ROSeTTA BOOKS
BRAVE
NEW WORLD
REVISITED
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World Revisited
Copyright
Brave New World Revisited
Copyright © 1958 by Aldous Huxley
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright
© 2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
For information address Editor@RosettaBooks.com
First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC,
New York.
ISBN 0-7953-0012-3
Brave New World Revisited
3
eForeword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Contents
Brave New World Revisited
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e Foreword
Being something of a prophet can be a grim responsibility. In
Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays published in 1958,
Aldous Huxley re-examines the issues and concerns that
inspired him to write the novel Brave New World some 27 years
earlier. What had come to pass, especially in wake of World War
II at the height of the Cold War, disturbed Huxley. He saw an
overpopulated world that had gravitated toward his dark vision, in
which freedom and individualism were willingly exchanged for
sensory pleasure and endless consumption, making "order" out
of "chaos" - a world in which people were, as the philosopher
Neil Postman suggested, "amusing ourselves to death."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) came by his despair honestly. He
remains one of the most interesting figures English literature
produced in the early 20th century. His early work bespoke his
origins, as the well-bred son of one of England's most distinctive
families (his grandfather helped realize Darwin's theory of
evolution and his great-uncle was Matthew Arnold). But Huxley's
clever, stinging satires of English intellectual life ( Crome Yellow,
Antic Hay) quickly gave way to a new seriousness with the
publication of Brave New World. A vision problem had kept him
from pursuing a career in medicine, and maturity brought about
in him a spiritual restlessness that was encouraged by his friend
D.H. Lawrence. For the remainder of his life - much of it spent in
southern California - Aldous Huxley explored political and
philosophical issues in his essays and his "novels of ideas."
Brave New World Revisited reflects the fierce intelligence and
clear-eyed perception that informed the best of Huxley's work. It
is an invaluable, it's-later-than-you-think "reality check" for every
reader of the novel Brave New World.
Brave New World Revisited
5
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Brave New World Revisited
6
Chapter 1
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.,1
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
Brave New World Revisited
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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
Brave New World Revisited
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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 postnatally—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
Brave New World Revisited
9
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 to-morrow—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
Brave New World Revisited
10
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,
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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
Brave New World Revisited
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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 bureacratic managers. But the nature of power is such that
even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon
Brave New World Revisited
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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 totatarian 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
Brave New World Revisited
14
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.
Brave New World Revisited
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Chapter 2
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.
Brave New World Revisited
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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 birth-rates 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
Brave New World Revisited
17
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.
Brave New World Revisited
18
Chapter 3
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 mas distribution the
Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a
Brave New World Revisited
19
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
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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 example, 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
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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 co-operating
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
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deindividualize 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 re-create 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
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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.
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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 Orwells 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
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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 cusodiet 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
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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.
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Chapter 4
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
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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
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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
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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
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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 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,
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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.
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Chapter 5
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 psychophysical
organisms of their lower leaders, subjecting minds and bodies to
a system of ruthless and, from all accounts, highly effective
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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 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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Chapter 6
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
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order to find out the best way to take advantage of their
ignorance and to exploit 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
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41
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
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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
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43
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
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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
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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."
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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.
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Chapter 7
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
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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
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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."
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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.
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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
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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, recreated 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
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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.
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Chapter 8
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 acida) 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
transcendency 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,
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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
Brave New World Revisited
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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 mate 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
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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.
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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
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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 crisis, 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
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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.
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Chapter 9
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
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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 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 such 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
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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. Skillfully 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
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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.
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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 feeling 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.
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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.
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Chapter 10
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 loudspeakers 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
hypnopaedia, "the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all
time." In the Brave New World, no citizens belonging to the lower
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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 limited periods of time. In such a society, the
use of 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.
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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 pupils 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
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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 Branwell 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
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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 daytime 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,
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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 calculation, 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 Massachussetts 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
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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
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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.
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Chapter 11
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,
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"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
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-six 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?"
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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 Skinners 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 Bismark 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
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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 makeup,
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
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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
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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 facts 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
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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
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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,
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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.
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Chapter 12
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 co-operating causes and is not to be
cured except by a multiplicity of co-operating 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
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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 menterrr, 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
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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 over-population 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
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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 electic 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
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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
co-operating 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 alternatively humanize the
metropolis by creating within its network of mechanical
organization the urban equivalents of small country communities,
in which individuals can meet and co-operate 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 co-operative 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,
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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 fully 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.
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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
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91
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.
Brave New World Revisited
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