Date: November 4, 2006 7:23:13 AM PST
Subject: Propaganda in a Democratic Society - Aldous Huxley
Propaganda in a Democratic Society
by Aldous Huxley
"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
twentienth 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, I
repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensible 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 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
... 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 a 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 measures 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. Were the actions of individuals
are concerned there are motives more exhalted 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
credible 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 arguements 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 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 feilds 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 arguements that
appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the feilds
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 reasoning 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
sufferage 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
indispensible 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 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 forsee 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 infrequent, 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 gladitorial 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 bumblepuppy) 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 metephysical 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, supression and rationalization - the repetition of
catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression 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.
SOURCE: Political Corrections
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