Incite Magazine

Sam Colbert and Anna Kulikov

Artwork by Joshua Lewis

One of the first things you’ll learn about 18^th-century thinker Immanuel Kant in an introductory philosophy course is that, in his nearly eighty years of life, he never once traveled more than ten miles outside of his hometown. And yet, despite his lack of foreign exploration, he’s been credited as the greatest philosopher since the ancient Greeks.

Like Kant, my travels have yet to take me very far from home. (This, of course, is only the beginning of a long list of striking similarities between the great philosopher and myself.) But I’d like to believe that a life of limited geography is not necessarily one lacking insight and excitement. Whatever your routine is, there’s fun to be had.

In, “For Queen and Country”, Kathryn Morrison discusses how, over time, the protagonists of our adventure stories have changed from being the Hero to the Everyman. In an effort to add excitement to her life, Meg Peters puts a twist on each day of the week in “Manic Meg’s Wacky Week”. Jane van Koeverden and Leanna Katz go looking for wild times at a downtown Hamilton bingo hall in “Happiness is Playing Bingo?”

Beyond that, Incite’s ‘Adventure’-themed December issue has nacho reviews, tales of risky fashion statements, an analysis of what technology has done to the fun in our lives, and a little poetry.

So go put your bed on the other side of the room. Substitute a few new ingredients in tonight’s dinner recipe. Have a few drinks, buy a watermelon, walk with it to an old friend’s house, and see what happens.

Our hope with this month’s issue is that it encourages you to try something a little different.

- SC

I have given in to temptation, and will begin this month’s editorial with Star Trek flair. Cue Sir Patrick Stewart: “These are the voyages of the magazine Incite. Its continuing mission to explore strange new themes, to seek out new stories and new witticisms, to boldly go where no one has gone before…”

While such an introduction may be thematically appropriate, I have just reached a new height of nerdom. In print, no less.

This month’s theme created the opportunity for our writers to tell tales of grand adventures past and to embark on new ones. Join Larry Evans on his risky self-guided tour of Hamilton’s abandoned places in “Urban Exploration”, and Devra Charney and Kaila Radan on their first Geocaching mission right on McMaster’s campus in “Gotta Cache ‘Em All”.

Adira Winegust recounts her experiences hitchhiking in a foreign land while Charlotte Mussels and Julia Redmond forgo the GO for a long bike ride from Hamilton to Toronto in “Hitchhiker’s Guide Meets Bicycle Diaries”. Karina Redick shares the story of her journey “In the Warm Heart of Africa” and discusses the implications of so-called ‘development tourism’.

The Romanian dramatist, Eugene Ionesco, once said, “A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” Incite has always striven to be an outlet not only for writers, but for artists as well – and this month is no different. Inside our pages, beautiful art and photography awaits!

So, with a cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot), embark on your own adventure through Incite. Fair winds and following seas, dear reader!

- AK

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Check out the full January issue here!

Leanna Katz and Jane van Koeverden  

Artwork by Brianna Smrke

Thursday night: it’s club night and we’re looking fly. Waiting at the bus stop, there’s a group of girls in miniskirts and stilettos. We’re wearing our boyfriends’ oversized t-shirts and faculty swag. Cars honk at us as they pass by. Okay. Maybe not at us.

The girls might look tighter, brighter, and hotter than us. They might be louder, gigglier, and drunker than us. But no one’s got a buzz like us. They’ll spend their night dancing, flirting, and hooking up in a dark crowded club on Hess. We’ll spend ours in a brightly-lit, high-stakes, and even higher-intensity Bingo Hall at Main and Hughson.

The Delta Bingo Hall. You dig?

We part ways with the broads on the bus. They spend their ten bucks on cover charge. We spend ours on a bingo booklet.

“You’re late,” the lady behind the counter tells us. But she lets us in anyway. Hurriedly, she explains the rules. We nod, but don’t understand any of it.

Calmly, we find seats in the thick of the action. Leanna tries to sit beside a lady in her mid-fifties, clearly a pro, engrossed in her game. The lady asks Leanna not to sit there; she uses that seat to rest her feet. Instead, we settle ourselves across from the man who would take us under his wing for the evening.

The man, whose name we never learned, is wearing a Harley Davidson Motorcycle cap, which complements the spider tattoo on his forearm. His facial hair eclipses all the Movember staches  we saw last month, and his mullet is sensational. He has at least eight brightly-coloured bingo dabbers, each emblazoned with “the ink of winners.” He had already been here for hours when we arrived midway through the fifth game. As we quibble on what to do, he gently gives us guidance.

We try to make small talk with our new friend. “You come here a lot?”

“Yes,” he answers.

“What do you like about it?” we press.

“I have a terrible gambling addiction,” he says.

“Oh.” The small talk ends.

We turn our attention back to the game, dabbing furiously. It is simultaneously overwhelming and boring. Someone yelps, “Bingo!” and the game is up. A frustrated growl rumbles through the room. It’s more than just a reflex; it’s genuine disappointment. But nobody turns to their neighbour to complain. This is a solitary game. People haven’t come here to socialize. They’ve come to play bingo.

“Have you ever won?” we ask the man across from us.

“About three years ago,” he says, “got the jackpot, $3000.”

“What’d you spend it on?”

“Bingo.”

“Oh.” The small talk is over. Again.

The silence makes us self-conscious. We look around, aware of the grey walls, grey carpet, grey tables, grey bingo cards, and grey hair. There’s a buzz of talk in the air, but nobody’s actually speaking to each other. The ripping of pages from bingo booklets and syncopated beeping of heart monitors compete to be heard. The announcer’s voice drones above everything in an unintelligible garble. Clearly, we don’t speak bingo announcer yet.

A lady from the table next to us calls out, “Bingo!” and the last game is over. Neither we nor our mulleted friend have won a penny. We turn to commiserate with him, but he’s already shifted his weight from his bingo hall seat to an electric wheelchair. Without a word, he drives away, the pirate ship flags affixed to his wheelchair fluttering behind him.

We get up and head for the exit. The night was not what we were expecting. We came to be part of a group of eccentric Hamiltonians, but we left with a punctuated sense of how alone a person can feel, even in a crowded bingo hall.

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Check out the full January issue here!

Andrew Prine

A former Incite editor-in-chief lives on a prairie, mounts mountains, and crosses the dateline in search of adventure. Here’s a short piece about the first leg of his round-the-world trip:

Photo courtesy of Andrew Prine

On the morning of my 22^nd birthday, I woke up shivering, stiff, and glad to be alive. It was the 14^th of September, and though summer was still going strong in south-western Ontario, autumn had painted our Saskatchewan campsite with a hard frost. By the time I’d made it back from the composting toilet, the sun was just starting to creep over the tree line. Its raw, red rays lit the icy tall grass like torches. Despite the startling beauty that the sunlight revealed, I couldn’t help thinking, “fat load of good you were last night.”

Chris, Angela and I, running from summer-long brush-ins with the real world, had been on the road for eight days. We christened our carriage with a day trip from Sarnia to Point Pelee, and, after one last night at home, sallied forth. Driving up and west along the Great Lakes, we’d been impressed by the rugged, wild, and stereotypically Canadian beauty, but the prairies at harvest time hit us even harder.

Ontario extended a lot farther past Thunder Bay than we’d expected, but when we finally made it to Manitoba, the transition was surprisingly abrupt. As if sanded bare, the hills, lakes, and trees that had bordered the highway since Sarnia suddenly disappeared. We’d set aside four days for the prairies before making for Calgary, Edmonton, and the Rockies. Hoping to give our faithful steed, a beige 2001 Pontiac Montana affectionately known as Chuck, a little something to cut his teeth on before tackling the Western Cordillera, we thought we’d try the Cypress Hills, one of the relatively few elevation changes to be found on the great plains.

The rain had held off since half-way up Lake Huron, but when we arrived at the park, there was a price to pay for our good luck with the weather. Cypress Hills was under a fire ban, and though we had enough peanut butter, bread, and apples to make it through the night, we’d been looking forward to making a hearty pot of campfire chilli. Since our gear would also have to serve us in Australia’s tropical north in just a few weeks’ time, we’d packed light. Without fire, chilli was out of the question, but chilly we did get.

Not long after sunrise, awake, alert, and eager to regain feeling in our digits, we packed up our campsite, skipped breakfast, and thought we’d take the scenic park roads across the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. Unfortunately, the fire ban also covered internal combustion engines, so after a few roadblocks, breathtaking lookout points, and close calls with escaped cattle, we finally admitted defeat and left the park by the route we came in, returning, embarrassed, to the Trans-Canada.

A few more hours of driving brought us to the home of our Calgary hostess, Chris’s sister, Natalie. Glad for a chance to shower, shave, and sleep indoors, we decided to postpone any birthday-brations until we were better rested. Sympathetic to our plight, Natalie assured us that there would be ample opportunity for revelry at a University of Calgary Engineering event to be held just two nights later.

The goal for the evening was to board converted school buses, drive out to rural Alberta, and drink a bar dry. The unlucky sports bar in Okotoks that was their victim, filled with throngs of young, rowdy engineering students, was something of a new experience for me, but it wasn’t without some comforting familiarity; I was, as always, one of the worst dancers.

Stepping out to get some air, I also witnessed a fairly unique attempt at courtship. A young man introduced himself to two women smoking in the parking lot and offered to show them how he earned the name “Indiana Skywalker.” Laughing, the girls agreed. The man walked to his car. After a few moments of rummaging, he returned carrying a fedora, a whip, and a light sabre. Whatever can be said of his ultimately unsuccessful performance, it certainly didn’t lack originality.

The next day, after a somewhat late start, we drove to Drumheller, climbed the world’s largest dinosaur, stopped at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and rekindled a long-dormant childhood passion for palaeontology. It meant we’d have to face a night-time trip into Edmonton, something we’d been hoping to avoid, given the state of Chuck’s headlights, but we had absolutely no regrets.

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Check out the rest of the January issue here!

Sam Colbert and Anna Kulikov

Photography by Matthew Paulson (Flickr)

In Woody Allen’s recent film, Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway shares his thoughts with an aspiring author, played by Owen Wilson, on what it means to truly live in the moment.

“Death no longer lingers in the mind,” he says. “Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and loving, become your sole reality.”

While Hemingway was speaking specifically about “sharing your body and heart with a great woman,” his sentiment echoes the more general Buddhist principle of mindfulness. To achieve enlightenment, it says, one must be alive and aware in the present moment. The present is, after all, the only point in time that we may ever inhabit.

Mindfulness provides some consolation to those of us who struggle with the notion of death, for, because we will never be dead, our existence can be infinite. Yet, we don’t tend to think in this way. We see ourselves bound between our first and last moments of consciousness as though between two walls. The nonphysical space that is our life seems just as real to us.

In “Next to Normal”, Lily Hastings recalls how the confines of a mental ward resemble those of her own mind. Aaron Jacobs provides a technical explanation of how time and space really aren’t so different in “Let’s Get Physical”. Michael Teichman explores the spacing of conversation in “Pause”, and Nolan Matthews tells us what’s really happening during the mental gaps of daydreams in “Spacing Out”.

In as loose and metaphorical a sense as we could take it, the theme of Incite’s November issue is space. I hope you take the time to enjoy it.

- SC

A room of our own.

That is what this magazine has come to mean to those of us who dream and create inside its pages. It is comforting to know that there is a small corner of the university that belongs wholly to our thoughts and our ideas, a corner that we are creatively licensed to renovate monthly.

In this issue, our writers have braved all sorts of unfamiliar spaces and situations for the noble cause of narrative. Amongst the most courageous is Stephanie Wan, who relinquished the comforts and privacy of her single room in order to stay in a triplebunk loft with complete strangers. She writes about her experience in “Trading Spaces”.

For his adventures in “Too Close for Comfort”, Dylan Hickson may have been better prepared had he first consulted Incite’s manifest on social norms: “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”, compiled by Anthony D’Ambrosio, Devra Charney, and Julia Redmond. Dayna Taylor, meanwhile, on her journey of people-watching, naturally begins to wonder, who is watching her?

Just in time for midterms, Meg Peters reviews McMaster’s unconventional study spaces in “Where Not to Work”, while our resident Freudians Alisha Sunderji and Jen Squibb wonder “If Rooms Could Talk”, just what kind of secrets they would reveal about their inhabitants. And as for myself, I take advantage of the Rainy Days of autumn to visit the “Home of the Gods”, gladly leaving behind numbing November realities.

So, without further ado I welcome you, dear reader, into our space!

Won’t you stay awhile?

- AK

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Check out the rest of the November issue here!

Shawn Fazel

A thick cloud of incense smoke fills the room as we enter and take off our shoes. While we relax and prepare our bodies and minds for the next session, ambient music fills my mind and I let go.

These yoga studios are not your traditional gyms, there is a spiritual element here that is often either overlooked or dismissed. In an age where “enlightenment” is strictly an intellectual affair, the notion of developing your “soul” has fallen out of style. That is, if you believe it exists.

Similar to the question of the soul, comes the mind-body connection. While there have been significant advances in the fields of neuropsychology and neurophysiology, the connection is still an heavily debated topic. While we have a good understanding of the senses and their physiology, it is the mental interpretation of these inputs, combined with the mystery of the mind that creates our sense of consciousness. This is our awareness of the reality surrounding us, and our relationship to that reality.

Many spiritual traditions have explained it as a filtration of reality, like clouds covering the sun. Our subconscious, built throughout our life, projects itself onto our perception. Essentially, we perceive reality through our distinct personality and in such we live in a mental space created by us and sole to us. This projection distorts our reality, and most cultures have found ways to deconstruct this projection and reconnect with the “ultimate reality.” This spiritual dimension is important in all cultures; it is the responsibility of our spiritual guides, from shamans to priests and everyone in between.

Many will acknowledge that they filter reality but they do little to understand or access its true nature. It is in the hidden crevasses of our unconscious mind – do you dare to travel there? Do you dare to uncover long-repressed memories and see deeper truths? It isn’t a voyage everyone is willing to take; it requires determination, courage, and insight. Your subconscious might have you confront difficult truths of your past or uncertainties about your future. It isn’t easy to see the world differently. However, the benefits can outweigh the costs. While we can rationalize the human condition, we cannot understand or rationalize our meaning, only find peace within.

Attaining a higher state of awareness and exploring beyond the limits of our mental space is not as important today as it once was. Philosophers of the Age of Reason stressed a rational basis for enlightenment, delegitimizing organized religious institutions and emphasizing the individual nature of the spiritual relationship with reality. This framework marked the rise of Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The translation of the Bible, which conveniently coincided with the invention of the printing press, allowed for anyone to read the Bible and develop an understanding of Christianity for  his or herself outside of the Church’s authority. Enlightenment came to reflect that individual nature of understanding – the development of individual thinking and understanding. Therefore, freedom of speech and the freedom to individually believe and share in a perspective gained utmost importance. This gives everyone the means to enlighten his or herself.

Kant’s enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity … the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another … where there cause of self-imposition lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” Kant denounces all guidance to enlightenment – because it must be free of bias. When one can pay for a doctor to take care of the body, a plumber to unclog the toilet and a priest to heal the soul, where is the incentive to learn these things for oneself? Capitalism, Kant argues, shadows the incentive to gain spiritual enlightenment. But overthrowing a thought system will only make room for another. Kant puts it more elegantly: “Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.”

This is universal. Put this into the context of the Arab Spring for instance, and you see that the revolution is still taking place inside the hearts and minds of the oppressed. Without personal enlightenment, individual thought and the doubting of the propositions around us, we can be made to believe anything. Look at Hermain Cain, advocating a 9-9-9 tax plan that has no basis in any sound economic policy. George W. Bush convinced us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and justified the bombing of Baghdad with American safety. The appeal to our conditioned perception of reality only strengthens its position and distances you further from ultimate truth.

There are many means of escaping the influence of others and searching for personal enlightenment on one’s own. Without guidance though, it is difficult to know where to begin. Atheists looking for meaning in the world find only randomness and emptiness, which isn’t all that comforting. Dabbling in different religions and spiritualities is common, but stereotypes and strict rules discourage many. Where can we turn?

Voltaire advocates deism, where the rationality of the universe is both the subject of admiration and of careful study. Like “mice on a ship to Egypt”, Voltaire postulates that God does not meddle with human affairs but only sets the stage for them. Some Indian spiritual traditions frame karma as the accumulations of past actions that form kilesa, which distort our perception of reality, sanskara. There are many, many different schools of thought on the matter, and equally as many means of escaping the boring mental space we occupy every day. These include meditation, yoga, fasting, sleep deprivation, isolation, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and prayer. Some indigenous cultures relied on psychedelic drugs such as cannabis, psilocybin, peyote, salvia, ayahuasca, opiates, and tobacco among others. Many of these drugs are illegal and I would argue that the government has enough incentive to keep us from enlightenment. But that’s for another time.

Ultimately, it is important to take time to explore our consciousness and our relationship with reality. Whatever means we choose, it will take determination, strength and resolve to change our prejudices and expand our minds. It is a worthwhile endeavour and must not be taken lightly, so explore different techniques like tai chi or meditation. Maybe join that yoga studio nearby with the funky name and shoeless hipsters, and get back to reality.

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Check out the rest of the November issue here!

Lily Hastings

This story is not about hope. This story is about the time I lost my sanity and my freedom.

For years I had teetered on the edge of mental stability until, in my first year at McMaster, I fell into a deep depression. At first I just felt miserable. I didn’t sleep much, I didn’t eat much, and I seemed to cry all the time. As the weeks and then months passed, the situation got worse. My mind became a hostile place in which I no longer wanted to be. I was depressed, delusional, and suicidal. The world no longer seemed real. It existed as a caricature of itself that I viewed from the wrong end of a telescope.

One day during a routine appointment, the psychiatrist decided I was a danger to myself and committed me to the Acute Mental Health Ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital. By signing a piece of paper, she signed away my freedom. Two burly paramedics and a campus security guard escorted me through the student centre, into an ambulance, to the hospital, and directly up to the mental ward.

The Acute Mental Health Ward only has the one door, which is kept under lock and key by the adjacent nurses’ station. The nurses were simultaneously our carers and jailers. They attended to us, but, from their station, kept us locked inside. There were large windows that did not open. The ceiling was white, the floor tiled, and the walls an institutional grey. There was one long, square hallway. I wandered through the hall trapped in the ward and in my mind. I got lost in that hall.

Locked in that mental ward I lost all sense of freedom and privacy. The only air to breathe was stale and laced with disinfectant. There was a small porch – you had to get a guard to unlock the door out to it – but it was so recessed into the side of the building that little air blew through the heavy wire grating. The windows, which seemed like a blessing when I first came to the ward, taunted the patients locked inside. There were people everywhere. Patients wandered the halls, sat catatonically in the common room, or stayed in their rooms crying out in either pain or ecstasy. Nurses were constantly monitoring behaviour, eating habits, and sleeping patterns. Everything was prescribed; we were told when to wake up, when to eat, and when to take pills.

When I was in the ward, I felt less human at first. The people around me, just as un-human as myself, were shocking portraits of the chaos and darkness the mind can hold. My roommate, for example, was a nice woman when I met her, but she changed at night. She laughed in her sleep. All night I heard wild howls from the other side of the room. Every so often she would get out of bed to wander around, making threatening comments about me as if I wasn’t there. It was terrifying. I was afraid of a lot of people initially, but the more time I spent there, the less scary they became. We were all the same, really, stuck together in the ward with nothing in common except our madness.

The worst part about being there was the boredom. Time slipped by ever so slowly. Some of the time I did nothing but lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling, at the walls, at my pillow. There were a few patients my age, and to pass the time we coloured polystyrene cups with chewed-up crayons.

One day, I happened upon a small piano locked away and was allowed to play. The only song I could remember, despite years of memorizing conservatory pieces, was Angels We Have Heard on High. For hours I played that one Christmas carol. It staved off the boredom and was much better than what was happening in my head.

My best memory was of a conversation with another patient. We each knew that there was something wrong with the other, but it didn’t matter. It went unsaid that we didn’t want to be friends, didn’t even necessarily want to remember the other.

Our conversation was honest and stark. It drifted from suicide to medication to school and to life in general. Whenever I saw him after that, he smiled at me, but we are not friends and will never see each other again. I don’t even know his name.

Being locked up did have its benefits. I was saved from my own destructive power, and eventually from the overwhelming darkness in my head. I wasn’t cured, but I felt more capable of living when I was finally released.

Since leaving, I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. There have been a few emergency room visits, a few close calls, and a flirtation with psychosis, but I’m still alive. Manic depression is a lifelong illness. It is both unbearable and unbelievably brilliant, and though I have to live with it for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Check out the rest of the November issue here!

Click here to download the complete Oct 2011 issue

Sam Colbert and Anna Kulikov

Sure, everybody lies. But, for that matter, every path has its puddle, every rose has its thorn, and every day is just one closer to death. An untruth, I think, is not necessarily evil; it’s just a blemish on the complex and creative ways in which we relate to each other.

Admittedly, there is something sinister, for example, about deceitful corporations. They can omit or contradict truths, delivering profit to their executives and hardship to the rest. In “Media Misinformation”, Stephen Clare writes about the ability of media outlets to control public opinion. Asha Behdinan, Leila Gaind, and Victoria McKinnon tell us what we’ve really been eating by exposing lies in the food industry. In his inaugural column, Shawn Fazel views modern corporate influence in the same way that Thomas Hobbes saw the authority of the Church in the 17th century.

Much more innocent and sensitive are the lies between loved ones. Meg Peters and Nicki Varkevisser share personal accounts of how their parents passed down fairy tales and holiday traditions. In “Being Kacper”, Kacper Niburski reflects on when he learned that, as an infant, his name was switched with that of his twin brother.

But on some moral middle ground are the lies we all tell each other in trying to keep our identities robust and relevant in our respective social circles. Whether you’re the depraved (“Hate the Game” by Lily Hastings) or the flirtatious (“Femme Fatale” by Anqi Shen), the vengeful or the greedy, the self-conscious or the sad, the protector or the prey, a lie can make a life.

So live and let live; lie and let lie.

- SC

What would my lies taste like, I wonder? Would they be sour in the anger they incite, or bitter in the trust at which they wear away? Or would they instead be warm and sweet in the false and fleeting comfort they create? I think that if they were palatable, my lies wouldn’t have just one taste – they’d have them all. Lies are complete culinary experiences, taste turning to taste as they go through the necessary stages: formation, execution, and consequence.

For lies live lives of their own, much as people do. Some live quiet and ‘white’ ones, generating only the slightest ripples in the web of social interconnectedness before being forgotten. Abdullahi Sheikh explores these in “To Tell the Truth?”, while Incite’s resident philosophers ponder whether or not such deceptions, however useful, are ethically justified in “Philosophical Pragmatism”.

But many of the lies we tell are not so small and not so innocent. Some lies are big – big enough to swallow whole continents and shape the victories of the greatest wars of the last century. Aaron Jacobs chronicles the most famous of these in “The Great Ones”. Meanwhile, Stephanie Wan investigates lies that pervade different cultures in “Liars Without Borders”.

Myself, I find “A Guide to Deception” particularly useful, because I am just as bad of a liar as I am a cook, and since my culinary legacy is that of cratered muffins, raw potatoes, and burnt toast, you can just imagine that my lying could use a course or two. So savour, dear reader, the delicious deception of Incite’s first issue of 2011/2012, but remember to take it all with a grain of salt. Or pepper; it’s your call.

- AK

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Check out the rest of the October issue here!

Shawn Fazel
Columnist

Thomas Hobbes wrote in Chapter XIII of Leviathan: “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal vir­tues.” Withforce as physical dominance and fraud as mental dominance, the use of the word “cardinal” was especially ambiguous, considering Leviathan’s aim was to discredit the Church’s stronghold on education and information.

The final book, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, doesn’t describe Hell, but in­stead the darkness of ignorance, as op­posed to the light of true knowledge. Hobbes attacks the Church for purpose­fully misinterpreting the scriptures – but more importantly, he lays blame on its followers for not realizing this: “The enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance.” Hobbes describes the means by which the Church controls information through the misrepresenta­tion of the scriptures, stories of demons and the repression of knowledge and truth. While many would disagree with Hobbes’ view of “the life of man, soli­tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” I can find little argument against his views on human proneness to ignorance. The idea is omnipresent, like in Voltaire’s Candide, which shows us that “cultivat­ing our garden” (in other words, tending to our own affairs while leaving larger concerns to others) ensures happiness, partly through ignorance and partly our small sense of achievement. Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is espe­cially relevant in today’s age of Facebook and Google, where all internet activity is monitored and turned into valuable data for marketers. Like slaughterhouse-bound pigs enjoying free meals and lodg­ing, if you’re not paying for a service, then you’re not the consumer; you’re the product.

Members of the media, who occupy the place of social influence held by the Church during Hobbes’ time, do little to free your mind from control. They can withhold good information, or repeat bad information ad nauseam (Obama is a socialist), that is ad hominem (Obama is an evil socialist), appeals to authority , appeals to fear (“terrorists”) and appeals to prejudice (“axis of evil”). As students, we may believe we are capable of seeing through this, but we are not the norm of society. Critical thinking requires con­tinuous effort. If you have enough men­tal energy to pick apart your news every night while working a full-time job and raising two kids, then congrats: you’d probably be voting Ralph Nader if you lived in the U.S. (or you would have left). In Canada, you may not have that many options.

Your news source is likely shap­ing its information so that you come to a predetermined conclusion, which you will believe is impartial and detached from any moral argument. Instead, your conclusion is based on a biased version of the facts and has already been “fil­tered” through the standard of morality of our state that will inevitably seep into you, whether you like it or not. Whether you get your news from BBC, CBC, FOX, Economist or Al Jazeera, the media is fighting for your mind so that they can have your money. From money, they can develop new instruments to get their message across. In the U.S., this prob­lem is particularly visible, and it comes as no surprise that the Koch Industry, a multi-billion-dollar private energy con­glomerate, is a financial supporter of the Tea Party. Despite the small size of the Tea Party movement, it has profited from huge free advertising from virtually eve­ry news source, to the extent that eve­ryone in North America knows of them.

They fight for government deregulation of industry, meaning more opportunities to make money for companies, believing that the wealth generated by the multi-nationals will eventually “trickle down” to them (and “trickle-down” economics, as any economics student will tell you, are a complete falsehood). Essentially, this political movement is no differ­ent than any corporate operation, and the Tea Party members are the product (brains not included).

If we put this back into the context of Hobbes, then we find that the Church has transformed into the corporation. Actually, they are one and the same and always have been: religion profited the Church, just as ideology today profits the corporation. Looking at it this way, it reminds us of Marx’s view of religion as the opium of the people. Marx puts it very elegantly: religion is but a creation of man to appease our desire for spiritual fulfillment. “It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality … The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their con­dition is to call on them to give up a con­dition that requires illusions.”

Guy Debord later makes the anal­ogy to marketing: as industries battle for our attention, they make us associ­ate happiness with their products. We begin to look for this happiness through consuming, and the cycle continues. In many ways, consuming is our opium of the people.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World takes religion to a whole new level. A dystopia set in year 2019, where humans are bred in warehouses and raised to ful­fil a predetermined social role and sta­tus. There is no religion of the state, but a drug called soma that plays the same role: it is a political tool that systemati­cally drugs the population as “insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ide­as.” This turns Marx on his head; instead of religion being the opium of the people, opium becomes the religion of the peo­ple. The people willingly surrender their ability to think critically and are thereby unable to hold their oppressors account­able. This is what Hobbes means by de­ception being fuelled by the ignorance of the audience. Propaganda in Brave New World, however, does not only rely on misinformation, but instead exploits man’s infinite appetite for distractions. We are addicted to distractions, and as students, we know this quite well. An­other example would be the US inva­sion of Iraq, even after the “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction was found to have been a lie. Are the people of the USA holding their government account­able?

Today, we find false hope in religion and consolation for our condition. “Hope springs eternal from the human breast,” said Alexander Pope. If religion is dy­ing out now, then it will be replaced by something equally revolting, perhaps a strong sense of individualism (Ayn Rand style, God forbid), or sheer idiocy. Maybe we’re better off like Candide, tending to our own affairs.

In his 1896 cycle of poems, A Shrop­shire Lad, A.E. Housman suggests we find consolation for the state of affairs in a glass:

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.

Stephen Clare
Contributor

Everyone remembers the nuclear di­saster at the Fukushima Daiichi in Japan a few months ago. How could we not? The story was plastered over ev­ery newspaper and blared from every TV for weeks. However, the media went over the top, devolving into mass-hysteria. Ac­cording to them, not only were the reac­tors overheating, nuclear Armageddon was imminent. Not only were radioactive particles airborne, they had the po­tential to travel across the ocean and spread around the globe. With each day of the crisis, the headlines got more sensational, heightening the concerns of the audience.

Why is the media so alarmist? This was not an isolated incident. There are countless examples of main­stream media corporations spreading disinformation and outright lies to make their stories more exciting. The answer is simple. They are selling the news to us and they need to make it as exciting as possible. Take, for example, the avian flu. Whenever an outbreak oc­curs, media outlets pounce on the story as “the next pan­demic.” However, according to the World Health Organi­zation only 330 people world­wide have died of bird flu in the last eight years. By com­parison, between 250 000 and 500 000 people die every year of the regular ol’ flu. Similar cases of me­dia hype are seen every time a scary new infectious disease makes an appearance. Recall the SARS scare and swine flu.

Media corporations have a lot of pow­er. We all depend upon newspapers and news reports to keep us up to date in a fast-changing, complicated world. As such, it is the media’s duty to disseminate accurate news Think, for a moment, of the influence the media holds. When it claims a pandem­ic is imminent, people completely change their lives in response. They skip work, buy masks, stop going to public places, and stock up on food and medication, for ex­ample. The economy suffers appreciably.

Yet, despite these potentially damag­ing effects, stories are still embellished. The media is selling the news to us, mak­ing it more interesting than it really is in order to keep us glued to the TV screen or buying the newspaper every day. Last February, for example, Fox News used mis­leading video footage to exaggerate the violence of a pro-union protest in Wiscon­sin. They were only caught because some wary viewer noticed palm trees in the back­ground of the footage. If your U.S. geog­raphy is up to par, you will recognize that very few palm trees grow in Wisconsin. Fox was using footage from more violent protests in California.

That event was relatively harmless, but the misinformation gets more danger­ous, especially when it affects coverage of high-profile crimes. In these instances, the media’s effect on public opinions can literally be a matter of life and death. We all experienced it recently regarding the Casey Anthony murder trial in which the defendant was alleged to have killed her two-year old daughter. In that case, televi­sion host Nancy Grace was a perfect embodiment of the media’s hyperbole and pre­sumption during the trial. Anthony was condemned long before the verdict was given by the jury. Every night her face was plastered over the news with the degrad­ing nickname, “Tot Mom.” And the public got their in­formation regarding the trial almost exclusively from the news. Few among us took the time to watch the trial per­sonally and make our own judgements. When Anthony was found not guilty, the public outrage was evidence of the media’s unfair report­ing.

Jim Morrison said “who­ever controls the media, controls the mind.” It’s the news media’s job to bring the people the facts, and it’s the people’s job to interpret and make judgements on those facts. However, news media has become a lucrative business, making money from selling us the news. Can they be blamed for sometimes distorting the facts to make them a more interesting? That’s debateable. Regardless, it happens, and it happens more often than you think. That leaves it up to us to be skeptical of the news and make an effort to draw on oth­ers sources and our own common sense, especially in a world that moves as fast as ours.

Artwork by Brianna Smrke

By Sam Godfrey. Published in the October 2011 issue.

Reading this issue of Incite may be enough to make a perfectly content individual such as yourself into a surly dried fruit of cynicism. “I can’t trust anyone except myself!” you may grumble as you eat your prunes while watching Wheel Of Fortune. Never fear: I’m here to tell you otherwise! I’m here to tell you that you can’t trust anyone, including yourself. You’d think that after a lifetime of knowing yourself, you could count on you when you need you most (you follow?). But the reality is that your body plays all sorts of tricks on you, anything from that feeling of falling when lying down, to unnoticed pregnancies, and “locked-in syndromes.”

First there are the Dennis the Menace-esque tricks: temporary paralysis, out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, and that pesky-yet-kind-of-fun feeling of falling just as you’re dozing off. As you may have noticed, all of these things happen most often just as you’re about to slip into sweet sleep. This pre-unconscious state is called hypnagogia and is responsible for a whole mess of corporeal deceptions. Sleep paralysis occurs just as someone is about to fall asleep or just after one has woken up, and is caused by either an early onset of REM or a REM cycle that has persisted into your conscious state, respectively. This paralysis lasts a mere moment but is sometimes accompanied by a perceived difficulty in breathing, imaginary sights and sounds, and superfluous emotion. It is most likely the culprit for people’s accounts of alien abductions. As for the oh-lord-almighty-I’m-hurtling-to-my-surely-untimely-death feeling, it turns out that your body is actually trying to help you out! These spasms are called hypnic myoclonic twitches and they occur in response to your brain interpreting your muscles relaxing as a sign that you are falling, and so it attempts to save you by activating them.

But hypnic twitches are about to seem pretty dull, as do most things when compared to (surprise!) pregnancy. Unnoticed gestation is actually relatively common. More than 1 in 500 pregnancies go unnoticed until four to five months along, and you – assuming of course that you have the proper parts for baby-carrying – are three times more likely to carry to full term unawares than to give birth to triplets. To represent that statistic in a more meaningful way: if you know a set of triplets, then you probably know three people whose mothers were ignorant of their existence until labour!

Alternatively, there are cases in which a woman who is not any more pregnant than I am – and I’m not, just to be clear – is convinced that she is with child. These are called hysterical pregnancies, named after the ‘feminine’ affliction of hysteria. False pregnancies, as they are also called, are the result of abrupt hormonal changes which bring about symptoms similar to those of pregnancy, although they can also be entirely psychological in origin. Occasionally, an intense want for, or an intense fear of pregnancy may also bring about these deceptive endocrinal changes. Isn’t the body ironic in its cruelty?

And finally, at the extreme end of the body’s practical joke spectrum, we find locked-in syndrome, or for the particularly pretentious: erebromedullospinal disconnection or Eingeschlossensein (the pronunciation of which may have unpleasant consequences). Those afflicted with locked-in syndrome have no motor function, except for that of the eyes – they can perceive everything, but can do nothing. This is caused by damage to the lower brain, leaving the upper regions unaffected. This is why the individual retains perfect cognitive function, but is condemned to paralysis. Unfortunately, there is currently no known cure, or even consistently effective treatments, for this condition. Though curiously they managed to do it on House…

As you may have gathered, your body is a conniving little bugger, probably bitter about those all-nighters, deep-fried ice creams, and sporadic treadmill visits. I suppose you could try to appease it by treating it with a little more tact and respect. But for now: more Wheel of Fortune.