Yet it has not worked. Despite these appeals, no one – not pornography’s defenders nor even it’s most zealous critics – has been able to find an adequate explanation as to why copyright piracy has risen in concert with the demand for pornography. Besides a few simple statements of fact, it is a part of the issue that is completely overlooked and ignored by both. Instead, these two groups spend their time bickering with each over the question of why pornography became so popular in the first place. Of course there are minor differences of opinion, but even between these usually bitterly divided culture-war adversaries, there is a consensus about what is responsible. The rise of pornography to it’s current proportions is explained by the rise of the internet in general. The ability to remain anonymous, free from the risks to reputation that accompanied pornography consumption in the past, is what most believe is the cause. For the first time in history vast amounts of pornography is readily available, in the privacy of one’s home, for little or no cost.

None of this is disputed. What is disputed, however, is who’s fault it is. Pornography’s critics blame it’s producers. They say that if the opportunity weren’t there, it wouldn’t be acted upon, and they chastise the industry for failing to keep in mind that there are higher considerations beyond making money. The pornographers counter with claims that they had nothing to do with the public’s voracious appetite for their products. They say that they are merely giving the public what it has wanted all along; and some even go so far as to say that yes, they are aware of “higher considerations” beyond economics. Some claim that it is their desire to change incorrect, antiquated attitudes about sex, or to be conduits for lively debate about freedom of speech which really motivates them.

Discussions such as this one are not without merit. Not only are both sides half right in the answers they provide, but they are right to be approaching the question of why people consume pornography before examining why people steal it. No, this increase in demand has not always existed and simply revealed itself once the internet made exploiting it viable. Pornography’s critics are right that technologically savvy pornographers knew what would happen to the mind of the consumer if they made that much pornography available to him. However, what their critics fail to realize is that what the pornography industry inherited was not a lily white public, impervious to what would be given to it once technology caught up. Instead, what they got was a public made almost entirely ready to take the direction it took. The internet may have been the vehicle, but the motor was something entirely different.

For well over fifty years (and longer if thought of in fundamental terms) American culture – and especially American popular art – has been saturated with a certain world view who’s central result has been the introduction of uncertainty into the minds of it’s consumers. A shaking of the confidence which the average person has in his chosen values. Imagine what would happen is a man were regularly told one of the following: that his chosen lifestyle, and those of his friends and neighbors, is no better than any other to be found on the globe; or that his standard of living necessarily comes at the expense of another’s poverty; or, even there is a concession that his way of life is objectively better, that while he may be under the impression that he does, in truth he really does not, value it. What he says he values is just what he thinks he values because all of his thoughts and his feelings are just the result of social conditioning. The cumulative result of a steady stream of such messages is obvious. When a man is told such things, what results is that he no longer sees a point in preserving them. He may, for a very long time, hold on to them consciously and go through the motions of living up to his ideals and achieving his values, but inside his passion for them will be dead.

With such an onslaught confronting him daily, and with very little left in art or reality to counter those messages, is it any wonder that he will turn to something as base as pornography to fill up the void? The average decent man embraces pornography as a kind of surrender in a fight for his soul which he has lost the energy, the allies, and the ideas to continue. Why should he maintain his integrity? Why should he want to make all of his values – from the simplest and most clear-cut up to the most sophisticated, abstract, and personal – integrated into one non-contradictory whole? If he cannot counter the notion, spoon fed to him wholesale through entertainment and media, that things like his home, his hobbies, even his interest in his town’s sports team, is a pretty-bourgeois, middle-class, disposable delusion, eventually he is going to come to regard those thoughts and feelings which keep him attracted to virtuous women and scornful of whores as a delusion as well.

The process is gradual. Just as a man will not sell his own house and donate the proceeds immediately upon adopting the notion that more should be done for the homeless, nor will he immediately put his marriage or his mental health in jeopardy the moment he learns that every fickle sexual fantasy he has ever had can now be indulged on the internet.. He will, for awhile at least, still experience attraction to only those women whom he admires and, involuntarily, feel either indifference or repulsion to those he does not. But if he is consciously of the opinion that his judgment is not, and cannot be, objective – that it cannot serve and sustain his long-term, most personal values – then eventually his integrity will fade. He will experience an identity crisis and, shaken, he will seek out the most basic, predictable, superficial forms of self-indulgent pleasure available. If all that is available to him is an attack on his values and if he must put up with it, why not at least select a form of it which gets right to the point?

This exactly the sentiment the pornography industry relies upon in order to prosper. Pornography picks up where mainstream art and culture leaves off. It carries to it’s end the process which deadens a man to the connection between what he thinks and how he expresses what he thinks. It is the last stage of the battle for a man’s soul. Whatever remnant he has of his good ideas fights with these new ideas in an intellectual war between his never fully understood, but nevertheless mostly correct ideas about life and those conscious convictions transmitted to him from sources he believes are worthy of respect. His old ideas are unsupported, fading, and merely his own, but his new ones are delivered daily by professors, newsmen, actors, and political leaders – and then personified fully in the types of women he views and the types of sexual encounters they reenact. What begins as a respite becomes a habit, and then a personality trait. He acquires a new, heightened, more genuine sense of self-contempt, brought about by his despair-fueled over-indulgence in pornography. At this point his good ideas are as good as dead, no longer supported by any emotional ties, is struck. His bad feelings prove to be too much and he succumbs fully to the original notions – not realizing that they are what brought him here to begin with.

As his feelings got worse he started to blame it on his old ideas which, because they were never given the theoretical justification that his new ideas were, he came to regard as inferior. He told himself that what he needed to do was to to stop feeling bad about feeling bad. That the way to do this was to completely get rid of what he used to think, and to fully invest himself in the logical consequences of what he now regarded as true. A slew of ready-made, standard-lowering rationalizations were waiting for him when he needed them.

Having compromised his most personal experiences, like butterfly performing a perverse reversal of the process of metamorphosis, he is now ready to clip off his wings and crawl on his belly into the rest of his life. If life is all just delusion and social conditioning, and if he now feels his own depravity he had previously only heard about, then it doesn’t just stop with his sexuality. If a man has learned the habit of disregarding his judgment and giving in to whatever momentary urge he feels, he will experience a perverse emotion resembling pride. He will be aware that his new conscious convictions (life is hopeless and pointless, happiness and self-respect are illusory) and his new, barely-tolerable emotional state are complimentary, in a profoundly distorted way, he is the embodiment of his prior ideal: the integrated human being. He is simply oblivious to what has really happened: that he has become dead to real, long-lasting, and profound emotional experiences; and has become capable only of feeling cheap, short-term whims.

Why wouldn’t such a state of mind carry over into complicated questions about right and wrong? Legal and illegal? Without a passion for the preservation of his own soul, committing treason to less personal sources of pride like his respect for copyright is comparatively little to lose. He wants, at that moment, to look at pornography but he cannot afford it. He used to have a foggy idea that it was wrong to steal – and maybe he still knows how to mouth the words – but now the desire to escape into the comforting predictability of fantasy proves to be too much. He may have, at one time in his life, been able to give a pretty convincing explanation for why it was wrong to steal, but all of that is gone now. His new attitude about life is that desires trump ideas – and besides, even his new ideas tell him that terms like right and wrong, legal and illegal, are just social constructs or personal prejudices. His commitment to whims has made him irresistibly attracted to what pornography, and so he breaks down and crosses the line into thievery. One or two false premises, manufactured on high but reinforced by a tidal wave of psychological conditioning has washed away what once was. By the logic of his views about the relationship between thoughts and emotions, he has no other choice but to steal.

Pornography as such may have a timeless utility in some limited contexts, but under the current circumstances, it’s popularity is entirely the result of cultural default; not progress in loosening the traditional, puritanical attitudes about sex. The pornography industry grew to it’s current proportions because of the culture’s decay, it added to it’s momentum, and now it is suffering the consequences. It may be able to to stem the tide of chickens coming home with the same method by which it unleashed them – and arbitrary, disconnected plea to do something – but ultimately it is the method by which people are taught to think which trumps the content of what they thinks about any one topic. If the public believes that respecting property rights is nothing more than a culturally-imposed duty rather than a matter of personal honor and self-respect, let alone in his fundamental, long-term self-interest, it will stop respecting them. The concept of duty in regards to ethics carries with it no more personally rewarding, authentically motivating attributes than do his half-digested whims.

The pornography industry, at this point, can talk all it likes about property rights and try to remind the public of a moral and legal principle that they are somehow expected have retained and value, but nothing will come of it. The average person lost the ability to value such high-minded ideals for his own sake a long time ago, why would he be expected to preserve and live up to them for the sake of people he doesn’t know, in an industry he has no direct stake in? What did the pornographers expect? They applied the final coat of paint in the long, culture-wide process of turning the average, more or less decent and rational person into a kind of amoral automaton, driven by neurosis and a bevy of false philosophical conclusion, into their prime demographic.

LOL