-Caveat Lector-
http://www.deoxy.org/huxley1.htm
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.
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