Marshall McLuhan is most famous for popularizing the notion that “the medium is the message.”  He did so in a somewhat lengthy and very complicated book called Understanding Media, first published in 1964. The theory notes that the content of media isn’t so important as the medium itself. For example, even when content is similar, a person who gets his news from the internet is going to have an entirely different relationship with others and with the world in general, than a person who watches television for news.

In an effort to popularize his theories further, McLuhan released a book in 1967 called The Medium is the Massage (Note that it is “Massage” not “Message”).  The book features a variety of unusual images and sparse text, but is designed to quickly communicate the central ideas in McLuhan’s theories.  Consequently, it is full of McLuhan’s more anti-status quo observations such as this one:

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story , “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”

In America today, the people who run just about everything are all exceptionally well-adjusted. They know that to question the conventional wisdom about anything might bring a label of “kook” or “crank,” so unusual propositions or unpopular ideas are steadfastly avoided. This is all thoroughly encouraged through media, but also especially through public education through which unusual ideas are both shunned and ridiculed.

Parents, of course, frightened of having unpopular or unusual children, encourage their children to be “well-adjusted,” and this is just one of the many ways we fail our children.