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Contents
Foreword
I Over-Population
II Quantity, Quality,
Morality
III Over-Organization
IV Propaganda in a
Democratic Society
V Propaganda Under a
Dictatorship
VI The Arts of Selling
VII Brainwashing
VIII Chemical Persuasion
IX Subconscious
Persuasion
X Hypnopaedia
XI Education for
Freedom
XII What Can Be Done?
Foreword
The soul of wit may
become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity
can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a
complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and
simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand --
but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our
comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated
notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions
have been so arbitrarily abstracted.
But life is short and
information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are
generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no
exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the
abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though
intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to
simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to
concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring
too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able
to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost
any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably
more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always
been the current coin of thought.
The subject of freedom
and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too
short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched on many aspects
of the problem. Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in
the exposition; but these successive over-simplifications add up to a
picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of
the original.
Omitted from the
picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for convenience and
because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical
and military enemies of freedom -- the weapons and "hardware" which have
so powerfully strengthened the hands of the world's rulers against
their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever
more senseless and suicidal wars. The chapters that follow should be
read against a background of thoughts about the Hungarian uprising and
its repression, about H-bombs, about the cost of what every nation
refers to as "defense," and about those endless columns of uniformed
boys, white, black, brown, yellow, marching obediently toward the
common grave.
I.
Over-Population
In 1931, when Brave
New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still
plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste
system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the
servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced
happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of
sleep-teaching -- these things were coming all right, but not in my
time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date
of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere
in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in
the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants,
admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those
depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the
future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of
too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In
the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a
long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of
the human race would make the best of both worlds -- the disorderly
world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where
perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.
Twenty-seven years
later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long
before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less
optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The
prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they
would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare
of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. In the West,
it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of
freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of
democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom
seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for
individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The
nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh
century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now
awaiting us, just around the next corner.
George Orwell's 1984
was a magnified projection into the future of a present that contained
Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of
Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to
supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got
into his stride. In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive
contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future
dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the
future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context
of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after
all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia
and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book
of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course,
make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment
that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say
that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something
like Brave New World than of something like 1984.
In the light of what we
have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human
behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the
punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run,
than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by
rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well
than government through the non-violent manipulation of the
environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women
and children. Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable
behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victim's tendency to
indulge in it. Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of punishment
may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has
been punished. Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the
debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.
The society described in
1984 is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment
and the fear of punishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable,
punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control
exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of
desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation,
both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization. Babies
in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps
impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall
remain a viviparous species breeding at random. For practical purposes
genetic standardization may be ruled out. Societies will continue to be
controlled post-natally -- by punishment, as in the past, and to an ever
increasing extent by the more effective methods of reward and
scientific manipulation.
In Russia the
old-fashioned, 1984-style dictatorship of Stalin has begun to
give way to a more up-to-date form of tyranny. In the upper levels of
the Soviets' hierarchical society the reinforcement of desirable
behavior has begun to replace the older methods of control through the
punishment of undesirable behavior. Engineers and scientists, teachers
and administrators, are handsomely paid for good work and so moderately
taxed that they are under a constant incentive to do better and so be
more highly rewarded. In certain areas they are at liberty to think and
do more or less what they like. Punishment awaits them only when they
stray beyond their prescribed limits into the realms of ideology and
politics. It is because they have been granted a measure of professional
freedom that Russian teachers, scientists and technicians have achieved
such remarkable successes. Those who live near the base of the Soviet
pyramid enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the lucky or specially
gifted minority. Their wages are meager and they pay, in the form of
high prices, a disproportionately large share of the taxes. The area in
which they can do as they please is extremely restricted, and their
rulers control them more by punishment and the threat of punishment
than through non-violent manipulation or the reinforcement of desirable
behavior by reward. The Soviet system combines elements of 1984
with elements that are prophetic of what went on among the higher
castes in Brave New World.
Meanwhile impersonal
forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in
the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal
pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of
commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of
new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the
thoughts and feelings of the masses. The techniques of manipulation
will be discussed in later chapters. For the moment let us confine our
attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so
extremely unsafe for democracy, so very inhospitable to individual
freedom. What are these forces? And why has the nightmare, which I had
projected into the seventh century A.F., made so swift an advance in
our direction? The answer to these questions must begin where the life
of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings -- on the
level of biology.
On the first Christmas
Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty
millions -- less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen
centuries later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock,
human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions.
By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world
population had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, when I
was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two billions.
Today, only twenty-seven years later, there are two billion eight
hundred million of us. And tomorrow -- what? Penicillin, DDT and clean
water are cheap commodities, whose effects on public health are out of
all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest government is rich enough
to provide its subjects with a substantial measure of death control.
Birth control is a very different matter. Death control is something
which can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians working in
the pay of a benevolent government. Birth control depends on the
co-operation of an entire people. It must be practiced by countless
individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than
most of the world's teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or
mechanical methods of contraception are used) an expenditure of more
money than most of these millions can now afford. Moreover, there are
nowhere any religious traditions in favor of unrestricted death,
whereas religious and social traditions in favor of unrestricted
reproduction are widespread. For all these reasons, death control is
achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with great difficulty.
Death rates have therefore fallen in recent years with startling
suddenness. But birth rates have either remained at their old high level
or, if they have fallen, have fallen very little and at a very slow
rate. In consequence, human numbers are now increasing more rapidly than
at any time in the history of the species.
Moreover, the yearly
increases are themselves increasing. They increase regularly, according
to the rules of compound interest; and they also increase irregularly
with every application, by a technologically backward society of the
principles of Public Health. At the present time the annual increase in
world population runs to about forty-three millions. This means that
every four years mankind adds to its numbers the equivalent of the
present population of the United States, every eight and a half years
the equivalent of the present population of India. At the rate of
increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen
Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth
to double. At the present rate it will double in less than half a
century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be
taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are
already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic
efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available
mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a
drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.
In the Brave New World
of my fable, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural
resources had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world
population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this
figure (a little under two billions, if I remember rightly) generation
after generation. In the real contemporary world, the population
problem has not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver and
more formidable with every passing year. It is against this grim
biological background that all the political, economic, cultural and
psychological dramas of our time are being played out. As the twentieth
century wears on, as the new billions are added to the existing
billions (there will be more than five and a half billions of us by the
time my granddaughter is fifty), this biological background will
advance, ever more insistently, ever more menacingly, toward the front
and center of the historical stage. The problem of rapidly increasing
numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the
well-being of individuals -- this is now the central problem of
mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another
century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter. A new age is
supposed to have begun on October 4, 1957. But actually, in the present
context, all our exuberant post-Sputnik talk is irrelevant and even
nonsensical. So far as the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming
time will not be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Over-population.
We can parody the words of the old song and ask,
Will the
space that you're so rich in
Light a fire in the kitchen,
Or the little god of space turn the spit, spit, spit?
The answer, it is
obvious, is in the negative. A settlement on the moon may be of some
military advantage to the nation that does the settling. But it will do
nothing whatever to make life more tolerable, during the fifty years
that it will take our present population to double, for the earth's
undernourished and proliferating billions. And even if, at some future
date, emigration to Mars should become feasible, even if any
considerable number of men and women were desperate enough to choose a
new life under conditions comparable to those prevailing on a mountain
twice as high as Mount Everest, what difference would that make? In the
course of the last four centuries quite a number of people sailed from
the Old World to the New. But neither their departure nor the returning
flow of food and raw materials could solve the problems of the Old
World. Similarly the shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a
cost, for transportation and development, of several million dollars a
head) will do nothing to solve the problem of mounting population
pressures on our own planet. Unsolved, that problem will render
insoluble all our other problems. Worse still, it will create conditions
in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic
way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable. Not all
dictatorships arise in the same way. There are many roads to Brave New
World; but perhaps the straightest and the broadest of them is the road
we are traveling today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers
and accelerating increases. Let us briefly review the reasons for this
close correlation between too many people, too rapidly multiplying, and
the formulation of authoritarian philosophies, the rise of totalitarian
systems of government.
As large and increasing
numbers press more heavily upon available resources, the economic
position of the society undergoing this ordeal becomes ever more
precarious. This is especially true of those underdeveloped regions,
where a sudden lowering of the death rate by means of DDT, penicillin
and clean water has not been accompanied by a corresponding fall in the
birth rate. In parts of Asia and in most of Central and South America
populations are increasing so fast that they will double themselves in
little more than twenty years. If the production of food and
manufactured articles, of houses, schools and teachers, could be
increased at a greater rate than human numbers, it would be possible to
improve the wretched lot of those who live in these underdeveloped and
over-populated countries. But unfortunately these countries lack not
merely agricultural machinery and an industrial plant capable of turning
out this machinery, but also the capital required to create such a
plant. Capital is what is left over after the primary needs of a
population have been satisfied. But the primary needs of most of the
people in underdeveloped countries are never fully satisfied. At the end
of each year almost nothing is left over, and there is therefore almost
no capital available for creating the industrial and agricultural
plant, by means of which the people's needs might be satisfied.
Moreover, there is, in all these underdeveloped countries, a serious
shortage of the trained manpower without which a modern industrial and
agricultural plant cannot be operated. The present educational
facilities are inadequate; so are the resources, financial and cultural,
for improving the existing facilities as fast as the situation
demands. Meanwhile the population of some of these underdeveloped
countries is increasing at the rate of 3 per cent per annum.
Their tragic situation
is discussed in an important book, published in 1957 -- The Next
Hundred Years, by Professors Harrison Brown, James Bonner and John
Weir of the California Institute of Technology. How is mankind coping
with the problem of rapidly increasing numbers? Not very successfully.
"The evidence suggests rather strongly that in most underdeveloped
countries the lot of the average individual has worsened appreciably in
the last half century. People have become more poorly fed. There are
fewer available goods per person. And practically every attempt to
improve the situation has been nullified by the relentless pressure of
continued population growth."
Whenever the economic
life of a nation becomes precarious, the central government is forced
to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. It must
work out elaborate plans for dealing with a critical situation; it must
impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects;
and if, as is very likely, worsening economic conditions result in
political unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must
intervene to preserve public order and its own authority. More and more
power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their
bureaucratic managers. But the nature of power is such that even those
who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to
acquire a taste for more. "Lead us not into temptation," we pray -- and
with good reason; for when human beings are tempted too enticingly or
too long, they generally yield. A democratic constitution is a device
for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those particularly
dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is concentrated in
too few hands. Such a constitution works pretty well where, as in
Britain or the United States, there is a traditional respect for
constitutional procedures. Where the republican or limited monarchical
tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious
politicians from succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of
power. And in any country where numbers have begun to press heavily upon
available resources, these temptations cannot fail to arise.
Over-population leads to economic insecurity and social unrest. Unrest
and insecurity lead to more control by central governments and an
increase of their power. In the absence of a constitutional tradition,
this increased power will probably be exercised in a dictatorial
fashion. Even if Communism had never been invented, this would be likely
to happen. But Communism has been invented. Given this fact, the
probability of over-population leading through unrest to dictatorship
becomes a virtual certainty. It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years
from now, all the world's over-populated and underdeveloped countries
will be under some form of totalitarian rule -- probably by the
Communist party.
How will this
development affect the over-populated, but highly industrialized and
still democratic countries of Europe? If the newly formed dictatorships
were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of raw materials from the
underdeveloped countries were deliberately interrupted, the nations of
the West would find themselves in a very bad way indeed. Their
industrial system would break down, and the highly developed
technology, which up till now has permitted them to sustain a population
much greater than that which could be supported by locally available
resources, would no longer protect them against the consequences of
having too many people in too small a territory. If this should happen,
the enormous powers forced by unfavorable conditions upon central
governments may come to be used in the spirit of totalitarian
dictatorship.
The United States is not
at present an over-populated country. If, however, the population
continues to increase at the present rate (which is higher than that of
India's increase, though happily a good deal lower than the rate now
current in Mexico or Guatemala), the problem of numbers in relation to
available resources might well become troublesome by the beginning of
the twenty-first century. For the moment overpopulation is not a direct
threat to the personal freedom of Americans. It remains, however, an
indirect threat, a menace at one remove. If over-population should drive
the underdeveloped countries into totalitarianism, and if these new
dictatorships should ally themselves with Russia, then the military
position of the United States would become less secure and the
preparations for defense and retaliation would have to be intensified.
But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is
permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent
crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the
agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have
to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of
things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost
inevitable.
II.
Quantity, Quality, Morality
In the Brave New World
of my fantasy eugenics and dysgenics were practiced systematically. In
one set of bottles biologically superior ova, fertilized by
biologically superior sperm, were given the best possible prenatal
treatment and were finally decanted as Betas, Alphas and even Alpha
Pluses. In another, much more numerous set of bottles, biologically
inferior ova, fertilized by biologically inferior sperm, were subjected
to the Bokanovsky Process (ninety-six identical twins out of a single
egg) and treated prenatally with alcohol and other protein poisons. The
creatures finally decanted were almost subhuman; but they were capable
of performing unskilled work and, when properly conditioned,
detensioned by free and frequent access to the opposite sex, constantly
distracted by gratuitous entertainment and reinforced in their good
behavior patterns by daily doses of soma, could be counted on to give no
trouble to their superiors.
In this second half of
the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but
in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our
planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greater
numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. In the bad old days
children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects
rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and
the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects
reach maturity and multiply their kind. Under the conditions now
prevailing, every advance in medicine will tend to be offset by a
corresponding advance in the survival rate of individuals cursed by some
genetic insufficiency. In spite of new wonder drugs and better
treatment (indeed, in a certain sense, precisely because of these
things), the physical health of the general population will show no
improvement, and may even deteriorate. And along with a decline of
average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence.
Indeed, some competent authorities are convinced that such a decline
has already taken place and is continuing. "Under conditions that are
both soft and unregulated," writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock
tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect. . .
. It is the fashion in some academic circles to assure students that
the alarm over differential birthrates is unfounded; that these
problems are merely economic, or merely educational, or merely
religious, or merely cultural or something of the sort. This is
Pollyanna optimism. Reproductive delinquency is biological and basic."
And he adds that "nobody knows just how far the average IQ in this
country [the U.S.A.] has declined since 1916, when Terman attempted to
standardize the meaning of IQ 100."
In an underdeveloped and
over-populated country, where four-fifths of the people get less than
two thousand calories a day and one-fifth enjoys an adequate diet, can
democratic institutions arise spontaneously? Or if they should be
imposed from outside or from above, can they possibly survive?
And now let us consider
the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which,
owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ's and
physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society
maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government?
Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to
this question.
Meanwhile we find
ourselves confronted by a most disturbing moral problem. We know that
the pursuit of good ends does not justify the employment of bad means.
But what about those situations, now of such frequent occurrence, in
which good means have end results which turn out to be bad?
For example, we go to a
tropical island and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria and, in two
or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives. This is obviously
good. But the hundreds of thousands of human beings thus saved, and the
millions whom they beget and bring to birth, cannot be adequately
clothed, housed, educated or even fed out of the island's available
resources. Quick death by malaria has been abolished; but life made
miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and
slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.
And what about the
congenitally insufficient organisms, whom our medicine and our social
services now preserve so that they may propagate their kind? To help the
unfortunate is obviously good. But the wholesale transmission to our
descendants of the results of unfavorable mutations, and the progressive
contamination of the genetic pool from which the members of our
species will have to draw, are no less obviously bad. We are on the
horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all
our intelligence and all our good will.
III.
Over-Organization
The shortest and
broadest road to the nightmare of Brave New World leads, as I have
pointed out, through over-population and the accelerating increase of
human numbers -- twenty-eight hundred millions today, fifty-five
hundred millions by the turn of the century, with most of humanity
facing the choice between anarchy and totalitarian control. But the
increasing pressure of numbers upon available resources is not the only
force propelling us in the direction of totalitarianism. This blind
biological enemy of freedom is allied with immensely powerful forces
generated by the very advances in technology of which we are most proud.
Justifiably proud, it may be added; for these advances are the fruits
of genius and persistent hard work, of logic, imagination and
self-denial -- in a word, of moral and intellectual virtues for which
one can feel nothing but admiration. But the Nature of Things is such
that nobody in this world ever gets anything for nothing. These amazing
and admirable advances have had to be paid for. Indeed, like last year's
washing machine, they are still being paid for -- and each installment
is higher than the last. Many historians, many sociologists and
psychologists have written at length, and with a deep concern, about the
price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for
technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can
hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic
power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the
progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a
concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass
production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and
more expensive -- and so less available to the enterpriser of limited
means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution;
but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers
can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass
distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working
capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he
loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent
producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear,
more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer
people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by
advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is
controlled by the State -- that is to say, by a small group of party
leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out
their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it
is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power
Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the
country's working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls
many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and,
through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the
thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To
parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been
manipulated so much by so few. We are far indeed from Jefferson's ideal
of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing
units -- "the elementary republics of the wards, the county republics,
the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation
of authorities."
We see, then, that
modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political
power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in
the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the
democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are
composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help
individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and
creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological
advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a
philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western
society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress,
is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to
undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for
love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays
for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair
hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.
Our "increasing mental
sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are
conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr.
Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms.
Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are
symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the
forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still
fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found
among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal
because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because
their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they
do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic
does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of
the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal
society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure
of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people,
living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human
beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of
individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent
deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like
uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity
and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an
automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is
destroyed."
In the course of
evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every
individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by
bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's. These
hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of
ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture
which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political
or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits
an outrage against man's biological nature.
Science may be defined
as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the
endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of
particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finally
abstracting some kind of "law," in terms of which they make sense and
can be effectively dealt with. For examples, apples fall from the tree
and the moon moves across the sky. People had been observing these
facts from time immemorial. With Gertrude Stein they were convinced that
an apple is an apple is an apple, whereas the moon is the moon is the
moon. It remained for Isaac Newton to perceive what these very
dissimilar phenomena had in common, and to formulate a theory of
gravitation in terms of which certain aspects of the behavior of apples,
of the heavenly bodies and indeed of everything else in the physical
universe could be explained and dealt with in terms of a single system
of ideas. In the same spirit the artist takes the innumerable
diversities and uniquenesses of the outer world and his own imagination
and gives them meaning within an orderly system of plastic, literary or
musical patterns. The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring
harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of
intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind.
Within the realms of science, art and philosophy the workings of what I
may call this "Will to Order" are mainly beneficent. True, the Will to
Order has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient
evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much
pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions
for the data of immediate experience. But these errors, however
regrettable, do not do much harm, at any rate directly -- though it
sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm
indirectly, by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman
actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and
economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
Here the theoretical
reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes
the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of
freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed
scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian
dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed
work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are
perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants
out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of
tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
Organization is
indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a
self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though
indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization
transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit
and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe
course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at
one end of the scale and of total control at the other.
During the past century
the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by
corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to
be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as
smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order
to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to
deindivid-ualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity
and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become
automata.
The dehumanizing effects
of over-organization are reinforced by the dehumanizing effects of
over-population. Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater
proportion of humanity's increasing numbers into large cities. But life
in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence
of schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of
industrial slums); nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom
within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a
genuine democracy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract.
People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as
the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as
irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life,
individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence
ceases to have any point or meaning.
Biologically speaking,
man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal -- a
creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee
or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to
the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is,
among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed
into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects' organic
communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and
technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has
come to seem a realizable and even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal.
Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf
separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained
mammal; and even though the mammal should do his best to imitate the
insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a
social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process
of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian
despotism.
Brave New World
presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which
the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has
been pushed almost to the limits of the possible. That we are being
propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less
obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to co-operate
with the blind forces that are propelling us. For the moment, however,
the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread.
As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The
Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional
ethical system -- the system in which the individual is primary. The key
words in this Social Ethic are "adjustment," "adaptation," "socially
orientated behavior," "belongingness," "acquisition of social skills,"
"team work," "group living," "group loyalty," "group dynamics," "group
thinking," "group creativity." Its basic assumption is that the social
whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that
inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural
uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over
what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man. According to the
Social Ethic, Jesus was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath
was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and
must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind
of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as
ideal for their purposes. This ideal man is the man who displays
"dynamic conformity" (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the
group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. And the
ideal man must have an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely
adaptable and not merely resigned to the fact that her husband's first
loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account.
"He for God only," as Milton said of Adam and Eve, "she for God in him."
And in one important respect the wife of the ideal organization man is a
good deal worse off than our First Mother. She and Adam were permitted
by the Lord to be completely uninhibited in the matter of "youthful
dalliance."
Nor turned,
I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused.
Today, according to a
writer in the Harvard Business Review, the wife of the man who is
trying to live up to the ideal proposed by the Social Ethic, "must not
demand too much of her husband's time and interest. Because of his
single-minded concentration on his job, even his sexual activity must be
relegated to a secondary place." The monk makes vows of poverty,
obedience and chastity. The organization man is allowed to be rich, but
promises obedience ("he accepts authority without resentment, he looks
up to his superiors"-- Mussolini ha sempre ragione) and he must
be prepared, for the greater glory of the organization that employs
him, to forswear even conjugal love.
It is worth remarking
that, in 1984, the members of the Party are compelled to conform
to a sexual ethic of more than Puritan severity. In Brave New World,
on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge their sexual impulses
without let or hindrance. The society described in Orwell's fable is a
society permanently at war, and the aim of its rulers is first, of
course, to exercise power for its own delightful sake and, second, to
keep their subjects in that state of constant tension which a state of
constant war demands of those who wage it. By crusading against
sexuality the bosses are able to maintain the required tension in their
followers and at the same time can satisfy their lust for power in a
most gratifying way. The society described in Brave New World is a
world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim
of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making
trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree
of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that
practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of
destructive (or creative) emotional tension. In 1984 the lust
for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by
inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.
The current Social
Ethic, it is obvious, is merely a justification after the fact of the
less desirable consequences of over-organization. It represents a
pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity, to extract a positive
value from an unpleasant datum. It is a very unrealistic, and therefore
very dangerous, system of morality. The social whole, whose value is
assumed to be greater than that of its component parts, is not an
organism in the sense that a hive or a termitary may be thought of as an
organism. It is merely an organization, a piece of social machinery.
There can be no value except in relation to life and awareness. An
organization is neither conscious nor alive. Its value is instrumental
and derivative. It is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent
that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the
collective whole. To give organizations precedence over persons is to
subordinate ends to means. What happens when ends are subordinated to
means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin. Under their hideous
rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a
mixture of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic
manipulation of minds. In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow
there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin.
The future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps
of highly trained social engineers. "The challenge of social engineering
in our time," writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, "is
like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the
first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical
engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers"
-- and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World
Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World. To the
question quis custodiet custodes -- Who will mount guard over our
guardians, who will engineer the engineers? -- the answer is a bland
denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching
belief among certain Ph.D.'s in sociology that Ph.D.'s in sociology will
never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad's, their strength is as
the strength of ten because their heart is pure -- and their heart is
pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of
social studies.
Alas, higher education
is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political
wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds
must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character. Can we
accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice,
and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings?
For example, Professor Elton Mayo tells us categorically that "man's
desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a
strong, if not the strongest human characteristic." This, I would say,
is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described by
Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited
constitution. Any social organization based upon the assumption that
"man" (whoever "man" may be) desires to be continuously associated
with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of
Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the rack could
they be adjusted to it.
Again, how romantically
misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many
contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works!
"Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval
man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity." Protected him
from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the
hands of his superiors. And along with all that "peace and serenity"
there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of chronic
frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the
rigid, hierarchical system that permitted no vertical movement up the
social ladder and, for those who were bound to the land, very little
horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population
and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct
these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system.
This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such
Brave-New-Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and
drug-induced euphoria; but, for the majority of men and women, it will
still be a kind of servitude.
IV.
Propaganda
in a Democratic Society
"The doctrines of
Europe," Jefferson wrote, "were that men in numerous associations cannot
be restrained within the limits of order and justice, except by forces
physical and moral wielded over them by authorities independent of their
will. . . . We (the founders of the new American democracy) believe
that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with
an innate sense of justice, and that he could be restrained from wrong,
and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his
own choice and held to their duties by dependence on his own will." To
post-Freudian ears, this kind of language seems touchingly quaint and
ingenuous. Human beings are a good deal less rational and innately just
than the optimists of the eighteenth century supposed. On the other hand
they are neither so morally blind nor so hopelessly unreasonable as the
pessimists of the twentieth would have us believe. In spite of the Id
and the Unconscious, in spite of endemic neurosis and the prevalence
of low IQ's, most men and women are probably decent enough and sensible
enough to be trusted with the direction of their own destinies.
Democratic institutions
are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and
initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers
subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western
Europe and America, these devices have worked, all things considered,
not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth-century optimists were
not entirely wrong. Given a fair chance, human beings can govern
themselves, and govern themselves better, though perhaps with less
mechanical efficiency, than they can be governed by "authorities
independent of their will." Given a fair chance, I repeat; for the fair
chance is an indispensable prerequisite. No people that passes abruptly
from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the
completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to
have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work. Again, no
people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being
able to govern itself democratically. Liberalism flourishes in an
atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it
necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and
drastically in the affairs of its subjects. Over-population and
over-organization are two conditions which, as I have already pointed
out, deprive a society of a fair chance of making democratic
institutions work effectively. We see, then, that there are certain
historical, economic, demographic and technological conditions which
make it very hard for Jefferson's rational animals, endowed by nature
with inalienable rights and an innate sense of justice, to exercise
their reason, claim their rights and act justly within a democratically
organized society. We in the West have been supremely fortunate in
having been given our fair chance of making the great experiment in
self-government. Unfortunately it now looks as though, owing to recent
changes in our circumstances, this infinitely precious fair chance were
being, little by little, taken away from us. And this, of course, is not
the whole story. These blind impersonal forces are not the only enemies
of individual liberty and democratic institutions. There are also
forces of another, less abstract character, forces that can be
deliberately used by power-seeking individuals whose aim is to establish
partial or complete control over their fellows. Fifty years ago, when I
was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were
over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of
heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats,
traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were
simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth
century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to
church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of
by the benighted Africans and Asiatics. In the light of recent history
it would be foolish to suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen
again. It can and, no doubt, it will. But in the immediate future there
is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will
give place to the reinforcements and manipulations of Brave New
World.
There are two kinds of
propaganda -- rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant
with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to
whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant
with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and
appeals to, passion. Where the actions of individuals are concerned
there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but
where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and
economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of
effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to
promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this
world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against
their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions;
the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor
of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to
reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available
evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action
dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false,
garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to
influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the
furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by
cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so
that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most
cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious
principle and patriotic duty.
In John Dewey's words,
"a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in
general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth,
is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of
material success or a devout worship of special legal and political
forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us.
But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and
falsehood -- particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some
enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some
answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. In
certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and
truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal
to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists. They set
forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some
particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they
have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that
appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the fields
of physical science and technology. It is much more difficult in the
fields of politics and religion and ethics. Here the relevant facts
often elude us. As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends
upon the particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose to
interpret them. And these are not the only difficulties that confront
the rational truth-seeker. In public and in private life, it often
happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to
weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence
and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the
best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or
consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and
rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we
can to the limited truth and imperfect reasonings offered for our
consideration by others.
"If a nation expects to
be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and
never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information.
Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe."
Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in reason was thinking
about the same time, in almost precisely similar terms. Here is what
John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the utilitarian philosopher,
James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon the influence of reason
over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he
felt as if all would be gained, if the whole population were able to
read, and if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them
by word or in writing, and if by the suffrage they could nominate a
legislature to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All is
safe, all would be gained! Once more we hear the note of
eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson, it is true, was a realist as
well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of
the press can be shamefully abused. "Nothing," he declared, "can now be
believed which is seen in a newspaper." And yet, he insisted (and we can
only agree with him), "within the pale of truth, the press is a noble
institution, equally the friend of science and civil liberty." Mass
communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force
and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in
one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the
survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most
powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. In the field of mass
communications as in almost every other field of enterprise,
technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man.
As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a
great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of
country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere
or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the
press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have
disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of
syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East
there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are
controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic
censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members
of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of
communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less
objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but
certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could
possibly approve.
In regard to propaganda
the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged
only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be
false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our
Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass
communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor
the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In
a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite
for distractions.
In the past most people
never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long
for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas
came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few
readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a
neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the
performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For
conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must
return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by
frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment -- from
poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to
all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public
executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop
distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio,
television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop
distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy,
centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of
policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much
attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The
other world of religion is different from the other world of
entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly
"not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too
continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the
people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their
liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the
spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic
procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their
time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future,
but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap
opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to
resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda
today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and
rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be
accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be
ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used
in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of
manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future
will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop
distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea
of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of
individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.
V.
Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
At his trial after the
Second World War, Hitler's Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer,
delivered a long speech in which, with remarkable acuteness, he
described the Nazi tyranny and analyzed its methods. "Hitler's
dictatorship," he said, "differed in one fundamental point from all its
predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present
period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made
complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own
country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker,
eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was
thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. . . . Earlier
dictators needed highly qualified assistants even at the lowest level --
men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in
the period of modern technical development can dispense with such men;
thanks to modern methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize
the lower leadership. As a result of this there has arisen the new type
of the uncritical recipient of orders."
In the Brave New World
of my prophetic fable, technology had advanced far beyond the point it
had reached in Hitler's day; consequently the recipients of orders were
far less critical than their Nazi counterparts, far more obedient to
the order-giving elite. Moreover, they had been genetically standardized
and postnatally conditioned to perform their subordinate functions, and
could therefore be depended upon to behave almost as predictably as
machines. As we shall see in a later chapter, this conditioning of "the
lower leadership" is already going on under the Communist dictatorships.
The Chinese and the Russians are not relying merely on the indirect
effects of advancing technology; they are working directly on the
psycho-physical organisms of their lower leaders, subjecting minds and
bodies to a system of ruthless and, from all accounts, highly effective
conditioning. "Many a man," said Speer, "has been haunted by the
nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means.
That nightmare was almost realized in Hitler's totalitarian system."
Almost, but not quite. The Nazis did not have time -- and perhaps did
not have the intelligence and the necessary knowledge -- to brainwash
and condition their lower leadership. This, it may be, is one of the
reasons why they failed.
Since Hitler's day the
armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has
been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker,
the moving picture camera and the rotary press, the contemporary
propagandist can make use of television to broadcast the image as well
as the voice of his client, and can record both image and voice on
spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother
can now be almost as omnipresent as God. Nor is it only on the technical
front that the hand of the would-be dictator has been strengthened.
Since Hitler's day a great deal of work has been carried out in those
fields of applied psychology and neurology which are the special
province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher. In
the past these specialists in the art of changing people's minds were
empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number
of techniques and procedures, which they used very effectively
without, however, knowing precisely why they were effective. Today the
art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The
practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are
guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a
massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights
and the new techniques made possible by these insights, the nightmare
that was "all but realized in Hitler's totalitarian system" may soon be
completely realizable.
But before we discuss
these new insights and techniques let us take a look at the nightmare
that so nearly came true in Nazi Germany. What were the methods used by
Hitler and Goebbels for "depriving eighty million people of independent
thought and subjecting them to the will of one man"? And what was the
theory of human nature upon which those terrifyingly successful methods
were based? These questions can be answered, for the most part, in
Hitler's own words. And what remarkably clear and astute words they are!
When he writes about such vast abstractions as Race and History and
Providence, Hitler is strictly unreadable. But when he writes about the
German masses and the methods he used for dominating and directing them,
his style changes. Nonsense gives place to sense, bombast to a
hard-boiled and cynical lucidity. In his philosophical lucubrations
Hitler was either cloudily daydreaming or reproducing other people's
half-baked notions. In his comments on crowds and propaganda he was
writing of things he knew by firsthand experience. In the words of his
ablest biographer, Mr. Alan Bullock, "Hitler was the greatest demagogue
in history." Those who add, "only a demagogue," fail to appreciate the
nature of political power in an age of mass politics. As he himself
said, "To be a leader means to be able to move the masses." Hitler's aim
was first to move the masses and then, having pried them loose from
their traditional loyalties and moralities, to impose upon them (with
the hypnotized consent of the majority) a new authoritarian order of
his own devising. "Hitler," wrote Hermann Rauschning in 1939, "has a
deep respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit order; not because
of their Christian doctrine, but because of the 'machinery' they have
elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical system, their extremely
clever tactics, their knowledge of human nature and their wise use of
human weaknesses in ruling over believers." Ecclesiasticism without
Christianity, the discipline of a monastic rule, not for God's sake or
in order to achieve personal salvation, but for the sake of the State
and for the greater glory and power of the demagogue turned Leader --
this was the goal toward which the systematic moving of the masses was
to lead.
Let us see what Hitler
thought of the masses he moved and how he did the moving. The first
principle from which he started was a value judgment: the masses are
utterly contemptible. They are incapable of abstract thinking and
uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their immediate
experience. Their behavior is determined, not by knowledge and reason,
but by feelings and unconscious drives. It is in these drives and
feelings that "the roots of their positive as well as their negative
attitudes are implanted." To be successful a propagandist must learn
how to manipulate these instincts and emotions. "The driving force which
has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has
never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the
masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind
of hysteria which has urged them into action. Whoever wishes to win
over the masses must know the key that will open the door of their
hearts." . . . In post-Freudian jargon, of their unconscious.
Hitler made his
strongest appeal to those members of the lower middle classes who had
been ruined by the inflation of 1923, and then ruined all over again by
the depression of 1929 and the following years. "The masses" of whom he
speaks were these bewildered, frustrated and chronically anxious
millions. To make them more masslike, more homogeneously subhuman, he
assembled them, by the thousands and the tens of thousands, in vast
halls and arenas, where individuals could lose their personal identity,
even their elementary humanity, and be merged with the crowd. A man or
woman makes direct contact with society in two ways: as a member of some
familial, professional or religious group, or as a member of a crowd.
Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals
who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is
capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking.
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their
capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the
point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They
become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective
responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm
and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had
swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of
what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an
active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from
responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic,
animal mindlessness.
During his long career
as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had
learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that
the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's
actions, much more effectively than can the writer. Reading is a
private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to
individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The
orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with
herd-poison. They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can
do what he likes with them. As an orator, Hitler knew his business
supremely well. He was able, in his own words, "to follow the lead of
the great mass in such a way that from the living emotion of his hearers
the apt word which he needed would be suggested to him and in its turn
this would go straight to the heart of his hearers." Otto Strasser
called him "a loud-speaker, proclaiming the most secret desires, the
least admissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a
whole nation." Twenty years before Madison Avenue embarked upon
"Motivational Research," Hitler was systematically exploring and
exploiting the secret fears and hopes, the cravings, anxieties and
frustrations of the German masses. It is by manipulating "hidden
forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares -- a
toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate. And it is by
appealing to the same hidden forces -- and to others too dangerous for
Madison Avenue to meddle with -- that Hitler induced the German masses
to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World
War.
Unlike the masses,
intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of
propaganda that works so well on the majority. Among the masses
"instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith. . . . While the
healthy common folk instinctively close their ranks to form a community
of the people" (under a Leader, it goes without saying) "intellectuals
run this way and that, like hens in a poultry yard. With them one
cannot make history; they cannot be used as elements composing a
community." Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence
and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard
over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for
the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations
which are the propagandist's stock in trade. "All effective propaganda,"
Hitler wrote, "must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must
be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas." These stereotyped
formulas must be constantly repeated, for "only constant repetition
will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."
Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us
self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as
self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our
judgment or to feel doubt. The aim of the demagogue is to create social
coherence under his own leadership. But, as Bertrand Russell has pointed
out, "systems of dogma without empirical foundations, such as
scholasticism, Marxism and fascism, have the advantage of producing a
great deal of social coherence among their disciples." The demagogic
propagandist must therefore be consistently dogmatic. All his statements
are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of
the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white.
In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt "a systematically
one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with." He
must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different
point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be
argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become
too much of a nuisance, liquidated. The morally squeamish intellectual
may be shocked by this kind of thing. But the masses are always
convinced that "right is on the side of the active aggressor."
Such, then, was Hitler's
opinion of humanity in the mass. It was a very low opinion. Was it also
an incorrect opinion? The tree is known by its fruits, and a theory of
human nature which inspired the kind of techniques that proved so
horribly effective must contain at least an element of truth. Virtue
and intelligence belong to human beings as individuals freely
associating with other individuals in small groups. So do sin and
stupidity. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes
his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his
victims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as
individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral
idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms
of herd-poisoning. In all the world's higher religions, salvation and
enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the
mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd.
Christ promised to be present where two or three are gathered together.
He did not say anything about being present where thousands are
intoxicating one another with herd-poison. Under the Nazis enormous
numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous amount of time
marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and back again to
point A. "This keeping of the whole population on the march seemed to be
a senseless waste of time and energy. Only much later," adds Hermann
Rauschning, "was there revealed in it a subtle intention based on a
well-judged adjustment of ends and means. Marching diverts men's
thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of
individuality. Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in
order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity
until it becomes second nature."
From his point of view
and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was
perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who
look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds,
or of regimented collectives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of
accelerating over-population, of accelerating over-organization and
ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the
integrity and reassert the value of the human individual? This is a
question that can still be asked and perhaps effectively answered. A
generation from now it may be too late to find an answer and perhaps
impossible, in the stifling collective climate of that future time,
even to ask the question.
VI.
The Arts of Selling
The survival of
democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make
realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship,
on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the
facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened
self-interest, but to passion and prejudice, to the powerful "hidden
forces," as Hitler called them, present in the unconscious depths of
every human mind.
In the West, democratic
principles are proclaimed and many able and conscientious publicists do
their best to supply electors with adequate information and to persuade
them, by rational argument, to make realistic choices in the light of
that information. All this is greatly to the good. But unfortunately
propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two
faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department
there is often a democratic Dr. Jekyll -- a propagandist who would be
very happy to prove that John Dewey had been right about the ability of
human nature to respond to truth and reason. But this worthy man
controls only a part of the machinery of mass communication. In charge
of advertising we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr.
Hyde -- or rather a Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and
has a master's degree as well in the social sciences. This Dr. Hyde
would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John
Dewey's faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll's affair, not
his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human
weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and
fears by which so much of men's conscious thinking and overt doing is
determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who
would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to
improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to
take advantage of their ignorance and to expolit their irrationality for
the pecuniary benefit of his employers. But after all, it may be
argued, "capitalism is dead, consumerism is king" -- and consumerism
requires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts
(including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free
enterprise system commercial propaganda by any and every means is
absolutely indispensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the
desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be
far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings. An
earlier, more moralistic generation would have been profoundly shocked
by the bland cynicism of the motivation analysts. Today we read a book
like Mr. Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, and are more
amused than horrified, more resigned than indignant. Given Freud, given
Behaviorism, given the mass producer's chronically desperate need for
mass consumption, this is the sort of thing that is only to be expected.
But what, we may ask, is the sort of thing that is to be expected in
the future? Are Hyde's activities compatible in the long run with
Jekyll's? Can a campaign in favor of rationality be successful in the
teeth of another and even more vigorous campaign in favor of
irrationality? These are questions which, for the moment, I shall not
attempt to answer, but shall leave hanging, so to speak, as a backdrop
to our discussion of the methods of mass persuasion in a technologically
advanced democratic society.
The task of the
commercial propagandist in a democracy is in some ways easier and in
some ways more difficult than that of a political propagandist employed
by an established dictator or a dictator in the making. It is easier
inasmuch as almost everyone starts out with a prejudice in favor of
beer, cigarettes and iceboxes, whereas almost nobody starts out with a
prejudice in favor of tyrants. It is more difficult inasmuch as the
commercial propagandist is not permitted, by the rules of his particular
game, to appeal to the more savage instincts of his public. The
advertiser of dairy products would dearly love to tell his readers and
listeners that all their troubles are caused by the machinations of a
gang of godless international margarine manufacturers, and that it is
their patriotic duty to march out and burn the oppressors' factories.
This sort of thing, however, is ruled out, and he must be content with a
milder approach. But the mild approach is less exciting than the
approach through verbal or physical violence. In the long run, anger and
hatred are self-defeating emotions. But in the short run they pay high
dividends in the form of psychological and even (since they release
large quantities of adrenalin and noradrenalin) physiological
satisfaction. People may start out with an initial prejudice against
tyrants; but when tyrants or would-be tyrants treat them to
adrenalin-releasing propaganda about the wickedness of their enemies --
particularly of enemies weak enough to be persecuted -- they are ready
to follow him with enthusiasm. In his speeches Hitler kept repeating
such words as "hatred," "force," "ruthless," "crush," "smash"; and he
would accompany these violent words with even more violent gestures. He
would yell, he would scream, his veins would swell, his face would turn
purple. Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist knows) is in the
highest degree contagious. Infected by the malignant frenzy of the
orator, the audience would groan and sob and scream in an orgy of
uninhibited passion. And these orgies were so enjoyable that most of
those who had experienced them eagerly came back for more. Almost all of
us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm
for the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom.
Conversely almost nobody wants war or tyranny; but a great many people
find an intense pleasure in the thoughts, feelings and actions that
make for war and tyranny. These thoughts, feelings and actions are too
dangerous to be exploited for commercial purposes. Accepting this
handicap, the advertising man must do the best he can with the less
intoxicating emotions, the quieter forms of irrationality.
Effective rational
propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on
the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their
relations to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda
depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the
nature of symbols. Simple-minded people tend to equate the symbol with
what it stands for, to attribute to things and events some of the
qualities expressed by the words in terms of which the propagandist has
chosen, for his own purposes, to talk about them. Consider a simple
example. Most cosmetics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of
purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion
has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become
rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial
propagandists do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion.
They give it some picturesquely voluptuous name, talk ecstatically and
misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes
nourishing their tissues with skin food. "The cosmetic manufacturers,"
one of their number has written, "are not selling lanolin, they are
selling hope." For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise
that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the
value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related,
by means of misleading symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal
feminine wish -- the wish to be more attractive to members of the
opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are
extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious
fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the
product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial
symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory
dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when
purchased, will make the dream come true. "We no longer buy oranges, we
buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige." And so with
all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy, not a mere cleanser
and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive.
In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in
small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically
valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the
warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With
our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god, the radiance of one of
Diana's nymphs. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the
envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the
sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some
deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the consumer
to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.
Stored in the minds and bodies of countless individuals, this potential
energy is released by, and transmitted along, a line of symbols
carefully laid out so as to bypass rationality and obscure the real
issue.
Sometimes the symbols
take effect by being disproportionately impressive, haunting and
fascinating in their own right. Of this kind are the rites and pomps of
religion. These "beauties of holiness" strengthen faith where it already
exists and, where there is no faith, contribute to conversion.
Appealing, as they do, only to the aesthetic sense, they guarantee
neither the truth nor the ethical value of the doctrines with which they
have been, quite arbitrarily, associated. As a matter of plain
historical fact, the beauties of holiness have often been matched and
indeed surpassed by the beauties of unholiness. Under Hitler, for
example, the yearly Nuremberg rallies were masterpieces of ritual and
theatrical art. "I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war
in the best days of the old Russian ballet," writes Sir Neville
Henderson, the British ambassador to Hitler's Germany, "but for
grandiose beauty I have never seen any ballet to compare with the
Nuremberg rally." One thinks of Keats -- "beauty is truth, truth
beauty." Alas, the identity exists only on some ultimate, supramundane
level. On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly
compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if
beauty were incompatible with nonsense and tyranny, there would be
precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting,
sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political
propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a government or a
priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all
religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the
servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult.
Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad metaphysics.
Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it
is actually taking place? That is the question.
In commercial propaganda
the principle of the disproportionately fascinating symbol is clearly
understood. Every propagandist has his Art Department, and attempts are
constantly being made to beautify the billboards with striking posters,
the advertising pages of magazines with lively drawings and
photographs. There are no masterpieces; for masterpieces appeal only to
a limited audience, and the commercial propagandist is out to captivate
the majority. For him, the ideal is a moderate excellence. Those who
like this not too good, but sufficiently striking, art may be expected
to like the products with which it has been associated and for which it
symbolically stands.
Another
disproportionately fascinating symbol is the Singing Commercial. Singing
Commercials are a recent invention; but the Singing Theological and the
Singing Devotional -- the hymn and the psalm -- are as old as religion
itself. Singing Militaries, or marching songs, are coeval with war, and
Singing Patriotics, the precursors of our national anthems, were
doubtless used to promote group solidarity, to emphasize the
distinction between "us" and "them," by the wandering bands of
paleolithic hunters and food gatherers. To most people music is
intrinsically attractive. Moreover, melodies tend to ingrain themselves
in the listener's mind. A tune will haunt the memory during the whole of
a lifetime. Here, for example, is a quite uninteresting statement or
value judgment. As it stands nobody will pay attention to it. But now
set the words to a catchy and easily remembered tune. Immediately they
become words of power. Moreover, the words will tend automatically to
repeat themselves every time the melody is heard or spontaneously
remembered. Orpheus has entered into an alliance with Pavlov -- the
power of sound with the conditioned reflex. For the commercial
propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and
religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it
would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken
can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure
and even with a kind of intellectual conviction. Can we learn to
separate the pleasure of singing or of listening to song from the all
too human tendency to believe in the propaganda which the song is
putting over? That again is the question.
Thanks to compulsory
education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many
years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every
civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the
happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults
and not yet literate children.
Children, as might be
expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of
the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. Their
critical faculties are undeveloped. The youngest of them have not yet
reached the age of reason and the older ones lack the experience on
which their new-found rationality can effectively work. In Europe,
conscripts used to be playfully referred to as "cannon fodder." Their
little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television
fodder. In my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in
pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing
Commercials. Which is better -- "Rheingold is my beer, the dry beer," or
"Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle"? "Abide with me" or "You'll
wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with
Pepsodent"? Who knows?
"I don't say that
children should be forced to harass their parents into buying products
they've seen advertised on television, but at the same time I cannot
close my eyes to the fact that it's being done every day." So writes the
star of one of the many programs beamed to a juvenile audience.
"Children," he adds, "are living, talking records of what we tell them
every day." And in due course these living, talking records of
television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of
industry. "Think," writes Mr. Clyde Miller ecstatically, "think of what
it can mean to your firm in profits if you can condition a million or
ten million children, who will grow up into adults trained to buy your
product, as soldiers are trained in advance when they hear the trigger
words, Forward March!" Yes, just think of it! And at the same time
remember that the dictators and the would-be dictators have been
thinking about this sort of thing for years, and that millions, tens of
millions, hundreds of millions of children are in process of growing up
to buy the local despot's ideological product and, like well-trained
soldiers, to respond with appropriate behavior to the trigger words
implanted in those young minds by the despot's propagandists.
Self-government is in
inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the
value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the
individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity.
The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the
pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people;
but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off
at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey. Increasing population
and advancing technology have resulted in an increase in the number and
complexity of organizations, an increase in the amount of power
concentrated in the hands of officials and a corresponding decrease in
the amount of control exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in
the public's regard for democratic procedures. Already weakened by the
vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic
institutions are now being undermined from within by the politicians
and their propagandists.
Human beings act in a
great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if
given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of
available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if
all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage
rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the
politicians and their propagandists prefer to make nonsense of
democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance
and irrationality of the electors. "Both parties," we were told in 1956
by the editor of a leading business journal, "will merchandize their
candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to
sell goods. These include scientific selection of appeals and planned
repetition. . . . Radio spot announcements and ads will repeat phrases
with a planned intensity. Billboards will push slogans of proven power. .
. . Candidates need, in addition to rich voices and good diction, to be
able to look 'sincerely' at the TV camera."
The political
merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their
potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into
becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate
and exploit them. For this purpose all the resources of psychology and
the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully selected
samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These
interviews in depth reveal the unconscious fears and wishes most
prevalent in a given society at the time of an election. Phrases and
images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at
satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the
experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the
light of the information thus obtained. After which the political
campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is
money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the
new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action
have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the
candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the
things that really matter.
In one way or another,
as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He
must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to
television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted
and does not like to be asked to concentrate or make a prolonged
intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must
therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt
with in five minutes at the most -- and preferably (since the audience
will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation
or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that
there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to
over-simplify complex issues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most
conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole
truth. The methods now being used to merchandise the political
candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the
electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.
VII.
Brainwashing
In the two preceding
chapters I have described the techniques of what may be called wholesale
mind-manipulation, as practiced by the greatest demagogue and the most
successful salesmen in recorded history. But no human problem can be
solved by wholesale methods alone. The shotgun has its place, but so has
the hypodermic syringe. In the chapters that follow I shall describe
some of the more effective techniques for manipulating not crowds, not
entire publics, but isolated individuals.
In the course of his
epoch-making experiments on the conditioned reflex, Ivan Pavlov observed
that, when subjected to prolonged physical or psychic stress,
laboratory animals exhibit all the symptoms of a nervous breakdown.
Refusing to cope any longer with the intolerable situation, their brains
go on strike, so to speak, and either stop working altogether (the dog
loses consciousness), or else resort to slowdowns and sabotage (the dog
behaves unrealistically, or develops the kind of physical symptoms
which, in a human being, we would call hysterical). Some animals are
more resistant to stress than others. Dogs possessing what Pavlov
called a "strong excitatory" constitution break down much more quickly
than dogs of a merely "lively" (as opposed to a choleric or agitated)
temperament. Similarly "weak inhibitory" dogs reach the end of their
tether much sooner than do "calm imperturbable" dogs. But even the most
stoical dog is unable to resist indefinitely. If the stress to which he
is subjected is sufficiently intense or sufficiently prolonged, he will
end by breaking down as abjectly and as completely as the weakest of
his kind.
Pavlov's findings were
confirmed in the most distressing manner, and on a very large scale,
during the two World Wars. As the result of a single catastrophic
experience, or of a succession of terrors less appalling but frequently
repeated, soldiers develop a number of disabling psychophysical
symptoms. Temporary unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy,
functional blindness or paralysis, completely unrealistic responses to
the challenge of events, strange reversals of lifelong patterns of
behavior -- all the symptoms, which Pavlov observed in his dogs,
reappeared among the victims of what in the First World War was called
"shell shock," in the Second, "battle fatigue." Every man, like every
dog, has his own individual limit of endurance. Most men reach their
limit after about thirty days of more or less continuous stress under
the conditions of modern combat. The more than averagely susceptible
succumb in only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist
for forty-five or even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all
of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially
sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up
indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual
insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
The fact that every
individual has his breaking point has been known and, in a crude
unscientific way, exploited from time immemorial. In some cases man's
dreadful inhumanity to man has been inspired by the love of cruelty for
its own horrible and fascinating sake. More often, however, pure sadism
was tempered by utilitarianism, theology or reasons of state. Physical
torture and other forms of stress were inflicted by lawyers in order to
loosen the tongues of reluctant witnesses; by clergymen in order to
punish the unorthodox and induce them to change their opinions; by the
secret police to extract confessions from persons suspected of being
hostile to the government. Under Hitler, torture, followed by mass
extermination, was used on those biological heretics, the Jews. For a
young Nazi, a tour of duty in the Extermination Camps was (in Himmler's
words) "the best indoctrination on inferior beings and the subhuman
races." Given the obsessional quality of the anti-Semitism which Hitler
had picked up as a young man in the slums of Vienna, this revival of the
methods employed by the Holy Office against heretics and witches was
inevitable. But in the light of the findings of Pavlov and of the
knowledge gained by psychiatrists in the treatment of war neuroses, it
seems a hideous and grotesque anachronism. Stresses amply sufficient to
cause a complete cerebral breakdown can be induced by methods which,
though hatefully inhuman, fall short of physical torture.
Whatever may have
happened in earlier years, it seems fairly certain that torture is not
extensively used by the Communist police today. They draw their
inspiration, not from the Inquisitor or the SS man, but from the
physiologist and his methodically conditioned laboratory animals. For
the dictator and his policemen, Pavlov's findings have important
practical implications. If the central nervous system of dogs can be
broken down, so can the central nervous system of political prisoners.
It is simply a matter of applying the right amount of stress for the
right length of time. At the end of the treatment, the prisoner will be
in a state of neurosis or hysteria, and will be ready to confess
whatever his captors want him to confess.
But confession is not
enough. A hopeless neurotic is no use to anyone. What the intelligent
and practical dictator needs is not a patient to be institutionalized,
or a victim to be shot, but a convert who will work for the Cause.
Turning once again to Pavlov, he learns that, on their way to the point
of final breakdown, dogs become more than normally suggestible. New
behavior patterns can easily be installed while the dog is at or near
the limit of its cerebral endurance, and these new behavior patterns
seem to be ineradicable. The animal in which they have been implanted
cannot be deconditioned; that which it has learned under stress will
remain an integral part of its make-up.
Psychological stresses
can be produced in many ways. Dogs become disturbed when stimuli are
unusually strong; when the interval between a stimulus and the
customary response is unduly prolonged and the animal is left in a state
of suspense; when the brain is confused by stimuli that run counter to
what the dog has learned to expect; when stimuli make no sense within
the victim's established frame of reference. Furthermore, it has been
found that the deliberate induction of fear, rage or anxiety markedly
heightens the dog's suggestibility. If these emotions are kept at a high
pitch of intensity for a long enough time, the brain goes "on strike."
When this happens, new behavior patterns may be installed with the
greatest of ease.
Among the physical
stresses that increase a dog's suggestibility are fatigue, wounds and
every form of sickness.
For the would-be
dictator these findings possess important practical implications. They
prove, for example, that Hitler was quite right in maintaining that mass
meetings at night were more effective than mass meetings in the
daytime. During the day, he wrote, "man's will power revolts with
highest energy against any attempt at being forced under another's will
and another's opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily
to the dominating force of a stronger will."
Pavlov would have agreed
with him; fatigue increases suggestibility. (That is why, among other
reasons, the commercial sponsors of television programs prefer the
evening hours and are ready to back their preference with hard cash.)
Illness is even more
effective than fatigue as an intensifier of suggestibility. In the past,
sickrooms were the scene of countless religious conversions. The
scientifically trained dictator of the future will have all the
hospitals in his dominions wired for sound and equipped with pillow
speakers. Canned persuasion will be on the air twenty-four hours a day,
and the more important patients will be visited by political soul-savers
and mind-changers just as, in the past, their ancestors were visited by
priests, nuns and pious laymen.
The fact that strong
negative emotions tend to heighten suggestibility and so facilitate a
change of heart had been observed and exploited long before the days of
Pavlov. As Dr. William Sargant has pointed out in his enlightening book,
Battle for the Mind, John Wesley's enormous success as a
preacher was based upon an intuitive understanding of the central
nervous system. He would open his sermon with a long and detailed
description of the torments to which, unless they underwent conversion,
his hearers would undoubtedly be condemned for all eternity. Then,
when terror and an agonizing sense of guilt had brought his audience to
the verge, or in some cases over the verge, of a complete cerebral
breakdown, he would change his tone and promise salvation to those who
believed and repented. By this kind of preaching, Wesley converted
thousands of men, women and children. Intense, prolonged fear broke
them down and produced a state of greatly intensified suggestibility. In
this state they were able to accept the preacher's theological
pronouncements without question. After which they were reintegrated by
words of comfort, and emerged from their ordeal with new and generally
better behavior patterns ineradicably implanted in their minds and
nervous systems.
The effectiveness of
political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed,
not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false,
wholesome or pernicious -- it makes little or no difference. If the
indoctrination is given in the right way at the proper stage of nervous
exhaustion, it will work. Under favorable conditions, practically
everybody can be converted to practically anything.
We possess detailed
descriptions of the methods used by the Communist police for dealing
with political prisoners. From the moment he is taken into custody, the
victim is subjected systematically to many kinds of physical and
psychological stress. He is badly fed, he is made extremely
uncomfortable, he is not allowed to sleep for more than a few hours each
night. And all the time he is kept in a state of suspense, uncertainty
and acute apprehension. Day after day -- or rather night after night,
for these Pavlovian policemen understand the value of fatigue as an
intensifier of suggestibility -- he is questioned, often for many hours
at a stretch, by interrogators who do their best to frighten, confuse
and bewilder him. After a few weeks or months of such treatment, his
brain goes on strike and he confesses whatever it is that his captors
want him to confess. Then, if he is to be converted rather than shot, he
is offered the comfort of hope. If he will but accept the true faith,
he can yet be saved -- not, of course, in the next life (for,
officially, there is no next life), but in this.
Similar but rather less
drastic methods were used during the Korean War on military prisoners.
In their Chinese camps the young Western captives were systematically
subjected to stress. Thus, for the most trivial breaches of the rules,
offenders would be summoned to the commandant's office, there to be
questioned, browbeaten and publicly humiliated. And the process would
be repeated, again and again, at any hour of the day or night. This
continuous harassment produced in its victims a sense of bewilderment
and chronic anxiety. To intensify their sense of guilt, prisoners were
made to write and rewrite, in ever more intimate detail, long
autobiographical accounts of their shortcomings. And after having
confessed their own sins, they were required to confess the sins of
their companions. The aim was to create within the camp a nightmarish
society, in which everybody was spying on, and informing against,
everyone else. To these mental stresses were added the physical stresses
of malnutrition, discomfort and illness. The increased suggestibility
thus induced was skilfully exploited by the Chinese, who poured into
these abnormally receptive minds large doses of pro-Communist and
anti-capitalist literature. These Pavlovian techniques were remarkably
successful. One out of every seven American prisoners was guilty, we
are officially told, of grave collaboration with the Chinese
authorities, one out of three of technical collaboration.
It must not be supposed
that this kind of treatment is reserved by the Communists exclusively
for their enemies. The young field workers, whose business it was,
during the first years of the new regime, to act as Communist
missionaries and organizers in China's innumerable towns and villages
were made to take a course of indoctrination far more intense than that
to which any prisoner of war was ever subjected. In his China under
Communism R. L. Walker describes the methods by which the party
leaders are able to fabricate out of ordinary men and women the
thousands of selfless fanatics required for spreading the Communist
gospel and for enforcing Communist policies. Under this system of
training, the human raw material is shipped to special camps, where the
trainees are completely isolated from their friends, families and the
outside world in general. In these camps they are made to perform
exhausting physical and mental work; they are never alone, always in
groups; they are encouraged to spy on one another; they are required to
write self-accusatory autobiographies; they live in chronic fear of the
dreadful fate that may befall them on account of what has been said
about them by informers or of what they themselves have confessed. In
this state of heightened suggestibility they are given an intensive
course in theoretical and applied Marxism -- a course in which failure
to pass examinations may mean anything from ignominious expulsion to a
term in a forced labor camp or even liquidation. After about six months
of this kind of thing, prolonged mental and physical stress produces the
results which Pavlov's findings would lead one to expect. One after
another, or in whole groups, the trainees break down. Neurotic and
hysterical symptoms make their appearance. Some of the victims commit
suicide, others (as many, we are told, as 20 per cent of the total)
develop a severe mental illness. Those who survive the rigors of the
conversion process emerge with new and ineradicable behavior patterns.
All their ties with the past -- friends, family, traditional decencies
and pieties -- have been severed. They are new men, re-created in the
image of their new god and totally dedicated to his service.
Throughout the Communist
world tens of thousands of these disciplined and devoted young men are
being turned out every year from hundreds of conditioning centers. What
the Jesuits did for the Roman Church of the Counter Reformation, these
products of a more scientific and even harsher training are now doing,
and will doubtless continue to do, for the Communist parties of Europe,
Asia and Africa.
In politics Pavlov seems
to have been an old-fashioned liberal. But, by a strange irony of
fate, his researches and the theories he based upon them have called
into existence a great army of fanatics dedicated heart and soul,
reflex and nervous system, to the destruction of old-fashioned
liberalism, wherever it can be found.
Brainwashing, as it is
now practiced, is a hybrid technique, depending for its effectiveness
partly on the systematic use of violence, partly on skilful
psychological manipulation. It represents the tradition of 1984
on its way to becoming the tradition of Brave New World. Under a
long-established and well-regulated dictatorship our current methods of
semiviolent manipulation will seem, no doubt, absurdly crude.
Conditioned from earliest infancy (and perhaps also biologically
predestined), the average middle- or lower-caste individual will never
require conversion or even a refresher course in the true faith. The
members of the highest caste will have to be able to think new thoughts
in response to new situations; consequently their training will be much
less rigid than the training imposed upon those whose business is not
to reason why, but merely to do and die with the minimum of fuss. These
upper-caste individuals will be members, still, of a wild species --
the trainers and guardians, themselves only slightly conditioned, of a
breed of completely domesticated animals. Their wildness will make it
possible for them to become heretical and rebellious. When this happens,
they will have to be either liquidated, or brainwashed back into
orthodoxy, or (as in Brave New World) exiled to some island,
where they can give no further trouble, except of course to one another.
But universal infant conditioning and the other techniques of
manipulation and control are still a few generations away in the
future. On the road to the Brave New World our rulers will have to rely
on the transitional and provisional techniques of brainwashing.
VIII.
Chemical Persuasion
In the Brave New World
of my fable there was no whisky, no tobacco, no illicit heroin, no
bootlegged cocaine. People neither smoked, nor drank, nor sniffed, nor
gave themselves injections. Whenever anyone felt depressed or below par,
he would swallow a tablet or two of a chemical compound called soma.
The original soma, from which I took the name of this hypothetical drug,
was an unknown plant (possibly Asclepias aeida) used by the
ancient Aryan invaders of India in one of the most solemn of their
religious rites. The intoxicating juice expressed from the stems of this
plant was drunk by the priests and nobles in the course of an elaborate
ceremony. In the Vedic hymns we are told that the drinkers of soma were
blessed in many ways. Their bodies were strengthened, their hearts were
filled with courage, joy and enthusiasm, their minds were enlightened
and in an immediate experience of eternal life they received the
assurance of their immortality. But the sacred juice had its drawbacks.
Soma was a dangerous drug -- so dangerous that even the great sky-god,
Indra, was sometimes made ill by drinking it. Ordinary mortals might
even die of an overdose. But the experience was so transcendently
blissful and enlightening that soma drinking was regarded as a high
privilege. For this privilege no price was too great.
The soma of Brave New
World had none of the drawbacks of its Indian original. In small
doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see
visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes
into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The
Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from
the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their
health or permanently reducing their efficiency.
In the Brave New World
the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution,
it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But this most precious of the
subjects' inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most
powerful instruments of rule in the dictator's armory. The systematic
drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State (and incidentally,
of course, for their own delight) was a main plank in the policy of the
World Controllers. The daily soma ration was an insurance against
personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive
ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the
Brave New World this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was
the people's religion. Like religion, the drug had power to console and
compensate, it called up visions of another, better world, it offered
hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity. Beer, a poet has
written,
. . .does
more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
And let us remember
that, compared with soma, beer is a drug of the crudest and most
unreliable kind. In this matter of justifying God's ways to man, soma is
to alcohol as alcohol is to the theological arguments of Milton.
In 1931, when I was
writing about the imaginary synthetic by means of which future
generations would be made both happy and docile, the well-known
American biochemist, Dr. Irvine Page, was preparing to leave Germany,
where he had spent the three preceding years at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute, working on the chemistry of the brain. "It is hard to
understand," Dr. Page has written in a recent article, "why it took so
long for scientists to get around to investigating the chemical
reactions in their own brains. I speak," he adds, "from acute personal
experience. When I came home in 1931 . . . I could not get a job in this
field (the field of brain chemistry) or stir a ripple of interest in
it." Today, twenty-seven years later, the non-existent ripple of 1931
has become a tidal wave of biochemical and psychopharmacological
research. The enzymes which regulate the workings of the brain are being
studied. Within the body, hitherto unknown chemical substances such as
adrenochrome and serotonin (of which Dr. Page was a co-discoverer) have
been isolated and their far-reaching effects on our mental and physical
functions are now being investigated. Meanwhile new drugs are being
synthesized -- drugs that reinforce or correct or interfere with the
actions of the various chemicals, by means of which the nervous system
performs its daily and hourly miracles as the controller of the body,
the instrument and mediator of consciousness. From our present point of
view, the most interesting fact about these new drugs is that they
temporarily alter the chemistry of the brain and the associated state of
the mind without doing any permanent damage to the organism as a whole.
In this respect they are like soma -- and profoundly unlike the
mind-changing drugs of the past. For example, the classical
tranquillizer is opium. But opium is a dangerous drug which, from
neolithic times down to the present day, has been making addicts and
ruining health. The same is true of the classical euphoric, alcohol --
the drug which, in the words of the Psalmist, "maketh glad the heart of
man." But unfortunately alcohol not only maketh glad the heart of man;
it also, in excessive doses, causes illness and addiction, and has been a
main source, for the last eight or ten thousand years, of crime,
domestic unhappiness, moral degradation and avoidable accidents.
Among the classical
stimulants, tea, coffee and maté are, thank goodness, almost completely
harmless. They are also very weak stimulants. Unlike these "cups that
cheer but not inebriate," cocaine is a very powerful and a very
dangerous drug. Those who make use of it must pay for their ecstasies,
their sense of unlimited physical and mental power, by spells of
agonizing depression, by such horrible physical symptoms as the
sensation of being infested by myriads of crawling insects and by
paranoid delusions that may lead to crimes of violence. Another
stimulant of more recent vintage is amphetamine, better known under its
trade name of Benzedrine. Amphetamine works very effectively -- but
works, if abused, at the expense of mental and physical health. It has
been reported that, in Japan, there are now about one million
amphetamine addicts.
Of the classical
vision-producers the best known are the peyote of Mexico and the
southwestern United States and Cannabis sativa, consumed all over
the world under such names as hashish, bhang, kif and marihuana.
According to the best medical and anthropological evidence, peyote is
far less harmful than the White Man's gin or whisky. It permits the
Indians who use it in their religious rites to enter paradise, and to
feel at one with the beloved community, without making them pay for the
privilege by anything worse than the ordeal of having to chew on
something with a revolting flavor and of feeling somewhat nauseated for
an hour or two. Cannabis sativa is a less innocuous drug --
though not nearly so harmful as the sensation-mongers would have us
believe. The Medical Committee, appointed in 1944 by the Mayor of New
York to investigate the problem of marihuana, came to the conclusion,
after careful investigation, that Cannabis sativa is not a serious
menace to society, or even to those who indulge in it. It is merely a
nuisance.
From these classical
mind-changes we pass to the latest products of psychopharmacological
research. Most highly publicized of these are the three new
tranquillizers, reserpine, chlorpromazine and meprobamate. Administered
to certain classes of psychotics, the first two have proved to be
remarkably effective, not in curing mental illnesses, but at least in
temporarily abolishing their more distressing symptoms. Meprobamate
(alias Miltown) produces similar effects in persons suffering from
various forms of neurosis. None of these drugs is perfectly harmless;
but their cost, in terms of physical health and mental efficiency, is
extraordinarily low. In a world where nobody gets anything for nothing
tranquillizers offer a great deal for very little. Miltown and
chlorpromazine are not yet soma; but they come fairly near to being one
of the aspects of that mythical drug. They provide temporary relief from
nervous tension without, in the great majority of cases, inflicting
permanent organic harm, and without causing more than a rather slight
impairment, while the drug is working, of intellectual and physical
efficiency. Except as narcotics, they are probably to be preferred to
the barbiturates, which blunt the mind's cutting edge and, in large
doses, cause a number of undesirable psychophysical symptoms and may
result in a full-blown addiction.
In LSD-25 (lysergic acid
diethylamide) the pharmacologists have recently created another aspect
of soma -- a perception-improver and vision-producer that is,
physiologically speaking, almost costless. This extraordinary drug,
which is effective in doses as small as fifty or even twenty-five
millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to transport people into
the other world. In the majority of cases, the other world to which
LSD-25 gives access is heavenly; alternatively it may be purgatorial or
even infernal. But, positive, or negative, the lysergic acid experience
is felt by almost everyone who undergoes it to be profoundly
significant and enlightening. In any event, the fact that minds can be
changed so radically at so little cost to the body is altogether
astonishing.
Soma was not only a
vision-producer and a tranquillizer; it was also (and no doubt
impossibly) a stimulant of mind and body, a creator of active euphoria
as well as of the negative happiness that follows the release from
anxiety and tension.
The ideal stimulant --
powerful but innocuous -- still awaits discovery. Amphetamine, as we
have seen, was far from satisfactory; it exacted too high a price for
what it gave. A more promising candidate for the role of soma in its
third aspect is Iproniazid, which is now being used to lift depressed
patients out of their misery, to enliven the apathetic and in general to
increase the amount of available psychic energy. Still more promising,
according to a distinguished pharmacologist of my acquaintance, is a
new compound, still in the testing stage, to be known as Deaner. Deaner
is an amino-alcohol and is thought to increase the production of
acetyl-choline within the body, and thereby to increase the activity and
effectiveness of the nervous system. The man who takes the new pill
needs less sleep, feels more alert and cheerful, thinks faster and
better -- and all at next to no organic cost, at any rate in the short
run. It sounds almost too good to be true.
We see then that, though
soma does not yet exist (and will probably never exist), fairly good
substitutes for the various aspects of soma have already been
discovered. There are now physiologically cheap tranquillizers,
physiologically cheap vision-producers and physiologically cheap
stimulants.
That a dictator could,
if he so desired, make use of these drugs for political purposes is
obvious. He could ensure himself against political unrest by changing
the chemistry of his subjects' brains and so making them content with
their servile condition. He could use tranquillizers to calm the
excited, stimulants to arouse enthusiasm in the indifferent, halluciants
to distract the attention of the wretched from their miseries. But how,
it may be asked, will the dictator get his subjects to take the pills
that will make them think, feel and behave in the ways he finds
desirable? In all probability it will be enough merely to make the
pills available. Today alcohol and tobacco are available, and people
spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics,
pseudo-stimulants and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the
education of their children. Or consider the barbiturates and the
tranquillizers. In the United States these drugs can be obtained only on
a doctor's prescription. But the demand of the American public for
something that will make life in an urban-industrial environment a
little more tolerable is so great that doctors are now writing
prescriptions for the various tranquillizers at the rate of forty-eight
millions a year. Moreover, a majority of these prescriptions are
refilled. A hundred doses of happiness are not enough: send to the
drugstore for another bottle -- and, when that is finished, for another.
. . . There can be no doubt that, if tranquillizers could be bought as
easily and cheaply as aspirin, they would be consumed, not by the
billions, as they are at present, but by the scores and hundreds of
billions. And a good, cheap stimulant would be almost as popular.
Under a dictatorship
pharmacists would be instructed to change their tune with every change
of circumstances. In times of national crisis it would be their business
to push the sale of stimulants. Between crises, too much alertness and
energy on the part of his subjects might prove embarrassing to the
tyrant. At such times the masses would be urged to buy tranquillizers
and vision-producers. Under the influence of these soothing syrups they
could be relied upon to give their master no trouble.
As things now stand, the
tranquillizers may prevent some people from giving enough trouble, not
only to their rulers, but even to themselves. Too much tension is a
disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought
to be tense, when an excess of tranquillity (and especially of
tranquillity imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely
inappropriate.
At a recent symposium on
meprobamate, in which I was a participant, an eminent biochemist
playfully suggested that the United States government should make a free
gift to the Soviet people of fifty billion doses of this most popular
of the tranquillizers. The joke had a serious point to it. In a contest
between two populations, one of which is being constantly stimulated by
threats and promises, constantly directed by one-pointed propaganda,
while the other is no less constantly being distracted by television
and tranquillized by Miltown, which of the opponents is more likely to
come out on top?
As well as
tranquillizing, hallucinating and stimulating, the soma of my fable had
the power of heightening suggestibility, and so could be used to
reinforce the effects of governmental propaganda. Less effectively and
at a higher physiological cost, several drugs already in the
pharmacopoeia can be used for the same purpose. There is scopolamine,
for example, the active principle of henbane and, in large doses, a
powerful poison; there are pentothal and sodium amytal. Nicknamed for
some odd reason "the truth serum," pentothal has been used by the
police of various countries for the purpose of extracting confessions
from (or perhaps suggesting confessions to) reluctant criminals.
Pentothal and sodium amytal lower the barrier between the conscious and
the subconscious mind and are of great value in the treatment of
"battle fatigue" by the process known in England as "abreaction
therapy," in America as "narcosynthesis." It is said that these drugs
are sometimes employed by the Communists, when preparing important
prisoners for their public appearance in court.
Meanwhile pharmacology,
biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite
certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better
chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering
psychological resistance will be discovered. Like everything else,
these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the
psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the
dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is
divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at
the same time destroy.
IX.
Subconscious Persuasion
In a footnote appended
to the 1919 edition of his book, The Interpretation of Dreams,
Sigmund Freud called attention to the work of Dr. Poetzl, an Austrian
neurologist, who had recently published a paper describing his
experiments with the tachistoscope. (The tachistoscope is an instrument
that comes in two forms -- a viewing box, into which the subject looks
at an image that is exposed for a small fraction of a second; a magic
lantern with a high-speed shutter, capable of projecting an image very
briefly upon a screen.) In these experiments Poetzl required the
subjects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a
picture exposed to their view in a tachistoscope. . . . He then turned
his attention to the dreams dreamed by the subjects during the following
night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate
portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details
of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject
provided material for the construction of the dream."
With various
modifications and refinements Poetzl's experiments have been repeated
several times, most recently by Dr. Charles Fisher, who has contributed
three excellent papers on the subject of dreams and "preconscious
perception" to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association. Meanwhile the academic psychologists have not been
idle. Confirming Poetzl's findings, their studies have shown that people
actually see and hear a great deal more than they consciously know they
see and hear, and that what they see and hear without knowing it is
recorded by the subconscious mind and may affect their conscious
thoughts, feelings and behavior.
Pure science does not
remain pure indefinitely. Sooner or later it is apt to turn into applied
science and finally into technology. Theory modulates into industrial
practice, knowledge becomes power, formulas and laboratory experiments
undergo a metamorphosis, and emerge as the H-bomb. In the present case,
Poetzl's nice little piece of pure science, and all the other nice
little pieces of pure science in the field of preconscious perception,
retained their pristine purity for a surprisingly long time. Then, in
the early autumn of 1957, exactly forty years after the publication of
Poetzl's original paper, it was announced that their purity was a thing
of the past; they had been applied, they had entered the realm of
technology. The announcement made a considerable stir, and was talked
and written about all over the civilized world. And no wonder; for the
new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was
intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of
civilized human beings mass entertainment now plays a part comparable
to that played in the Middle Ages by religion. Our epoch has been given
many nicknames -- the Age of Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age. It
might, with equally good reason, be called the Age of Television
Addiction, the Age of Soap Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey. In such an
age the announcement that Poetzl's pure science had been applied in the
form of a technique of subliminal projection could not fail to arouse
the most intense interest among the world's mass entertainees. For the
new technique was aimed directly at them, and its purpose was to
manipulate their minds without their being aware of what was being done
to them. By means of specially designed tachistoscopes words or images
were to be flashed for a millisecond or less upon the screens of
television sets and motion picture theaters during (not before or after)
the program. "Drink Coca-Cola" or "Light up a Camel" would be
superimposed upon the lovers' embrace, the tears of the broken-hearted
mother, and the optic nerves of the viewers would record these secret
messages, their subconscious minds would respond to them and in due
course they would consciously feel a craving for soda pop and tobacco.
And meanwhile other secret messages would be whispered too softly, or
squeaked too shrilly, for conscious hearing. Consciously the listener
might be paying attention to some phrase as "Darling, I love you"; but
subliminally, beneath the threshold of awareness, his incredibly
sensitive ears and his subconscious mind would be taking in the latest
good news about deodorants and laxatives.
Does this kind of
commercial propaganda really work? The evidence produced by the
commercial firm that first unveiled a technique for subliminal
projection was vague and, from a scientific point of view, very
unsatisfactory. Repeated at regular intervals during the showing of a
picture in a movie theater, the command to buy more popcorn was said to
have resulted in a 50 per cent increase in popcorn sales during the
intermission. But a single experiment proves very little. Moreover, this
particular experiment was poorly set up. There were no controls and no
attempt was made to allow for the many variables that undoubtedly
affect the consumption of popcorn by a theater audience. And anyhow was
this the most effective way of applying the knowledge accumulated over
the years by the scientific investigators of subconscious perception?
Was it intrinsically probable that, by merely flashing the name of a
product and a command to buy it, you would be able to break down sales
resistance and recruit new customers? The answer to both these questions
is pretty obviously in the negative. But this does not mean, of
course, that the findings of the neurologists and psychologists are
without any practical importance. Skilfully applied, Poetzl's nice
little piece of pure science might well become a powerful instrument for
the manipulation of unsuspecting minds.
For a few suggestive
hints let us now turn from the popcorn vendors to those who, with less
noise but more imagination and better methods, have been experimenting
in the same field. In Britain, where the process of manipulating minds
below the level of consciousness is known as "strobonic injection,"
investigators have stressed the practical importance of creating the
right psychological conditions for subconscious persuasion. A suggestion
above the threshold of awareness is more likely to take effect when the
recipient is in a light hypnotic trance, under the influence of certain
drugs, or has been debilitated by illness, starvation, or any kind of
physical or emotional stress. But what is true for suggestions above the
threshold of consciousness is also true for suggestions beneath that
threshold. In a word, the lower the level of a person's psychological
resistance, the greater will be the effectiveness of strobonically
injected suggestions. The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up
his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and
hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all
public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by
suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.
From the conditions
under which we may expect subliminal suggestion to be effective we now
pass to the suggestions themselves. In what terms should the
propagandist address himself to his victims' subconscious minds? Direct
commands ("Buy popcorn" or "Vote for Jones") and unqualified statements
("Socialism stinks" or "X's toothpaste cures halitosis") are likely to
take effect only upon those minds that are already partial to Jones and
popcorn, already alive to the dangers of body odors and the public
ownership of the means of production. But to strengthen existing faith
is not enough; the propagandist, if he is worth his salt, must create
new faith, must know how to bring the indifferent and the undecided over
to his side, must be able to mollify and perhaps even convert the
hostile. To subliminal assertion and command he knows that he must add
subliminal persuasion.
Above the threshold of
awareness, one of the most effective methods of non-rational persuasion
is what may be called persuasion-by-association. The propagandist
arbitrarily associates his chosen product, candidate or cause with some
idea, some image of a person or thing which most people, in a given
culture, unquestioningly regard as good. Thus, in a selling campaign
female beauty may be arbitrarily associated with anything from a
bulldozer to a diuretic; in a political campaign patriotism may be
associated with any cause from apartheid to integration, and with
any kind of person, from a Mahatma Gandhi to a Senator McCarthy. Years
ago, in Central America, I observed an example of
persuasion-by-association which filled me with an appalled admiration
for the men who had devised it. In the mountains of Guatemala the only
imported art works are the colored calendars distributed free of charge
by the foreign companies whose products are sold to the Indians. The
American calendars showed pictures of dogs, of landscapes, of young
women in a state of partial nudity. But to the Indian dogs are merely
utilitarian objects, landscapes are what he sees only too much of, every
day of his life, and half-naked blondes are uninteresting, perhaps a
little repulsive. American calendars were, in consequence, far less
popular than German calendars; for the German advertisers had taken the
trouble to find out what the Indians valued and were interested in. I
remember in particular one masterpiece of commercial propaganda. It was a
calendar put out by a manufacturer of aspirin. At the bottom of the
picture one saw the familiar trademark on the familiar bottle of white
tablets. Above it were no snow scenes or autumnal woods, no cocker
spaniels or bosomy chorus girls. No -- the wily Germans had associated
their pain-relievers with a brightly colored and extremely lifelike
picture of the Holy Trinity sitting on a cumulus cloud and surrounded by
St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, assorted saints and a large number of
angels. The miraculous virtues of acetyl salicylic acid were thus
guaranteed, in the Indians' simple and deeply religious minds, by God
the Father and the entire heavenly host.
This kind of
persuasion-by-association is something to which the techniques of
subliminal projection seem to lend themselves particularly well. In a
series of experiments carried out at New York University, under the
auspices of the National Institute of Health, it was found that a
person's feelings about some consciously seen image could be modified
by associating it, on the subconscious level, with another image, or,
better still, with value-bearing words. Thus, when associated, on the
subconscious level, with the word "happy," a blank expressionless face
would seem to the observer to smile, to look friendly, amiable,
outgoing. When the same face was associated, also on the subconscious
level, with the word "angry," it took on a forbidding expression, and
seemed to the observer to have become hostile and disagreeable. (To a
group of young women, it also came to seem very masculine -- whereas
when it was associated with "happy," they saw the face as belonging to a
member of their own sex. Fathers and husbands, please take note.) For
the commercial and political propagandist, these findings, it is
obvious, are highly significant. If he can put his victims into a state
of abnormally high suggestibility, if he can show them, while they are
in that state, the thing, the person or, through a symbol, the cause he
has to sell, and if, on the subconscious level, he can associate this
thing, person or symbol with some value-bearing word or image, he may be
able to modify their feelings and opinions without their having any
idea of what he is doing. It should be possible, according to an
enterprising commercial group in New Orleans, to enhance the
entertainment value of films and television plays by using this
technique. People like to feel strong emotions and therefore enjoy
tragedies, thrillers, murder mysteries and tales of passion. The
dramatization of a fight or an embrace produces strong emotions in the
spectators. It might produce even stronger emotions if it were
associated, on the subconscious level, with appropriate words or
symbols. For example, in the film version of A Farewell to Arms,
the death of the heroine in childbirth might be made even more
distressing than it already is by subliminally flashing upon the screen,
again and again, during the playing of the scene, such ominous words as
"pain," "blood" and "death." Consciously, the words would not be seen;
but their effect upon the subconscious mind might be very great and
these effects might powerfully reinforce the emotions evoked, on the
conscious level, by the acting and the dialogue. If, as seems pretty
certain, subliminal projection can consistently intensify the emotions
felt by moviegoers, the motion picture industry may yet be saved from
bankruptcy -- that is, if the producers of television plays don't get
there first.
In the light of what has
been said about persuasion-by-association and the enhancement of
emotions by subliminal suggestion, let us try to imagine what the
political meeting of tomorrow will be like. The candidate (if there is
still a question of candidates), or the appointed representative of the
ruling oligarchy, will make his speech for all to hear. Meanwhile the
tachistoscopes, the whispering and squeaking machines, the projectors of
images so dim that only the subconscious mind can respond to them, will
be reinforcing what he says by systematically associating the man and
his cause with positively charged words and hallowed images, and by
strobonically injecting negatively charged words and odious symbols
whenever he mentions the enemies of the State or the Party. In the
United States brief flashes of Abraham Lincoln and the words "government
by the people" will be projected upon the rostrum. In Russia the
speaker will, of course, be associated with glimpses of Lenin, with the
words "people's democracy," with the prophetic beard of Father Marx.
Because all this is still safely in the future, we can afford to smile.
Ten or twenty years from now, it will probably seem a good deal less
amusing. For what is now merely science fiction will have become
everyday political fact.
Poetzl was one of the
portents which, when writing Brave New World, I somehow
overlooked. There is no reference in my fable to subliminal projection.
It is a mistake of omission which, if I were to rewrite the book today, I
should most certainly correct.
X.
Hypnopaedia
In the late autumn of
1957 the Woodland Road Camp, a penal institution in Tulare County,
California, became the scene of a curious and interesting experiment.
Miniature loud-speakers were placed under the pillows of a group of
prisoners who had volunteered to act as psychological guinea pigs. Each
of these pillow speakers was hooked up to a phonograph in the Warden's
office. Every hour throughout the night an inspirational whisper
repeated a brief homily on "the principles of moral living." Waking at
midnight, a prisoner might hear this still small voice extolling the
cardinal virtues or murmuring, on behalf of his own Better Self, "I am
filled with love and compassion for all, so help me God."
After reading about the
Woodland Road Camp, I turned to the second chapter of Brave New World.
In that chapter the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning for
Western Europe explains to a group of freshman conditioners and
hatchers the workings of that state-controlled system of ethical
education, known in the seventh century After Ford as hypnopaedia. The
earliest attempts at sleep-teaching, the Director told his audience, had
been misguided, and therefore unsuccessful. Educators had tried to give
intellectual training to their slumbering pupils. But intellectual
activity is incompatible with sleep. Hypnopaedia became successful only
when it was used for moral training -- in other words, for the
conditioning of behavior through verbal suggestion at a time of lowered
psychological resistance. "Wordless conditioning is crude and
wholesale, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior
required by the State. For that there must be words, but words without
reason" . . . the kind of words that require no analysis for their
comprehension, but can be swallowed whole by the sleeping brain. This is
true hynopaedia, "the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all
time." In the Brave New World, no citizens belonging to the lower
castes ever gave any trouble. Why? Because, from the moment he could
speak and understand what was said to him, every lower-caste child was
exposed to endlessly repeated suggestions, night after night, during
the hours of drowsiness and sleep. These suggestions were "like drops of
liquid sealing wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves
with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions and the sum of these
suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The
adult's mind too -- all his life long. The mind that judges and desires
and decides -- made up of these suggestions. But these suggestions are
our suggestions -- suggestions from the State. . . ."
To date, so far as I
know, hypnopaedic suggestions have been given by no state more
formidable than Tulare County, and the nature of Tulare's hypnopaedic
suggestions to lawbreakers is unexceptionable. If only all of us, and
not only the inmates of the Woodland Road Camp, could be effectively
filled, during our sleep, with love and compassion for all! No, it is
not the message conveyed by the inspirational whisper that one objects
to; it is the principle of sleep-teaching by governmental agencies. Is
hypnopaedia the sort of instrument that officials, delegated to exercise
authority in a democratic society, ought to be allowed to use at their
discretion? In the present instance they are using it only on
volunteers and with the best intentions. But there is no guarantee that
in other cases the intentions will be good or the indoctrination on a
voluntary basis. Any law or social arrangement which makes it possible
for officials to be led into temptation is bad. Any law or arrangement
which preserves them from being tempted to abuse their delegated power
for their own advantage, or for the benefit of the State or of some
political, economic or ecclesiastical organization, is good.
Hypnopaedia, if it is effective, would be a tremendously powerful
instrument in the hands of anyone in a position to impose suggestions
upon a captive audience. A democratic society is a society dedicated to
the proposition that power is often abused and should therefore be
entrusted to officials only in limited amounts and for limited periods
of time. In such a society, the use of hypnopaedia by officials should
be regulated by law -- that is, of course, if hypnopaedia is genuinely
an instrument of power. But is it in fact an instrument of power? Will
it work now as well as I imagined it working in the seventh century
A.F.? Let us examine the evidence.
In the Psychological
Bulletin for July, 1955, Charles W. Simon and William H. Emmons have
analyzed and evaluated the ten most important studies in the field. All
these studies were concerned with memory. Does sleep-teaching help the
pupil in his task of learning by rote? And to what extent is material
whispered into the ear of a sleeping person remembered next morning when
he wakes? Simon and Emmons answer as follows : "Ten sleep-learning
studies were reviewed. Many of these have been cited uncritically by
commercial firms or in popular magazines and news articles as evidence
in support of the feasibility of learning during sleep. A critical
analysis was made of their experimental design, statistics, methodology
and criteria of sleep. All the studies had weaknesses in one or more of
these areas. The studies do not make it unequivocally clear that
learning during sleep actually takes place. But some learning
appears to take place in a special kind of waking state wherein the
subjects do not remember later on if they had been awake. This may be
of great practical importance from the standpoint of economy in study
time, but it cannot be construed as sleep learning. . . . The
problem is partially confounded by an inadequate definition of sleep."
Meanwhile the fact
remains that in the American Army during the Second World War (and even,
experimentally, during the First) daytime instruction in the Morse
Code and in foreign languages was supplemented by instruction during
sleep -- apparently with satisfactory results. Since the end of World
War II several commercial firms in the United States and elsewhere
have sold large numbers of pillow speakers and clock-controlled
phonographs and tape recorders for the use of actors in a hurry to learn
their parts, of politicians and preachers who want to give the illusion
of being extemporaneously eloquent, of students preparing for
examinations and, finally and most profitably, of the countless people
who are dissatisfied with themselves as they are and would like to be
suggested or autosuggested into becoming something else.
Self-administered suggestion can easily be recorded on magnetic tape and
listened to, over and over again, by day and during sleep. Suggestions
from the outside may be bought in the form of records carrying a wide
variety of helpful messages. There are on the market records for the
release of tension and the induction of deep relaxation, records for
promoting self-confidence (much used by salesmen), records for
increasing one's charm and making one's personality more magnetic. Among
the best sellers are records for the achievement of sexual harmony and
records for those who wish to lose weight. ("I am cold to chocolate,
insensible to the lure of potatoes, utterly unmoved by muffins.") There
are records for improved health and even records for making more money.
And the remarkable thing is that, according to the unsolicited
testimonials sent in by grateful purchasers of these records, many
people actually do make more money after listening to hypnopaedic
suggestions to that effect, many obese ladies do lose weight and many
couples on the verge of divorce achieve sexual harmony and live happily
ever after.
In this context an
article by Theodore X. Barber, "Sleep and Hypnosis," which appeared in The
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis for October, 1956, is
most enlightening. Mr. Barber points out that there is a significant
difference between light sleep and deep sleep. In deep sleep the
electroencephalograph records no alpha waves; in light sleep alpha
waves make their appearance. In this respect light sleep is closer to
the waking and hypnotic states (in both of which alpha waves are
present) than it is to deep sleep. A loud noise will cause a person in
deep sleep to awaken. A less violent stimulus will not arouse him, but
will cause the reappearance of alpha waves. Deep sleep has given place
for the time being to light sleep.
A person in deep sleep
is unsuggestible. But when subjects in light sleep are given
suggestions, they will respond to them, Mr. Barber found, in the same
way that they respond to suggestions when in the hypnotic trance.
Many of the earlier
investigators of hypnotism made similar experiments. In his classical History,
Practice and Theory of Hypnotism, first published in 1903, Milne
Bramwell records that "many authorities claim to have changed natural
sleep into hypnotic sleep. According to Wetterstrand, it is often very
easy to put oneself en rapport with sleeping persons, especially
children. . . . Wetterstrand thinks this method of inducing hypnosis of
much practical value and claims to have often used it successfully."
Bramwell cites many other experienced hypnotists (including such eminent
authorities as Bernheim, Moll and Forel) to the same effect. Today an
experimenter would not speak of "changing natural into hypnotic sleep."
All he is prepared to say is that light sleep (as opposed to deep sleep
without alpha waves) is a state in which many subjects will accept
suggestions as readily as they do when under hypnosis. For example,
after being told, when lightly asleep, that they will wake up in a
little while, feeling extremely thirsty, many subjects will duly wake up
with a dry throat and a craving for water. The cortex may be too
inactive to think straight; but it is alert enough to respond to
suggestions and to pass them on to the autonomic nervous system.
As we have already seen,
the well-known Swedish physician and experimenter, Wetterstrand, was
especially successful in the hypnotic treatment of sleeping children.
In our own day Wetterstrand's methods are followed by a number of
pediatricians, who instruct young mothers in the art of giving helpful
suggestions to their children during the hours of light sleep. By this
kind of hypnopaedia children can be cured of bed wetting and nail
biting, can be prepared to go into surgery without apprehension, can be
given confidence and reassurance when, for any reason, the
circumstances of their life have become distressing. I myself have seen
remarkable results achieved by the therapeutic sleep-teaching of small
children. Comparable results could probably be achieved with many
adults.
For a would-be dictator,
the moral of all this is plain. Under proper conditions, hypnopaedia
actually works -- works, it would seem, about as well as hypnosis. Most
of the things that can be done with and to a person in hypnotic trance
can be done with and to a person in light sleep. Verbal suggestions can
be passed through the somnolent cortex to the midbrain, the brain stem
and the autonomic nervous system. If these suggestions are well
conceived and frequently repeated, the bodily functions of the sleeper
can be improved or interfered with, new patterns of feeling can be
installed and old ones modified, posthypnotic commands can be given,
slogans, formulas and trigger words deeply ingrained in the memory.
Children are better hypnopaedic subjects than adults, and the would-be
dictator will take full advantage of the fact. Children of
nursery-school and kindergarten age will be treated to hypnopaedic
suggestions during their afternoon nap. For older children and
particularly the children of party members -- the boys and girls who
will grow up to be leaders, administrators and teachers -- there will be
boarding schools, in which an excellent day-time education will be
supplemented by nightly sleep-teaching. In the case of adults, special
attention will be paid to the sick. As Pavlov demonstrated many years
ago, strong-minded and resistant dogs become completely suggestible
after an operation or when suffering from some debilitating illness. Our
dictator will therefore see that every hospital ward is wired for
sound. An appendectomy, an accouchement, a bout of pneumonia or
hepatitis, can be made the occasion for an intensive course in loyalty
and the true faith, a refresher in the principles of the local ideology.
Other captive audiences can be found in prisons, in labor camps, in
military barracks, on ships at sea, on trains and airplanes in the
night, in the dismal waiting rooms of bus terminals and railway
stations. Even if the hypnopaedic suggestions given to these captive
audiences were no more than 10 per cent effective, the results would
still be impressive and, for a dictator, highly desirable.
From the heightened
suggestibility associated with light sleep and hypnosis let us pass to
the normal suggestibility of those who are awake -- or at least who
think they are awake. (In fact, as the Buddhists insist, most of us are
half asleep all the time and go through life as somnambulists obeying
somebody else's suggestions. Enlightenment is total awakeness. The word
"Buddha" can be translated as "The Wake.")
Genetically, every human
being is unique and in many ways unlike every other human being. The
range of individual variation from the statistical norm is amazingly
wide. And the statistical norm, let us remember, is useful only in
actuarial calculations, not in real life. In real life there is no such
person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and
children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body,
and all trying (or being compelled) to squeeze their biological
diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.
Suggestibility is one of
the qualities that vary significantly from individual to individual.
Environmental factors certainly play their part in making one person
more responsive to suggestion than another; but there are also, no less
certainly, constitutional differences in the suggestibility of
individuals. Extreme resistance to suggestion is rather rare.
Fortunately so. For if everyone were as unsuggestible as some people
are, social life would be impossible. Societies can function with a
reasonable degree of efficiency because, in varying degrees, most people
are fairly suggestible. Extreme suggestibility is probably about as
rare as extreme unsuggestibility. And this also is fortunate. For if
most people were as responsive to outside suggestions as the men and
women at the extreme limits of suggestibility, free, rational choice
would become, for the majority of the electorate, virtually
impossible, and democratic institutions could not survive, or even come
into existence.
A few years ago, at the
Massachusetts General Hospital, a group of researchers carried out a
most illuminating experiment on the pain-relieving effects of placebos.
(A placebo is anything which the patient believes to be an active
drug, but which in fact is pharmacologically inactive.) In this
experiment the subjects were one hundred and sixty-two patients who had
just come out of surgery and were all in considerable pain. Whenever a
patient asked for medication to relieve pain, he or she was given an
injection, either of morphine or of distilled water. All the patients
received some injections of morphine and some of the placebo. About 30
per cent of the patients never obtained relief from the placebo. On the
other hand 14 per cent obtained relief after every injection of
distilled water. The remaining 55 per cent of the group were relieved
by the placebo on some occasions, but not on others.
In what respects did the
suggestible reactors differ from the unsuggestible non-reactors?
Careful study and testing revealed that neither age nor sex was a
significant factor. Men reacted to placebo as frequently as did women,
and young people as often as old ones. Nor did intelligence, as measured
by the standard tests, seem to be important. The average IQ of the two
groups was about the same. It was above all in temperament, in the way
they felt about themselves and other people that the members of the two
groups were significantly different. The reactors were more co-operative
than the non-reactors, less critical and suspicious. They gave the
nurses no trouble and thought that the care they were receiving in the
hospital was simply "wonderful." But though less unfriendly toward
others than the non-reactors, the reactors were generally much more
anxious about themselves. Under stress, this anxiety tended to
translate itself into various psychosomatic symptoms, such as stomach
upsets, diarrhea and headaches. In spite of or because of their anxiety,
most of the reactors were more uninhibited in the display of emotion
than were the non-reactors, and more voluble. They were also much more
religious, much more active in the affairs of their church and much more
preoccupied, on a subconscious level, with their pelvic and abdominal
organs.
It is interesting to
compare these figures for reaction to placebos with the estimates made,
in their own special field, by writers on hypnosis. About a fifth of
the population, they tell us, can be hypnotized very easily. Another
fifth cannot be hypnotized at all, or can be hypnotized only when drugs
or fatigue have lowered psychological resistance. The remaining
three-fifths can be hypnotized somewhat less easily than the first
group, but considerably more easily than the second. A manufacturer of
hypnopaedic records has told me that about 20 per cent of his customers
are enthusiastic and report striking results in a very short time. At
the other end of the spectrum of suggestibility there is an 8 per cent
minority that regularly asks for its money back. Between these two
extremes are the people who fail to get quick results, but are
suggestible enough to be affected in the long run. If they listen
perseveringly to the appropriate hypnopaedic instructions they will end
by getting what they want -- self-confidence or sexual harmony, less
weight or more money.
The ideals of democracy
and freedom confront the brute fact of human suggestibility. One-fifth
of every electorate can be hypnotized almost in the twinkling of an eye,
one-seventh can be relieved of pain by injections of water,
one-quarter will respond promptly and enthusiastically to hypnopaedia.
And to these all too co-operative minorities must be added the
slow-starting majorities, whose less extreme suggestibility can be
effectually exploited by anyone who knows his business and is prepared
to take the necessary time and trouble.
Is individual freedom
compatible with a high degree of individual suggestibility? Can
democratic institutions survive the subversion from within of skilled
mind-manipulators trained in the science and art of exploiting the
suggestibility both of individuals and of crowds? To what extent can the
inborn tendency to be too suggestible for one's own good or the good of
a democratic society be neutralized by education? How far can the
exploitation of inordinate suggestibility by businessmen and
ecclesiastics, by politicians in and out of power, be controlled by law?
Explicitly or implicitly, the first two questions have been discussed
in earlier articles. In what follows I shall consider the problems of
prevention and cure.
XI.
Education for Freedom
Education for freedom
must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to
develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for
combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or
deny the values.
In an earlier chapter I
have discussed the Social Ethic, in terms of which the evils resulting
from over-organization and over-population are justified and made to
seem good. Is such a system of values consonant with what we know about
human physique and temperament? The Social Ethic assumes that nurture
is all-important in determining human behavior and that nature -- the
psychophysical equipment with which individuals are born -- is a
negligible factor. But is this true? Is it true that human beings are
nothing but the products of their social environment? And if it is not
true, what justification can there be for maintaining that the
individual is less important than the group of which he is a member?
All the available
evidence points to the conclusion that in the life of individuals and
societies heredity is no less significant than culture. Every individual
is biologically unique and unlike all other individuals. Freedom is
therefore a great good, tolerance a great virtue and regimentation a
great misfortune. For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators,
organization men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the
maddening diversity of men's natures to some kind of manageable
uniformity. In the first flush of his Behavioristic fervor, J. B. Watson
roundly declared that he could find "no support for hereditary patterns
of behavior, nor for special abilities (musical, art, etc.) which are
supposed to run in families." And even today we find a distinguished
psychologist, Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, "as
scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the
contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to
approach zero. Man's vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art,
science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him
responsible for the consequences of his choice -- none of these is
conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait." In a word,
Shakespeare's plays were not written by Shakespeare, nor even by Bacon
or the Earl of Oxford; they were written by Elizabethan England.
More than sixty years
ago William James wrote an essay on "Great Men and Their Environment,"
in which he set out to defend the outstanding individual against the
assaults of Herbert Spencer. Spencer had proclaimed that "Science" (that
wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a given
date, of Professors X, Y and Z) had completely abolished the Great Man.
"The great man," he had written, "must be classed with all other
phenomena in the society that gave him birth, as a product of its
antecedents." The great man may be (or seem to be) "the proximate
initiator of changes. . . . But if there is to be anything like a real
explanation of these changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
conditions out of which both he and they have arisen." This is one of
those empty profundities to which no operational meaning can possibly be
attached. What our philosopher is saying is that we must know
everything before we can fully understand anything. No doubt. But in
fact we shall never know everything. We must therefore be content with
partial understanding and proximate causes -- including the influence of
great men. "If anything is humanly certain," writes William James, "it
is that the great man's society, properly so called, does not make him
before he can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social,
political, geographical and to a great extent anthropological conditions
have just as much and just as little to do as the crater of Vesuvius
has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what
make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of
sociological pressures to have so impinged upon Stratford-upon-Avon
about the twenty-sixth of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all
his mental peculiarities, had to be born there? . . . And does he mean
to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would need have
engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
equilibrium?"
Professor Skinner is an
experimental psychologist, and his treatise on "Science and Human
Behavior" is solidly based upon facts. But unfortunately the facts
belong to so limited a class that when at last he ventures upon a
generalization, his conclusions are as sweepingly unrealistic as those
of the Victorian theorizer. Inevitably so; for Professor Skinner's
indifference to what James calls the "physiological forces" is almost
as complete as Herbert Spencer's. The genetic factors determining human
behavior are dismissed by him in less than a page. There is no reference
in his book to the findings of constitutional medicine, nor any hint of
that constitutional psychology, in terms of which (and in terms of
which alone, so far as I can judge) it might be possible to write a
complete and realistic biography of an individual in relation to the
relevant facts of his existence -- his body, his temperament, his
intellectual endowments, his immediate environment from moment to
moment, his time, place and culture. A science of human behavior is
like a science of motion in the abstract -- necessary, but, by itself,
wholly inadequate to the facts. Consider a dragonfly, a rocket and a
breaking wave. All three of them illustrate the same fundamental laws of
motion; but they illustrate these laws in different ways, and the
differences are at least as important as the identities. By itself, a
study of motion can tell us almost nothing about that which, in any
given instance, is being moved. Similarly a study of behavior can, by
itself, tell us almost nothing about the individual mind-body that, in
any particular instance, is exhibiting the behavior. But to us who are
mind-bodies, a knowledge of mind-bodies is of paramount importance.
Moreover, we know by observation and experience that the differences
between individual mind-bodies are enormously great, and that some
mind-bodies can and do profoundly affect their social environment. On
this last point Mr. Bertrand Russell is in full agreement with William
James -- and with practically everyone, I would add, except the
proponents of Spencerian or Behavioristic scientism. In Russell's view
the causes of historical change are of three kinds -- economic change,
political theory and important individuals. "I do not believe," says
Mr. Russell, "that any of these can be ignored, or wholly explained away
as the effect of causes of another kind." Thus, if Bismarck and Lenin
had died in infancy, our world would be very different from what, thanks
in part to Bismarck and Lenin, it now is. "History is not yet a
science, and can only be made to seem scientific by falsifications and
omissions." In real life, life as it is lived from day to day, the
individual can never be explained away. It is only in theory that his
contributions appear to approach zero; in practice they are
all-important. When a piece of work gets done in the world, who actually
does it? Whose eyes and ears do the perceiving, whose cortex does the
thinking, who has the feelings that motivate, the will that overcomes
obstacles? Certainly not the social environment; for a group is not an
organism, but only a blind unconscious organization. Everything that is
done within a society is done by individuals. These individuals are, of
course, profoundly influenced by the local culture, the taboos and
moralities, the information and misinformation handed down from the
past and preserved in a body of spoken traditions or written literature;
but whatever each individual takes from society (or, to be more
accurate, whatever he takes from other individuals associated in
groups, or from the symbolic records compiled by other individuals,
living or dead) will be used by him in his own unique way -- with his
special senses, his biochemical make-up, his physique and
temperament, and nobody else's. No amount of scientific explanation,
however comprehensive, can explain away these self-evident facts. And
let us remember that Professor Skinner's scientific portrait of man as
the product of the social environment is not the only scientific
portrait. There are other, more realistic likenesses. Consider, for
example, Professor Roger Williams' portrait. What he paints is not
behavior in the abstract, but mind-bodies behaving-mind-bodies that are
the products partly of the environment they share with other
mind-bodies, partly of their own private heredity. In The Human
Frontier and Free but Unequal Professor Williams has
expatiated, with a wealth of detailed evidence, on those innate
differences between individuals, for which Dr. Watson could find no
support and whose importance, in Professor Skinner's eyes, approaches
zero. Among animals, biological variability within a given species
becomes more and more conspicuous as we move up the evolutionary scale.
This biological variability is highest in man, and human beings display
a greater degree of biochemical, structural and temperamental diversity
than do the members of any other species. This is a plain observable
fact. But what I have called the Will to Order, the desire to impose a
comprehensible uniformity upon the bewildering manifoldness of things
and events, has led many people to ignore this fact. They have minimized
biological uniqueness and have concentrated all their attention upon
the simpler and, in the present state of knowledge, more understandable
environmental factors involved in human behavior. "As a result of this
environmentally centered thinking and investigation," writes Professor
Williams, "the doctrine of the essential uniformity of human infants
has been widely accepted and is held by a great body of social
psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, and many others,
including historians, economists, educationalists, legal scholars and
men in public life. This doctrine has been incorporated into the
prevailing mode of thought of many who have had to do with shaping
educational and governmental policies and is often accepted
unquestioningly by those who do little critical thinking of their own."
An ethical system that
is based upon a fairly realistic appraisal of the data of experience is
likely to do more good than harm. But many ethical systems have been
based upon an appraisal of experience, a view of the nature of things,
that is hopelessly unrealistic. Such an ethic is likely to do more harm
than good. Thus, until quite recent times, it was universally believed
that bad weather, diseases of cattle and sexual impotence could be, and
in many cases actually were, caused by the malevolent operations of
magicians. To catch and kill magicians was therefore a duty -- and this
duty, moreover, had been divinely ordained in the second Book of Moses:
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The systems of ethics and law
that were based upon this erroneous view of the nature of things were
the cause (during the centuries, when they were taken most seriously by
men in authority) of the most appalling evils. The orgy of spying,
lynching and judicial murder, which these wrong views about magic made
logical and mandatory, was not matched until our own days, when the
Communist ethic, based upon erroneous views about economics, and the
Nazi ethic, based upon erroneous views about race, commanded and
justified atrocities on an even greater scale. Consequences hardly less
undesirable are likely to follow the general adoption of a Social
Ethic, based upon the erroneous view that ours is a fully social
species, that human infants are born uniform and that individuals are
the product of conditioning by and within the collective environment.
If these views were correct, if human beings were in fact the members
of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were
trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning,
then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would
be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it. For the
individual termite, service to the termitary is perfect freedom. But
human beings are not completely social; they are only moderately
gregarious. Their societies are not organisms, like the hive or the
anthill; they are organizations, in other words ad hoc machines
for collective living. Moreover, the differences between individuals are
so great that, in spite of the most intensive cultural ironing, an
extreme endomorph (to use W. H. Sheldon's terminology) will retain his
sociable viscerotonic characteristics, an extreme mesomorph will remain
energetically somatotonic through thick and thin and an extreme
ectomorph will always be cerebrotonic, introverted and oversensitive. In
the Brave New World of my fable socially desirable behavior was
insured by a double process of genetic manipulation and postnatal
conditioning. Babies were cultivated in bottles and a high degree of
uniformity in the human product was assured by using ova from a limited
number of mothers and by treating each ovum in such a way that it would
split and split again, producing identical twins in batches of a
hundred or more. In this way it was possible to produce standardized
machine-minders for standardized machines. And the standardization of
the machine-minders was perfected, after birth, by infant conditioning,
hypnopaedia and chemically induced euphoria as a substitute for the
satisfaction of feeling oneself free and creative. In the world we live
in, as has been pointed out in earlier chapters, vast impersonal forces
are making for the centralization of power and a regimented society.
The genetic standardization of individuals is still impossible; but Big
Government and Big Business already possess, or will very soon possess,
all the techniques for mind-manipulation described in Brave New
World, along with others of which I was too unimaginative to dream.
Lacking the ability to impose genetic uniformity upon embryos, the
rulers of tomorrow's over-populated and over-organized world will try to
impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children.
To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the
mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not
hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by
economic coercion and threats of physical violence. If this kind of
tyranny is to be avoided, we must begin without delay to educate
ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government.
Such an education for
freedom should be, as I have said, an education first of all in facts
and in values -- the fact of individual diversity and genetic
uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity
which are the ethical corollaries of these facts. But unfortunately
correct knowledge and sound principles are not enough. An unexciting
truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood. A skilful appeal to
passion is often too strong for the best of good resolutions. The
effects of false and pernicious propaganda cannot be neutralized except
by a thorough training in the art of analyzing its techniques and seeing
through its sophistries. Language has made possible man's progress from
animality to civilization. But language has also inspired that
sustained folly and that systematic, that genuinely diabolic wickedness
which are no less characteristic of human behavior than are the
language-inspired virtues of systematic forethought and sustained
angelic benevolence. Language permits its users to pay attention to
things, persons and events, even when the things and persons are absent
and the events are not taking place. Language gives definition to our
memories and, by translating experiences into symbols, converts the
immediacy of craving or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed
principles of feeling and conduct. In some way of which we are wholly
unconscious, the reticular system of the brain selects from a countless
host of stimuli those few experiences which are of practical importance
to us. From these unconsciously selected experiences we more or less
consciously select and abstract a smaller number, which we label with
words from our vocabulary and then classify within a system at once
metaphysical, scientific and ethical, made up of other words on a
higher level of abstraction. In cases where the selecting and
abstracting have been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as
a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal labels have been
intelligently chosen and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our
behavior is apt to be realistic and tolerably decent. But under the
influence of badly chosen words, applied, without any understanding of
their merely symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected
and abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt
to behave with a fiendishness and an organized stupidity, of which dumb
animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are
blessedly incapable.
In their anti-rational
propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources
of language in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into
thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them
to think, feel and act. An education for freedom (and for the love and
intelligence which are at once the conditions and the results of
freedom) must be, among other things, an education in the proper uses
of language. For the last two or three generations philosophers have
devoted a great deal of time and thought to the analysis of symbols and
the meaning of meaning. How are the words and sentences which we speak
related to the things, persons and events, with which we have to deal
in our day-to-day living? To discuss this problem would take too long
and lead us too far afield. Suffice it to say that all the intellectual
materials for a sound education in the proper use of language -- an
education on every level from the kindergarten to the postgraduate
school -- are now available. Such an education in the art of
distinguishing between the proper and the improper use of symbols could
be inaugurated immediately. Indeed it might have been inaugurated at
any time during the last thirty or forty years. And yet children are
nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false,
or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because
their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be
given this kind of education. In this context the brief, sad history of
the Institute for Propaganda Analysis is highly significant. The
Institute was founded in 1937, when Nazi propaganda was at its noisiest
and most effective, by Mr. Filene, the New England philanthropist.
Under its auspices analyses of non-rational propaganda were made and
several texts for the instruction of high school and university students
were prepared. Then came the war -- a total war on all the fronts, the
mental no less than the physical. With all the Allied governments
engaging in "psychological warfare," an insistence upon the desirability
of analyzing propaganda seemed a bit tactless. The Institute was
closed in 1941. But even before the outbreak of hostilities, there were
many persons to whom its activities seemed profoundly objectionable.
Certain educators, for example, disapproved of the teaching of
propaganda analysis on the grounds that it would make adolescents
unduly cynical. Nor was it welcomed by the military authorities, who
were afraid that recruits might start to analyze the utterances of drill
sergeants. And then there were the clergymen and the advertisers. The
clergymen were against propaganda analysis as tending to undermine
belief and diminish churchgoing; the advertisers objected on the grounds
that it might undermine brand loyalty and reduce sales.
These fears and dislikes
were not unfounded. Too searching a scrutiny by too many of the common
folk of what is said by their pastors and masters might prove to be
profoundly subversive. In its present form, the social order depends for
its continued existence on the acceptance, without too many
embarrassing questions, of the propaganda put forth by those in
authority and the propaganda hallowed by the local traditions. The
problem, once more, is to find the happy mean. Individuals must be
suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work,
but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of
professional mind-manipulators. Similarly, they should be taught enough
about propaganda analysis to preserve them from an uncritical belief in
sheer nonsense, but not so much as to make them reject outright the not
always rational outpourings of the well-meaning guardians of tradition.
Probably the happy mean between gullibility and a total skepticism can
never be discovered and maintained by analysis alone. This rather
negative approach to the problem will have to be supplemented by
something more positive -- the enunciation of a set of generally
acceptable values based upon a solid foundation of facts. The value,
first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human
diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion,
based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern
psychiatry -- the fact that, whatever their mental and physical
diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter;
and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent
and freedom unattainable. This set of values will provide us with a
criterion by which propaganda may be judged. The propaganda that is
found to be both nonsensical and immoral may be rejected out of hand.
That which is merely irrational, but compatible with love and freedom,
and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be
provisionally accepted for what it is worth.
XII.
What Can Be Done?
We can be educated for
freedom -- much better educated for it than we are at present. But
freedom, as I have tried to show, is threatened from many directions,
and these threats are of many different kinds -- demographic, social,
political, psychological. Our disease has a multiplicity of cooperating
causes and is not to be cured except by a multiplicity of cooperating
remedies. In coping with any complex human situation, we must take
account of all the relevant factors, not merely of a single factor.
Nothing short of everything is ever really enough. Freedom is menaced,
and education for freedom is urgently needed. But so are many other
things -- for example, social organization for freedom, birth control
for freedom, legislation for freedom. Let us begin with the last of
these items.
From the time of Magna
Carta and even earlier, the makers of English law have been concerned to
protect the physical freedom of the individual. A person who is being
kept in prison on grounds of doubtful legality has the right, under the
Common Law as clarified by the statute of 1679, to appeal to one of the
higher courts of justice for a writ of habeas corpus. This writ
is addressed by a judge of the high court to a sheriff or jailer, and
commands him, within a specified period of time, to bring the person he
is holding in custody to the court for an examination of his case -- to
bring, be it noted, not the person's written complaint, nor his legal
representatives, but his corpus, his body, the too too solid
flesh which has been made to sleep on boards, to smell the fetid prison
air, to eat the revolting prison food. This concern with the basic
condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is
unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is
perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free -- to
be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive,
compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national
State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think,
feel and act. There will never be such a thing as a writ of habeas
mentem; for no sheriff or jailer can bring an illegally imprisoned
mind into court, and no person whose mind had been made captive by the
methods outlined in earlier articles would be in a position to complain
of his captivity. The nature of psychological compulsion is such that
those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are
acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does
not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are
invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is
apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.
No, I repeat, there can
never be such a thing as a writ of habeas mentem. But there can
be preventive legislation -- an outlawing of the psychological slave
trade, a statute for the protection of minds against the unscrupulous
purveyors of poisonous propaganda, modeled on the statutes for the
protection of bodies against the unscrupulous purveyors of adulterated
food and dangerous drugs. For example, there could and, I think, there
should be legislation limiting the right of public officials, civil or
military, to subject the captive audiences under their command or in
their custody to sleep-teaching. There could and, I think, there should
be legislation prohibiting the use of subliminal projection in public
places or on television screens. There could and, I think, there should
be legislation to prevent political candidates not merely from spending
more than a certain amount of money on their election campaigns, but
also to prevent them from resorting to the kind of anti-rational
propaganda that makes nonsense of the whole democratic process.
Such preventive
legislation might do some good; but if the great impersonal forces now
menacing freedom continue to gather momentum, they cannot do much good
for very long. The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be
powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of over-population
and of the over-organization imposed by growing numbers and advancing
technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the good laws
will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely
serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given
unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see
in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed
England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a
monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation
and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective
methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature;
the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all
the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of
non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the
hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old
days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and
editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense.
Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of
soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will
quietly run the show as they see fit.
How can we control the
vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? On the
verbal level and in general terms, the question may be answered with the
utmost ease. Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting
human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What
is to be done? Obviously we must, with all possible speed, reduce the
birth rate to the point where it does not exceed the death rate. At the
same time we must, with all possible speed, increase food production,
we must institute and implement a world-wide policy for conserving our
soils and our forests, we must develop practical substitutes, preferably
less dangerous and less rapidly exhaustible than uranium, for our
present fuels; and, while husbanding our dwindling resources of easily
available minerals, we must work out new and not too costly methods for
extracting these minerals from ever poorer and poorer ores -- the
poorest ore of all being sea water. But all this, needless to say, is
almost infinitely easier said than done. The annual increase of numbers
should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine,
pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of
us choose birth control -- and immediately find ourselves confronted by
a problem that is simultaneously a puzzle in physiology, pharmacology,
sociology, psychology and even theology. "The Pill" has not yet been
invented. When and if it is invented, how can it be distributed to the
many hundreds of millions of potential mothers (or, if it is a pill that
works upon the male, potential fathers) who will have to take it if the
birth rate of the species is to be reduced? And, given existing social
customs and the forces of cultural and psychological inertia, how can
those who ought to take the pill, but don't want to, be persuaded to
change their minds? And what about the objections on the part of the
Roman Catholic Church, to any form of birth control except the so-called
Rhythm Method -- a method, incidentally, which has proved, hitherto, to
be almost completely ineffective in reducing the birth rate of those
industrially backward societies where such a reduction is most urgently
necessary? And these questions about the future, hypothetical Pill must
be asked, with as little prospect of eliciting satisfactory answers,
about the chemical and mechanical methods of birth control already
available.
When we pass from the
problems of birth control to the problems of increasing the available
food supply and conserving our natural resources, we find ourselves
confronted by difficulties not perhaps quite so great, but still
enormous. There is the problem, first of all, of education. How soon can
the innumerable peasants and farmers, who are now responsible for
raising most of the world's supply of food, be educated into improving
their methods? And when and if they are educated, where will they find
the capital to provide them with the machines, the fuel and lubricants,
the electric power, the fertilizers and the improved strains of food
plants and domestic animals, without which the best agricultural
education is useless? Similarly, who is going to educate the human race
in the principles and practice of conservation? And how are the hungry
peasant-citizens of a country whose population and demands for food are
rapidly rising to be prevented from "mining the soil"? And, if they can
be prevented, who will pay for their support while the wounded and
exhausted earth is being gradually nursed back, if that is still
feasible, to health and restored fertility? Or consider the backward
societies that are now trying to industrialize. If they succeed, who is
to prevent them, in their desperate efforts to catch up and keep up,
from squandering the planet's irreplaceable resources as stupidly and
wantonly as was done, and is still being done, by their forerunners in
the race? And when the day of reckoning comes, where, in the poorer
countries, will anyone find the scientific manpower and the huge amounts
of capital that will be required to extract the indispensable minerals
from ores in which their concentration is too low, under existing
circumstances, to make extraction technically feasible or economically
justifiable? It may be that, in time, a practical answer to all these
questions can be found. But in how much time? In any race between human
numbers and natural resources, time is against us. By the end of the
present century, there may, if we try very hard, be twice as much food
on the world's markets as there is today. But there will also be about
twice as many people, and several billions of these people will be
living in partially industrialized countries and consuming ten times as
much power, water, timber and irreplaceable minerals as they are
consuming now. In a word, the food situation will be as bad as it is
today, and the raw materials situation will be considerably worse.
To find a solution to
the problem of over-organization is hardly less difficult than to find a
solution to the problem of natural resources and increasing numbers.
On the verbal level and in general terms the answer is perfectly
simple. Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But
it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast
becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government.
Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute
property as widely as possible.
Or take the right to
vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent
history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no
guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by
referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives
into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of
functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big
Government.
Over-population and
over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully
human life of multiple personal relationships has become almost
impossible. Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment
of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the
small country community, or alternately humanize the metropolis by
creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban
equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet
and cooperate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of
specialized functions.
All this is obvious
today and, indeed, was obvious fifty years ago. From Hilaire Belloc to
Mr. Mortimer Adler, from the early apostles of cooperative credit unions
to the land reformers of modern Italy and Japan, men of good will have
for generations been advocating the decentralization of economic power
and the widespread distribution of property. And how many ingenious
schemes have been propounded for the dispersal of production, for a
return to small-scale "village industry." And then there were
Dubreuil's elaborate plans for giving a measure of autonomy and
initiative to the various departments of a single large industrial
organization. There were the Syndicalists, with their blueprints for a
stateless society organized as a federation of productive groups under
the auspices of the trade unions. In America, Arthur Morgan and Baker
Brownell have set forth the theory and described the practice of a new
kind of community living on the village and small-town level.
Professor Skinner of
Harvard has set forth a psychologist's view of the problem in his Walden
Two, a Utopian novel about a self-sustaining and autonomous
community, so scientifically organized that nobody is ever led into
anti-social temptation and, without resort to coercion or undesirable
propaganda, everyone does what he or she ought to do, and everyone is
happy and creative. In France, during and after the Second World War,
Marcel Barbu and his followers set up a number of self-governing,
non-hierarchical communities of production, which were also
communities for mutual aid and full human living. And meanwhile, in
London, the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by
co-ordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to
create a true community even in a metropolis.
We see, then, that the
disease of over-organization has been clearly recognized, that various
comprehensive remedies have been prescribed and that experimental
treatments of symptoms have been attempted here and there, often with
considerable success. And yet, in spite of all this preaching and this
exemplary practice, the disease grows steadily worse. We know that it is
unsafe to allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a ruling
oligarchy; nevertheless power is in fact being concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands. We know that, for most people, life in a huge modern city
is anonymous, atomic, less than fully human; nevertheless the huge
cities grow steadily huger and the pattern of urban-industrial living
remains unchanged. We know that, in a very large and complex society,
democracy is almost meaningless except in relation to autonomous groups
of manageable size; nevertheless more and more of every nation's
affairs are managed by the bureaucrats of Big Government and Big
Business. It is only too evident that, in practice, the problem of
over-organization is almost as hard to solve as the problem of
over-population. In both cases we know what ought to be done; but in
neither case have we been able, as yet, to act effectively upon our
knowledge.
At this point we find
ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish
to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it
worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if
possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of
everything? In the United States and America is the prophetic image of
the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from
now -- recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority
of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith
in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of
unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the
people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue
to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled,
from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the
well-fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful
democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of
self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the
right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a
bird," we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of
unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget
the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without
being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of
flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human
beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a
day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone -- or
at least by bread and circuses alone. "In the end," says the Grand
Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's parable, "in the end they will lay their
freedom at our feet and say to us, 'make us your slaves, but feed us.' "
And when Alyosha Karamazov asks his brother, the teller of the story,
if the Grand Inquisitor is speaking ironically, Ivan answers, "Not a bit
of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that they
have vanquished freedom and done so to make men happy." Yes, to make men
happy; "for nothing," the Inquisitor insists, "has ever been more
insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom." Nothing,
except the absence of freedom; for when things go badly, and the
rations are reduced, the grounded dodos will clamor again for their
wings -- only to renounce them, yet once more, when times grow better
and the dodo-farmers become more lenient and generous. The young people
who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to become fighters for
freedom. The cry of "Give me television and hamburgers, but don't bother
me with the responsibilities of liberty," may give place, under
altered circumstances, to the cry of "Give me liberty or give me death."
If such a revolution takes place, it will be due in part to the
operation of forces over which even the most powerful rulers have very
little control, in part to the incompetence of those rulers, their
inability to make effective use of the mind-manipulating instruments
with which science and technology have supplied, and will go on
supplying, the would-be tyrant. Considering how little they knew and how
poorly they were equipped, the Grand Inquisitors of earlier times did
remarkably well. But their successors, the well-informed, thoroughly
scientific dictators of the future will undoubtedly be able to do a
great deal better. The Grand Inquisitor reproaches Christ with having
called upon men to be free and tells Him that "we have corrected Thy
work and founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority." But miracle,
mystery and authority are not enough to guarantee the indefinite
survival of a dictatorship. In my fable of Brave New World, the
dictators had added science to the list and thus were able to enforce
their authority by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of
infants and the minds of children and adults. And, instead of merely
talking about miracles and hinting symbolically at mysteries, they were
able, by means of drugs, to give their subjects the direct experience of
mysteries and miracles -- to transform mere faith into ecstatic
knowledge. The older dictators fell because they could never supply
their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and
mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of
mind-manipulation. In the past, free-thinkers and revolutionaries were
often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not
surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still
are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will
really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to
love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to
be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever
be overthrown.
Meanwhile there is still
some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not
seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without
freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is
therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom
are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do
whatever we can to resist them.
Aldous
Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley
was born in Surrey, England, on July 26, 1894, third son of Dr. Leonard
Huxley and Julia Arnold, the niece of Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs.
Humphrey Ward. He is the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the scientist.
"I was educated," he
writes, "at Eton, which I left at seventeen owing to an affliction of
the eyes which left me practically blind for two or three years, an
event which prevented me from becoming a complete public-school English
gentleman. Providence is sometimes kind even when it seems to be harsh.
My temporary blindness also preserved me from becoming a doctor, for
which I am also grateful. For seeing that I nearly died of overwork as a
journalist, I should infallibly have killed myself in the much more
strenuous profession of medicine. On the other hand, I very much regret
the scientific training which my blindness made me miss. It is
ludicrous to live in the twentieth century equipped with an elegant
literary training eminently suitable for the seventeenth. As soon as I
could see well enough to read through a magnifying glass, I went to
Oxford, where I took my degree in English literature. Two years of my
time at Oxford were years of the war. During the remainder of the war I
cut down trees, worked in a government office -- as long as my sight
would stand the strain -- and taught at school."
There followed several
years of journalism, including music and artistic criticism, articles on
architecture and house decoration, and book reviews. In this period he
began the writing of poems, essays, and historical pieces which he has
continued throughout his literary career, but it was as a satirical
novelist that he first caught the public fancy.
Mr. Huxley established
his reputation before he was thirty and has been a prolific writer.
Having contributed to poetry magazines, he published his first book, The
Burning Wheel, a volume of poems, in 1916. There followed three
more volumes of verse before his first prose work, Limbo, was
brought out in 1920. Although doing editorial work for the London House
and Garden at the time, Huxley wrote in quick succession a number
of books which included Crome Yellow, his first novel. Mortal
Coils, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point
Counterpoint, Brave New World, Texts and Pretexts, Eyeless
in Gaza, and The Olive Tree were among the books which
followed.
For a number of years
Mr. Huxley lived in Italy, where he formed a close relationship with D.
H. Lawrence, whose letters he edited in 1933. Most of Mr. Huxley's
earlier novels were written in Italy and Southern Prance, the later
books in New Mexico and California.
While living in Taos,
New Mexico, Mr. Huxley wrote Ends and Means. Its publication was
followed by a fantastic novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
Then came Grey Eminence, a biography of Richelieu's coadjutor,
Father Joseph. Since then his published works have included The Art
of Seeing, Time Must Have A Stop, The Perennial Philosophy,
Ape and Essence, Themes and Variations, The Gioconda
Smile, The Devils of Loudon, The Doors of Perception, The
Genius and the Goddess, Heaven and Hell, and Tomorrow and
Tomorrow. The World of Aldous Huxley, an omnibus work edited
by Charles J. Rolo, was published in 1947, followed by Collected
Short Stories (1958) and Collected Essays (1959). Brave
New World Revisited, an examination of the prophecies made in Brave
New World, was brought out in 1958; a selection of essays, On
Art and Artists, in 1960, and a novel, Island, in 1962.
In 1959 Aldous Huxley
received the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters.
Mr. Huxley came to the
United States in 1937 and was living in California at the time of his
death on November 22, 1963.
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