Propaganda in a Democratic Society
Brave New World Revisited
by Aldous Huxley, 1958
http://deoxy.org/huxley1.htm
"The doctrines of Europe," Jefferson wrote, "were
that men in numerous associations cannot be restrained within
the limits of order and justice, except by forces physical and
moral wielded over them by authorities independent of their will.
. . . We (the founders of the new American democracy) believe
that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights,
and with an innate sense of justice, and that he could be restrained
from wrong, and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided
to persons of his own choice and held to their duties by dependence
on his own will." To post-Freudian ears, this kind of language
seems touchingly quaint and ingenuous. Human beings are a good
deal less rational and innately just than the optimists of the
eighteenth century supposed. On the other hand they are neither
so morally blind nor so hopelessly unreasonable as the pessimists
of the twentienth would have us believe. In spite of the Id and
the Unconscious, in spite of endemic neurosis and the prevalence
of low IQ's, most men and women are probably decent enough and
sensible enough to be trusted with the direction of their own
destinies.
Democratic institutions are devices
for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative,
and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject
to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western
Europe and America, these devices have worked, all things considered,
not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth century optimists
were not entirely wrong. Given a fair chance, I repeat; for the
fair chance is an indispensible prerequisite. No people that passes
abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot
to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can
be said to have a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically.
Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines
as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government
to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs
of its subjects. Over-population and over-organization are two
conditions which ... deprive a society of a fair chance of making
democratic institutions work effectively. We see, then, that there
are certain historical, economic, demographic and technological
conditions which make it very hard for Jefferson's rational animals,
endowed by nature with inalienable rights and an innate sense
of justice, to exercise their reason, claim their rights and act
justly within a democratically organized society. We in the West
have been supremely fortunate in having been given a fair chance
of making the great experiment in self-government. Unfortunately,
it now looks as though , owing to recent changes in our circumstances,
this infinitely precious fair chance were being, little by little,
taken away from us. And this, of course, is not the whole story.
These blind impersonal forces are not the only enemies of individual
liberty and democratic institutions.
There are also forces of another, less
abstract character, forces that can be deliberately used by power-seeking
individuals whose aim is to establish partial or complete control
over their fellows. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed
completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that
torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics,
were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled
in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply
out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth
century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and
went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale
undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asiatics. In the light
of recent history it would be foolish to suppose that this sort
of thing cannot happen again. It can and, no doubt, it will. But
in the immediate future there is some reason to believe that the
punitive measures of 1984 will give place to the reinforcements
and manipulations of Brave New World.
There are two kinds of propaganda - rational
propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened
self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed,
and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's
enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to,
passion. Were the actions of individuals are concerned there are
motives more exhalted than enlightened self-interest, but where
collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and
economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of
effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always
acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest,
this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often
act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least
credible passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery.
Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened
self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguements
based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set
forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses
that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete
evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims
by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation
of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating
the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities
come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical
kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious
principle and patriotic duty.
In John Dewey's words, "a renewal
of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general,
and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth,
is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration
of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political
forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in
all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond
to unreason and falsehood - particularly in those cases where
falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to
unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman
depths of our being. In certain feilds of activity men have learned
to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors
of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow
scientists and technologists.
They set forth what, to the best of their
knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality,
they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they
support their point of view with arguements that appeal to reason
in other people. All this is fairly easy in the feilds of physical
science and technology. It is much more difficult in the fields
of politics and religion and ethics. Here the relevant facts often
elude us. As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends
upon the particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose
to interpret them. And these are not the only difficulties that
confront the rational truth-seeker. In public and in private life,
it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant
facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on
insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady
than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot
always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that
is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances
permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited
truth and imperfect reasoning offered for our consideration by
others.
"If a nation expects to be
ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what
never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without
information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read,
all is safe." Across the Atlantic another passionate believer
in reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely
similar terms. Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father,
the utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was
his reliance upon the influence of reason over the minds of mankind,
whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would
be gained, if the whole population were able to read, and if all
sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word
or in writing, and if by the sufferage they could nominate a legislature
to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All
is safe, all would be gained! Once more we hear the note of
eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson , it is true, was a realist
as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the
freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. "Nothing,"
he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."
And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him), "within
the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally the
friend of science and civil liberty." Mass communication,
in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and,
like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used
in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensible
to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among
the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. In the field
of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise,
technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the
Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country
could boast a great number of small journals and local newspapers.
Thousands of country editors expressed
thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody
could get almost anything printed,. Today the press is still legally
free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost
of wood pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news
is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there
is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are
controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic
censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled
by members of the Power Elite.
Censorship by rising costs and the concentration
of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less
objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda;
but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat
could possibly approve.
In regard to propaganda the early advocates
of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities:
the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not
forsee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist
democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry,
concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but
with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word,
they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite
for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance
of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions,
but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once
a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few
readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a
neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances,
though infrequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even
remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to
imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent,
gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical
dramas to gladitorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out
boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions.
But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction
now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television
and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions
of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal
bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for
the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention
to the realities of the social and political situation. The other
world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment;
but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not
of this world."
Both are distractions and, if lived in
too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the
opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the
vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are
constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves
effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose
members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not
here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else,
in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology
and metephysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments
of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators
rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization
- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted
as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored,
the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used
in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science
of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of
the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with
the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening
to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential
to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic
institutions.
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