The radio environment turned the planet into a “1984” environment by 1934 said MM.
McLuhan knew that the nomenclature of “freedom”, “slavery”, “capitalism”, “fascism”, “communism”, etc. was useless after Aug., 1945, as the atomic bomb created a new hidden ground (“Big Brother goes inside”).
That’s why he created a language of effects so that the global citizenry could think about power and politics in a new way.
This was the “political” McLuhan that journalists and critics missed.
By 1975 MM was calling it a “planet of the dead”. I would say that was the condition for the Chemical Body.
But the new bodies being grown (TV and Chip) were going to create completely new vistas of “democracy”, “freedom”, and “power” that humanity had never enjoyed before.
The disservices (global identity crises in all the Bodies, included) were never subsequently delineated accurately (except by MM) since then.
Just as MM praised Lewis’ “THE ART OF BEING RULED” (1926) as being way more applicable to the 20th Century than Machiavelli’s “THE PRINCE” in a letter to Harold Innis in 1951, so should we praise TAKE TODAY as presenting proportionately a more relevant scenario than Lewis’ brilliant 1926 tome.
The exaggerated “emotions of multitude” today are actually about our TV and Chip Bodies, not the forlorn Chemical Body.
I would add that these “global identity crises in all the Bodies” created GREAT WEALTH in the increasingly virtual economies since 1970.
This GREAT WEALTH evoked incredible new inspirations, “causes”, models, sports, “arts”, lifestyles, illnesses, and counter-irritants which MM foresaw (more than anybody else) when he said in the 1968 Mailer-McLuhan-Muggeridge CBC discussion:
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. This present time, we’re moving into this electric age, in the dawn of much the greatest of all human ages. There’s nothing to even remotely resemble the scope of human awareness, of human greatness… at this time.” – The Realist, #83, p.8
