The exploitation of sex and violence in the media continues to cause controversy. In the United States, whenever legislation is proposed to control the broadcast of violent or pornographic images on television or the internet, it provokes a storm of protests from intellectuals invoking freedom of expression.
If human rights are considered in isolation, without taking responsibilities into account, there will never be a solution to the problem. We are allowing violence to become our daily bread, to the point that the average American teenager has seen forty thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television before turning nineteen. Violence is implicitly presented as the best way to solve a problem, and sometimes as the only way. It is glorified and, at the same time, dissociated from physical pain, as it only involves visual images.
This attitude extends to many other fields. Boxer Mike Tyson became the highest-paid athlete in history – 75 million dollars in one year. For what? To punch another person.
It cannot be denied that this general attitude towards things in the media increases the use of violence in reality. Any control over these excesses is denounced as a gag on freedom of expression, but without any control, we will see more and more violence. Undoubtedly, the problem is the lack of any sense of responsibility. The producers who broadcast these television programs or organize such contests know very well, deep down, that what they are doing is far from helping humanity. But the public is fascinated by violence and sex, and commercially this works very well. The producers only see money to be made, while lawmakers are paralyzed by the fear of even touching on people’s freedom of expression.
The result is a complete ignorance of responsibility and an inability to translate this notion into law or convention. In the end, a sense of responsibility has to come from the maturity of individuals, not from restrictive laws. And for individuals to reach such maturity, spiritual principles that make inner change possible must be alive and well in society, rather than cruelly absent.
Source: Matthieu Ricard