In 1998 the king of Bhutan, the small, idyllic Buddhist kingdom nestling high in the Himalayas, announced that his nation’s objective would be the Gross National Happiness. What an enlightened ruler!
Yet one year later he made a fateful decision: to allow television into his country.
Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London, 2005, p. 77
MartinWalking through any town or village in Britain on a summer evening when the windows are open one can see the bluish sheen of the television screen in almost any house. It is therefore easily possible, if o n e knows which programmes are at that moment being broadcast o n the three available channels, to know what are the only three possible contents at that moment occupy- ing the minds of the people inside the houses in that street. In times past an- other person’s thoughts were one of the greatest of mysteries. Today, during television peak hours in one of the more highly developed countries, the contents of a very high proportion of other people’s minds have become highly predictable.
Indeed, if we regard the continuous stream of thought and emotion which constitutes a human being’s conscious mental processes as the most private sphere of his individuality, we might express the effect of this mass communications medium by saying that for a given number of hours a day—in the United Kingdom between two and two and a half hours—twentieth- century man switches his mind from private to collective consciousness. It is a staggering and, in the literal sense of the word, awful thought.
Martin Esslin, ‘Television: Mass Demand and Quality’, Impact of Science on Society, vol. 20, no. 3 (1970), pp. 207–218
En [1935] el mundo industrializado contaba más de treinta millones de desocupados. Al perder el trabajo habían quedado prácticamente fuera de la economía de mercado, y muchos había perdido la confianza en el capitalismo. La solución, para un número creciente, era el socialismo, fuese rosado o rojo. Hoy día hay casi el mismo número de desocupados en la misma área geográfica, pero la clase trabajadora no se radicaliza ni moviliza, y los partidos socialistas pierden terreno a menos que se tornen conservadores. […]
Hoy todos los países industrializados tienen dos instituciones que explican la diferencia. Una es el régimen de seguridad social, la otra es la televisión masiva. La primera le ha robado el viento a las velas de la nave socialista. La segunda hace más llevadera la pobreza e invita a la inacción. Entre las dos han causado una de las revoluciones sociales más profundas de la historia, y la única que no ha derramado ni una gota de sangre.
Mario Bunge, ‘Socialismo y televisión’, in Cápsulas, Barcelona, 2003, p. 206