Our favorite drug

The enneagram is first of all about a focus of attention. America suffers politically and economically, individually and collectively because we pay attention to television so devoutly that in a certain sense we live in an altered state. Right after a local guy, David Cook, won on American Idol, I asked a group who David Cook was and who Ban Ki Moon was. (He's secretary general of the UN). Not one person (of 15) knew Ban Ki Moon, everyone knew Cook. I do not watch American Idol but I could not avoid his name.
Here are some political consequences of watching TV.

In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Some religious tradition speak of custody of the eyes. I think this might be the best and perhaps the first good use of that discipline.