2009):
pretty basedTangled (2010): your mom is a psychic vampire & all her rules are intended to deceive & exploit you
Frozen (2013): goes without saying
Zootopia (2016): attempt at neolib fable but explores its analogy a little too deeply/truthfully
Moana (2016):
colonialism is good, tradition is good, you owe something to the people who built your civilization even if it wasn't perfect
The Lion King: premarital sex is good if he’s like totally cute. Enjoy being exploited, rulers who eat you in return for nothing is good actually. Kumbaya. Ambition and a desire for excellence are just covers for evil Machiavellian scheming.
Toy Story: Ok mainly because Toy Story II is so good
Up: Your heroes are psychos, the myths that define you were lies, you can always replace your need for family with other people’s children, the Faustian Spirit drives you mad
Moana: your dad means well but is ret*rded, run away with your r*tard bf-substitute, your dad will come around, grrrl-power
Beware the extremely common message that well-raised happy girls should run away from their home with semi-criminal thugs.
OK, next.
Knowing its Propaganda Doesn’t Stop the Effects
Knowing its propaganda doesn’t stop the effects. Can you watch porn and not have any reaction because you tell yourself, oh, this is meant to arouse me? Can you smell bread wafting from the bakery and stop your mouth from watering because the bakery is doing it on purpose? Your unconscious hoovering mechanism is not under conscious control like that.
Suppose every Brazilian telenovela had run with a warning that the messages in the show would make the viewer less likely to have children. What would have happened? Maybe some of the drop in birth rates would have been ameliorated. But not all.
Propaganda Does Not Work the Way You Think It Works
Let us put a new thought to you.
The main propagandistic effect of media is not to change your mind. In propaganda terms, that is a stretch goal. Blunting your natural emotions reactions is enough. The propaganda point is often just to dilute your disgust.
Even if you watch whatever it is and then draw the appropriate moral lesson for your children afterwards, leading them to the correct intellectual conclusion, the propaganda has at least been exposed to them. With repeated exposure, even assuming your counterprogramming works perfectly, at best you have succeeded in replacing a natural, healthy organic strong reaction with a mental, formal one that is usually weak. It lacks the visceral quality that drives people on.
Suppose you were the King of X and you wanted to do something the courtiers and peasants would hate. Make them all kiss your bunions, lets say. Propaganda to the point that the majority actively want to do it would be a huge waste of resources and is probably impossible anyway. Instead, your propaganda is designed to scatter their natural disgust reactions which might drive them to action and which would also—dangerously to you!— serve as an inherent coordination mechanism. Instead, you propagandize enough that they are still grossed out by it but aren’t going to respond like lunatics. Then you shove it down their throats. You force them to it, execute a few malcontents, fire a few holdouts, hold on through a few scattered protests. Then is when the peasants start to love it.
The false model of propaganda is (1) convince you of X, (2) implement X. The true model is (1) take the edge off your opposition to X, (2) make X mandatory, (3) you convince yourself. Yes propaganda is meant to convert some people and make others at least what are called affirmers and allies in contemporary lingo, but it still succeeding if all it does is blunt you. It succeeds if it damages your emotional processing circuits.
Or your kids’.
It’s not All About You
How much of your excuses for your kids being fed the media pipe is Stockholm syndrome from your own tv-addled childhood? How much of the pop music you listen to is nostalgic feelings about the song? There's no reason your children need to live in the shadows of your pre-rational commitment to your own childhood.
Perhaps you grew up fine. 90% of your peers are struggling. How do you like those odds for your kids?
The fallback position is to have one sort of media diet for your kids and another for you. Almost everybody does it to some extent. The downside of this is that you make squirrelly media high status for your children. It will make them feel grown up.
The type of media you participate in is the type they will gravitate to.
Elites and Prestige TV
For the last decades or so, our elite class has been addicted to prestige TV like the Wire and social media like Twitter. At the same time, they have been monumentally incompetent. World historic bad.
The usual high-level insight is that the elite class has become a lot stupider, which is why they like TV and Twitter more than books and essays.
We suggest the causal arrow might run the other way. Prestige TV and Twitter is what makes them stupider.
What level of intelligence do you aspire to for your kids?
Opportunity Costs. Gresham’s Law of Entertainment
Entertainment is a good thing. A healthy family is a family that plays. The problem with some forms of entertainment is not that you could be doing something serious instead, but that you could be doing some other kind of entertainment. Entertainment has opportunity costs. Often low-value entertainment sucks you inunless you have made a conscious decision in advance to limit it because its just that little bit easier to get into, just that little bit semi-hypnotic, just that little bit semi-addictive.
I think families should literally just find better forms of entertainment. In our family we don't have screens. We read stories and sing songs.
It's way more engaging and no [current propaganda]. Why bother with Disney nonsense at all?
It would have to be a really, really durn good Disney film that would be worth Tolkien not making up the stories for his kids that became the Hobbit.
Family singing and family story time are invaluable. Indispensable. Inimitable. No identity without them. Family games come close especially parlor games.
(Notice the subtle family limitation propaganda worked in with the overt family fun propaganda.)
Inoculation is not an Excuse
Parents sometime says they are inoculating their kid. They are exposing them to what’s out there so they can point out the flaws and propaganda elements. Fair enough.
But does even the most enthusiastic proponent of vaccination inoculate their kid every day? Every week? A little goes a long way.
The real danger of not inoculating is that children find participation in mainstream entertainment and media attractive and fun when they grow up, so they end up distancing themselves from the family project. But now entertainment is increasingly horrifying and squalid to some one who hasn’t really built up an exposure to it. Are you inoculating or just building tolerance?
Cultural Literacy
Some entertainment is part of cultural literacy. There is a social cost to avoiding such things entirely, true.
Let’s look at some counterpoints.
1. The culture is fracturing and already fractured. What are the contemporary cultural works that every educated person should know? They are few and far between.
2. Investing in contemporary cultural literacy is investing in the status quo. It’s making an assumption that the current structure is going to last, and that the current leadership system is going to continue. Socially speaking its putting your money into bonds. Other forms of cultural literacy that aren’t just investing in dominant US entertainment products are social start ups.
Thanks to Wikipedia I don't have to actually watch movies or tv shows to understand peoples dumb memes. ChatGPT can help too haha.
Social Cost is Real
Social cost is real and it is something you will need to account for. The desire to fit in is strong. However, if your children assimilate to the culture, you will get the same results the culture gets.
So let’s be brutally direct. Preventing your kids from fitting in is one of your goals. Social cost is an asset.
The amount of social distance is tricky to get right. It is possible to get too much. But in some ways, the social cost of rejecting common media is a happy bonus.
Can’t Replace Something with Nothing
Even in the most overly strict homes, the kids usually grow up the way their parents raised them. The idea that kids from super strict homes grow up to rebel is overstated. Yet it does happen, usually when the home life was dull and arid. They kept out the media pipe, but they did not replace it with anything.
You can’t beat something with nothing. If you are going to drastically limit your home’s media diet, and you should, you will need to make sure that there still is a lively sense of fun and activity.
Some of that will be family stories and songs and parlor games and board games. If all you ever do is movie night, try one of those instead.
Our kids bug us if we miss our usual Sunday night pie ‘n’ parlor games.
That said, likely some books, movies, and so on will play a role in your family’s entertainment.
Watching a single classic Disney movie (Snow White, Fantasia, lion king, etc) once a month as a family is obviously way different than plugging Disney+ right into their individual little brains for a constant drip
The key is that you are in charge. You make decisions about what comes in and what stays out. These can be fairly rough and ready. For instance, here is what one steader family does.
We have a cutoff date for our kids. Before that is presumed OK, we don’t have to check it out thoroughly first. After that we have to approve it specifically as an exception.
* adult fiction – 40s, maybe mid 50s
* kids, young adult fiction – 70s. We aren’t consistent, sometimes we go with the 80s.
* nonfiction – hard one, anything up until the last decade or so usually won’t have blatant anti-family propaganda crudely inserted but there are bad themes that go way back. Pick and choose.
* movies – Hays code era. For “family movies” anything up through the 90s.
*TV – pretty much no. 70s I guess?
* social media – There’s no platform that is presumed OK. We will generally allow instructional videos and certain other approved channels and sources. Mark Rober is approved but youtube isn’t in general, if that makes sense.
Be creative.
Entertainment comes in many forms. For instance my son and I have recently been watching Linus Tech Tips on youtube primarily for entertainment, with the side benefit of getting some useful inspiration here and there (like upgrading my home networking and finally building a NAS)
Of course all the old stuff was just as propagandistic as now. For instance there was a movement among the trendsetters for a few decades around the turn of the old century to do message fiction about animal cruelty. They made whole books like Black Beauty and many books on other topics will have Very Special Chapters about it. That’s ok. Old propaganda for old barely perceived causes usually doesn’t hit the same. It mostly just comes across as wholesome.
PHEW! Let’s Come to Some Conclusions
That was a lot! Let’s boil it down.
Modern society is not healthy for individuals and families. Its entertainment and media will generally promote the unhealthiness. Some of these ways are too subtle for you to detect. And even if detected, you will still be affected by them.
You can’t replace something with nothing. If you ban much, and you should, you still have to find your own sources of entertainment and things that are not banned
For advanced level parents: if your entertainment and media diet socially distances you from the mass, is there any group that it closes the distance with? Finding or creating a group of families with at least some media practices in common means you are creating a new cultural literacy and can therefore be very powerful.