Independent Western thought is impossible

In modern society we are faced with a never ending inescapable onslaught of consumerism through images presented from the media beginning almost immediately at birth. The newly born infant is given clothes embedded with a character from a show that plays colorful flashing pictures nested neatly between chunks of advertisement. These advertisements present adult scenarios and emotions in an attempt to cast a shroud of consumer desire onto the parents of the children, so that the illusion of necessity comes to be actualized in the form of a purchase. The very young child, still deep in the grip of infantile amnesia, is experiencing the shadow of the actual feeling of desire through the television screen. Just as the shadows from Plato's Allegory of the Cave are merely representations of the reality that is the men behind the flames, so too are the emotions we experience as we consume the fictional reality, through images, corruptions of what really is. This corrupt marriage between media, consumer capitalism, and the images that are endlessly aimed at our emotional reaction is, as Guy Debord titled his famous set of theses, The Society of the Spectacle. The spectacle is a representation of what the media, driven forward by consumer capitalism, has determined the ideal life should look. Since we are assaulted by the spectacle before we have the ability to have fluid thought (as were the generations before us albeit in a less technological fashion), we are raised believing that the spectacle represents what is right. Our behavior therefore is an attempt to succeed in the economic structure that exists only because we justify its economic path to internal peace based on the evidence of happiness presented by the advertising media. It is here that it becomes clear that the spectacle is no longer being ran by an entity other than itself as the whole of society. We desire the fictional emotions presented through the images so we emulate that behavior and, in doing so, bring the spectacle into reality. No longer can we say the spectacle is fiction; the spectacle is the only existence there is. Because of this if there was, hypothetically, an attempt made at a thought independent of the spectacle's eternal projection of images, this authentic experience would now be the fiction. The spectacle has devoured all. "In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood." - Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Thesis 9. http://www.antiworld.se... Through this devouring of emotional experience we can no longer claim any experience to be unique, authentic, or independent of the corruption of the spectacle. We are now many generations into the spectacle's fury and any traces of what unique, authentic, independent thought has long been absorbed and processed into the spectacle. Once the spectacle has it, it is then replicated and mass published so the entirety of society can experience the concept of an experience. We know what it is to be angry because the spectacle had shown it to us. Now, though it may be based on an authentic injustice, the actual emotion and thought that occurs has been corrupted since we had already seen anger in one of the spectacles images. Even if you, personally, had somehow managed to reach an age old enough to have mental fluidity to be able to process these experiences without ever having been exposed to a sample copy that the spectacle churns out, you would be basing that emotional experience on your observations of your parents/older siblings/caretaker; if they themselves have not ever came into significant contact with the spectacle as well then there is no logical way you could say that they exist in Western Culture. I have demonstrated, to an exact point, why Independent Western Thought is impossible.