{"id":776,"date":"2021-06-16T18:25:13","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T22:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/?p=776"},"modified":"2021-06-16T19:21:06","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T23:21:06","slug":"reading-gurdjieff-on-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/reading-gurdjieff-on-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Gurdjieff: On Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the process of gathering what Mr. Gurdjieff wrote about journalism and journalists, I&#8217;ve put together some brief notes from <em>Meetings with Remarkable Men<\/em> p. 18-28 on just what he wrote on the subject:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Journalism is a fundamental evil that exerts a poisonous influence on mutual relations among people today and offers nothing whatsoever to the development of the mind.<\/li>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<li>Accelerates the atrophy of people\u2019s last possibilities for acquiring data to remember oneself.<\/li>\n<li>Journalism is the cause for contemporary man\u2019s thinking further separation from individuality and thereby conscience, weakening the mind until it is open without resistance to deceit, delusion, without well-founded thinking or sane judgement, and instead, incredulity, indignation, fear, false shame, hypocrisy, pride, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Several examples are given:\n<ul>\n<li>Family died from eating spoiled sausages through the influence of false advertising.<\/li>\n<li>False advertising about an actress.<\/li>\n<li>False advertising about an artist.<\/li>\n<li>False report of an unprincipled employer led to suicide.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Critics who know nothing of what they criticize; music, for example.<\/li>\n<li>Journalism develops our intellect like an Edison phonograph and our feelings to the fineness of a cow.<\/li>\n<li>The leaders of contemporary civilization are incapable of knowing the significance of the effect of journalism on man.<\/li>\n<li>Leaders of former civilizations would never have allowed journalism to exist.<\/li>\n<li>Met with society of literati and journalists, and they were young, weak, effeminate, and their parents were drunkards or suffered from other passions through will-lessness; or had their own hidden bad habits.<\/li>\n<li>Journalists and writers strongly support each other and praise each other highly but are nullities. Their readers do not see they are nullities.<\/li>\n<li>Astonishing that governments do not recognize and destroy journalism as the cause of many crimes and misunderstandings.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Prior to addressing the subject of journalism and journalists, Mr. Gurdjieff had raised the topic of the difference between ancient and contemporary literature, which will be detailed in a subsequent post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the process of gathering what Mr. Gurdjieff wrote about journalism and journalists, I&#8217;ve put together some brief notes from Meetings with Remarkable Men p. 18-28 on just what he wrote on the subject: Journalism is a fundamental evil that exerts a poisonous influence on mutual relations among people today and offers nothing whatsoever to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gurdjieffism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robcouture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}