Marshall McLuhan 1977 Interview - Violence as a Quest for Identity

Marshall McLuhan Full Interview 1977 Violence as a Quest for Identity TV Ontario 1977 The Mike McManus Show Host: Mike McManus Transcript: [McManus]Way back in the early fifties you predicted that the world was becoming a global Village. [McLuhan]We are going back into the bicameral mind that is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness. [McManus]But, it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly. [McLuhan]No, tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It is a full-time sport in tribal societies. [McManus]But, I had some idea as we got global and tribal we were going to try to - [McLuhan]The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other. [McManus]Why is it? Is it because of the nature of man? [McLuhan]His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. [McManus]Do you see any pattern of this in, for example the desires of Quebec to separate? [McLuhan]I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the way the American south felt about the Yankee north a hundred years ago. [McManus]Is this going to be a pattern right around the world? [McLuhan]Apparently, separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic and nationalistic little groups. [McManus]But in Quebec for example, like do you define it as the quest for identity? [McLuhan]Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers - these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed. [McManus]And all this is somehow an effect of the electronic age? [McLuhan]No, but people in all times have been this way. In our time, when things happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light. There is little time to get accustomed to anything. Even radio has sent tribal societies around theglobe up the wall with intensity of feeling. One of the major violence makers of our century has been radio. Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man. [McManus]Then, what does television do to that tribal man? [McLuhan]Well, I don’t think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. McCarthy was a very hot character and like Nixon, he made a very bad image on television. He was far too hot a character. He would have been much better on radio. [McManus]The investigations now of the CIA, the FBI and even our own, God forbid, RCMP, has this anything to do with the electronic age? [McLuhan]Yes, because we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they are in, we can put them under surveillance. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings on. [McManus]And invading privacy. [McLuhan]Yes, in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous. The light and the the message go right through us. At this moment, we are on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on T.V., you don’t have a physical body - you’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. I think this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their identity. [McManus]So that’s what this is doing to me? More information: Transcripts: