Confucius's Media, The Moral Dictator Who Will Cause War

After reading Confucius’s The Analects, I have come to realize that the media is a perfect example of rhetorical influence on people. Like The Analects, the newspaper and news broadcast channels have a secondary purpose which stands beside the one that is to inform. This objective is that it wants the people to have their same point of view regarding a certain situation, person, or organization. This text has taught me to be firm on my beliefs when choosing to accept media into my attention and time. Even Confucius has opinions which I disagree with, like when he says that “As for music, listen only to the Shao and Wu. Prohibit the tunes of Zeng, and keep glib people at a distance--- for the tunes of Zeng are licentious, and glib people are dangerous.” (15.11) Here, I believe that Confucius tries to mess with our perspectives regarding the tunes of Zeng and glib people. He contradicts himself later by stating that “When the multitude hates a person, you must examine them and judge for yourself. The same holds true for someone whom the multitude loves.” (15. 28) I believe this applies to the multitude as well as the media. In this way, there are some points of view which I agree with, as well as there are some which I disagree with. If The Analects have taught me something, it is to not believe everything I read. Surely, there are some points which are logically correct, but I think he uses the momentum that such opinions give him to throw other opinions which aren’t so logical at us. While he may be very open minded and is preoccupied on the good of the group as opposed to the good of the individual, I believe he misuses the term individual and transforms group into army of clones which he will lead to a Utopia. In my opinion, he lacks some perspective regarding people’s individuality.

I agree with David’s blog, Conservative Rightness, which speaks about the way in which a society’s rituals is what holds it together, because we are not advanced enough to tolerate people with different rituals within our society. This has made the world divide into very marked cultural groups. The acceptance of variety is limited, and thus, we are left ignorant on our world’s cultural richness. We are blinded by our media to believe generalizations with futher divide us, and which ends up creating war. This is why I believe that the media is primarily responsible for war. It causes repression, hatred, generalization fallacies, and intolerance. It leaves us in the dark.