The Fiji Experiment
I spent a few days in Fiji in 1973. My best description, from the view of a seven year old boy, is 1973’s Fiji was like Gilligan’s Island. The roads were dirt paths, the homes were thatch huts, the beaches were ground seashells, and citizens led a simple life. They did not even have television. We stayed at a western hotel, as the island was already a resort destination, but the islanders still had a strong historical identity with limited western influence.
Then something happened. In 1994 Fiji launched Fiji Television Limited and western civilization invaded the hearts and minds of Fijians. Sociologists jumped at the opportunity to study the affects western television programming, and all of its ills, would have on a naive population. In 1995 they interviewed a carefully selected group of young teens girls, asking questions about self-image, identity, and culture, focusing on eating disorders and risk taking behaviors.
Three years later they interviewed a new group of young teen girls, now the same age as the first group was in 1995, with the same battery of questions. The 1998 group, now exposed to the western media’s ideals of what women should be for just three short years, showed a radical increase in eating disorders, critical self-image, and depression. In the blink of an eye, a once hopeful society that believed being plump was a sign of health and well-being, and weight loss was a sign of illness, had been infected with western neuroses by western media. They went from a simple, spiritually healthy, primarily Christian society to a society of growing psychological distress.
Once upon a time, body dysmorphic syndrome did not exist in America. The concept of ‘calories’ really did not exist, only the vice of gluttony. Then, with the advent of television, fashion magazines, and even pornography, our vision of what is ‘normal’ was reprogrammed by a tiny… I mean really tiny… group of private businesses. Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Teen Beat, Soap Opera Digest, Playboy, Hollywood, ABC, NBC, CBS, et al. For goodness sake, look at Wilma Flintstone’s waist! Look at Dolly Parton’s! And that is just the 60’s and the 70’s. Once the internet came into existence, ordinary people were enticed with impossible concepts of what we should look like, how we should behave sexually, and what it means to be human.
Things once good became warped and twisted to the detriment of western civilization. Today, it is no longer enough for parents to cancel their cable subscription and turn off the television. To protect their children they are forced into home schooling, as these “new principles” have literally become inescapable policy and curriculum.
Our world is rife with examples: The breakdown of the traditional family and the negative impact fatherlessness has on individual children and the community at large. The hypersexualization of children at younger and younger ages leading to ever-increasing rates of STIs as well and the decoupling of sex from intimacy, love, and personal responsibility. Body dysphoria that is leading to eating disorders and self-harm. Gender dysphoria that is leading to an entirely new branch of pseudoscience that denies our world is primarily a sexually binary system across life’s phyla.
All good things can, and likely will be, twisted to evil. Sex within a loving, committed marriage is a good, healthy thing. Sex without love… rape or promiscuity for instance… are unhealthy for both mind and body. It is just the degree of harm per act done that is open for debate. The good the internet has brought our world is vastly outweighed by its evils. What happened to Fiji virtually overnight has been happening to western civilization for the past 100 years. Vices have become our virtues, virtues have become our sins, and God has been dismissed by a society devoted to self.