Ideology in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

In Raoul Vanegeim’s 1967 book “the Revolution of Everyday Life” he describes the way ideology functions in a disintegrating world, and reveals the reason so many of us continue to support institutions we hate, work jobs that are stultifying, and lead lives of quiet desperation. We are, he says, like Wile E. Coyote in a Warner Brothers cartoon. That is we have run over the edge of the cliff and are hanging in midair, but we don’t realize it yet. We subjectively know that Global warming is an apocalyptic threat, that the internal contradictions in the economy are bringing a global depression, and that the death of the institutions of liberal bourgeois democracy is certain to bring on authoritarian regimes, but we continue to objectively believe that the world is stable, that Capitalism and America are forever, and that our personal 15 minutes are just around the next corner.

We are looking for our beliefs in all the wrong places. Our beliefs aren’t to be found in our private thoughts, but in our daily practices, and in the habits and rituals that fill our days.

“As cynical subjects we know full well that our understanding of reality is distorted, but we nevertheless stick to that falsehood and do not reject it. Instead of Marx’s formula for ideology, then–”they do not know it, but they are doing it,” Sloterdijk proposes a cynical variation on it–”they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it…” – pg. 65, SLavoj Zizek, Myers

In Tony Myers book he points out that Marx’s critique of money, Marx’s assertion that money is materially worthless and functions only as a symbol for social relations and inequality, is well known.

“Individuals already know that money itself is not valuable. They are completely aware in their day-to-day use of money that it is only an indirect expression of wealth…Nevertheless people act as if money were inherently valuable.” – pg. 66

There are hundreds of examples of ideology in practice, an ideology that functions despite cynicism, or that is perhaps even supported by cynicism. Belief in Santa Claus, for example, does not require that the parents or children really believe, but only that the stockings are stuffed with candy and cheap toys from China. The holy rite of Communion is another example. The participant in this ritual is not required to literally believe or experience the bread and wine on offer as literally transformed into the body of and blood of Christ–rather it is the act of consuming the wafer that is the act of transubstantiation. If one were to actually experience the wafer as a slab of human flesh this would amount to experiencing a delusion. It would perhaps, from a religious perspective, be evidence of demonic possession.

The ritual is designed to do your experiencing for you.

Another example of ideology in action would be viewing a children’s program such as Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Here we participate in the fiction of parenting and childhood as an enlightened project of self discovery. And while we watch the reruns from Roger’s neighborhood we may experience the program as an empty charade from a softspoken if not somewhat fruity, spokesperson of public television, a representative of upper-middle class and middle-brow bourgeois democracy, the program itself acts out a belief in dialogue, imagination, childhood, nurturing, and community.

The program is chockfull of rituals. Mister Rogers removes his jacket and leather shoes and replaces these items with a zip up sweater and a pair of comfy tennis shoes. Mister Rogers feeds his fish, he visits Picture Picture, and sends his model Trolley through the fourth wall and into the neighborhood of make-believe.

In order to fully appreciate the ideological function of this program it’s helpful to remember that Mister Rogers was both a psychologist and presbyterian minister. He was not an innocent or naive creator of unconscious ideologies but constructed his message with intention. The program did not reflect the dominant values of television but instead worked to subvert those values and offer another set of values to be acted out in a new neighborhood. However, when ideology is no longer conceived as a set of false beliefs, but rather as a form of collective behavior, when ideology is materialized, the cognition or exposure of an ideology as an ideology ceases to be the end goal of a critique. Instead this is our starting point.

Dear Mister Rogers,

Are you real? Are you under a mask or costume like Big Bird? Are you for real or not? My birthday wish is I want to know if you are for real.

From Timmy, age 5

Dear Timmy,

…That’s a good question. It’s hard for children to understand what they see on television. I’m glad that you are a person who wonders about things and that you ask questions about what you’re wondering. Asking questions is a good way to grow and learn!

You asked if I am a real person. I am a real person, just the way you are a real person. Your television set is a special way that you can see the picture of me and hear my voice. I can’t look out through the television set to see or hear my television friends, but I think about them whenever we make our television visits.

So what is ideology of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and how does it function in practice?

To sum it up with just a few big words the neighborhood is ontologically materialist, epistemologically realist, and politically a mixture of bourgeois democracy and socialism. The neighborhood was built to reflect these values–it was a televisual space filled in with these ideas.

Mister Rogers was first and foremost an advocate for children’s educational television. A psychologist and a minister, Mister Rogers did not envision childhood as an eden, but as a state of extreme vulnerability and inner conflict. Children, from Fred Rogers way of thinking, are creatures born to soon. Small and defenseless they arrive with drives, impulses, and predelections that too often overwhelm them. Far from needing protection from the adult world, children require emotional and intellectual instruction from adults. They need our help to learn the difference between thoughts and objects, the difference between right and wrong.

Mister Rogers saw childhood through a Freudian lens and the lessons he broadcast to his television neighbors were always aimed at helping children to discover ways to sublimate their libidinal impulses, to manage their fears, and to develop a domesticated imaginal realm. He aimed to teach children how to safely express their emotions through music. He looked upon playtime as a space wherein children do the work of growing up, and he was always quick to point out that open communication, especially with adults or other elders or authorities, was essential for children.

Compare Fred Rogers to Willy Wonka. While both men act as gatekeepers and guides into a realm of imagination, their tone and techniques are totally opposed. Wonka escorted the children onto a steamboat and took them through a Tunnel of Love in his factory. He set off into a nightmare realm where filmed images of beheaded chickens, green faces, centipedes, lava lamps, and villains wearing top hats appeared as menancing. Wonka’s ritual was meant to be taken as reality.
Mister Rogers on the other hand, asked the children to allow his mechanical trolley to take the imaginal journey for them. The passage from reality to the Neighborhood of make believe was accompanied with chimes and the sound of a trolley moving down the tracks.

Dear Mister Rogers,

Why do you use a trolley?
Kevin, age 11

Dear Kevin,
There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, we wanted to have a way of separating our Neighborhood (where things happen in a real way) from Make-Believe (where things can happen by pretending or by magic.). Secondly, we wanted to show that we could all go together to another place–the Neighborhood of Make-Believe–by pretending.

Mister Rogers was the kind of magician who would tell you how his trick worked. He even showed us where the Trolley’s controls were hidden because he thought it was “important to show that trolleys don’t operate independently of people. It was important to emphasize that its people who make machines work. I think its healthy to demystify this medium of television as much as we can.”

This emphasis on realism, on demystifying life and its operations, is essential to Roger’s mission. He always asked the same question of the musicians, basketball players, actors, mail men, and others who visit him in his television house.

“What were you like as a child. How did you come to be good at what you do? Who taught you, influenced you? How did you grow up?”

When visiting a pretzel factory, or an assembly line for electric cars, he always asked the workers how they did it, how long each step in production took, and how they came to be so good at what they did. Roger’s motto was this: People do things. Pretzels and violins and twinkies don’t come into the world on their own accord.

For Mister Rogers people are special individually. They aren’t to be treated as means but as ends. And People make things. People are the only agents of production in Roger’s universe.

“Zizek argues that the typical postmodern subject is one who displays an outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at the same time firmly believes in the existence of conspiracies and an unseen Other pulling the strings. This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the big Other. You therefore display cynicism and belief in equal measures.” -pg 57

While it is true that Mister Rogers is a humanist, a realist, an educator, it is also true that his is a normative education. Mister Rogers believes in people, and teaches that people are the ones who do things, but in Roger’s neighborhood there are no divisions between people. No capitalists and workers, no rich and poor.

That is, while Mister Rogers is glad to show the controls for his Trolley, glad to expose the real mechanism behind his Neighborhood of make-believe, the project of exposing the magical or make-believe mechanisms that control what is real in the neighborhood is never begun.

Consider: Mister Rogers takes off his shoes and sports coat when he walks in his television house. He performs a ritual that believes in the natural rightness of the division between work and leisure, a ritual that performs this belief so we no longer are required to believe anything. He talks to the factory worker and factory owner in the same manner. He is always decent and kind and respectful. And the puppet King in the neighborhood of make believe is only a bumbling narcissist and not an enemy of democracy and liberty.

“How could one carry on the class struggle on the basis of this thesis: ‘it is man who makes history’? It might be said that this thesis is useful in fighting against a certain conception of ‘History’: history in submission to the decisions of a Deity or to the Ends of Providence. But, speaking seriously, that is no longer the problem. It might be said that this Thesis serves everyone, without distinction, whether he be capitalist, a petty-bourgeois, or a worker, because these are all ‘men.’ But that is not true. It serves those whose interest it is to talk about ‘man’ and not about masses, about ‘man’ and not about classes and the class struggle….” pg 97, Ideology, Althusser

Mister Rogers was a television personality, a psychologist, a minister. He spoke kindly and presented the best aspects of today’s ruling ideology. After all, who isn’t afraid of Santa Caus? Who isn’t glad to know that one can’t go down the drain or get flushed down the toilet? Who isn’t relieved to hear that those machines aren’t independent of us, that we humans are really in charge despite appearances to the contrary?

Mister Rogers was a decent man, a good neighbor, but like much else in today’s world of hidden ideologies, his message is only good for children. As adults we must accept that Mister Rogers needs to be detourned, derailed, or simply toppled.