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Title: Brave New World Revisited
Author: Huxley, Aldous [Aldous Leonard] (1894-1963)
Date of first publication: 1958
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harper & Brothers
   [undated, but no later than 1962]
Date first posted: 4 June 2017
Date last updated: 4 June 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1443

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

The list of books by Aldous Huxley has been moved to the end
of the book from its original position preceding the title page.






  Brave New World
  Re-visited



  Aldous Huxley



  HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK





  Most of the material in this book was published by _Newsday_
  under the title of TYRANNY OVER THE MIND

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 58-12451




  Contents

  Foreword

  I Over-Population
  II Quantity, Quality, Morality
  III Over-Organization
  IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society
  V Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
  VI The Arts of Selling
  VII Brainwashing
  VIII Chemical Persuasion
  IX Subconscious Persuasion
  X Hypnopaedia
  XI Education for Freedom
  XII What Can Be Done?




_Foreword_

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.  However elegant
and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice
to all the facts of a complex situation.  On such a theme one can be
brief only by omission and simplification.  Omission and simplification
help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the
wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's
neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from
which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for
everything.  In practice we are generally forced to choose between an
unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all.  Abbreviation is a
necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a
job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing.  He
must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.  He must
learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without
ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side issues.  In this way he
may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth
about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but
considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths
which have always been the current coin of thought.

The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have
written is certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I
have touched on many aspects of the problem.  Each aspect may have been
somewhat oversimplified in the exposition; but these successive
over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint
of the vastness and complexity of the original.

Omitted from the picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for
convenience and because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are
the mechanical and military enemies of freedom--the weapons and
"hardware" which have so powerfully strengthened the hands of the
world's rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously
costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars.  The
chapters that follow should be read against a background of thoughts
about the Hungarian uprising and its repression, about H-bombs, about
the cost of what every nation refers to as "defense," and about those
endless columns of uniformed boys, white, black, brown, yellow,
marching obediently toward the common grave.




BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED



_I Over-Population_

In 1931, when _Brave New World_ was being written, I was convinced that
there was still plenty of time.  The completely organized society, the
scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical
conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of
chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly
courses of sleep-teaching--these things were coming all right, but not
in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren.  I forget the
exact date of the events recorded in _Brave New World_; but it was
somewhere in the sixth, or seventh century A.F. (After Ford).  We who
were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were
the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the
nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the
nightmare of the future, described in _Brave New World_.  Ours was a
nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of
too much.  In the process of passing from one extreme to the other,
there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more
fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both
worlds--the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly
Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or
personal initiative.

Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth
century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel
a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing _Brave New
World_.  The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I
thought they would.  The blessed interval between too little order and
the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning.
In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large
measure of freedom.  But even in those countries that have a tradition
of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this
freedom seem to be on the wane.  In the rest of the world freedom for
individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go.  The
nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh
century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now
awaiting us, just around the next corner.

George Orwell's _1984_ was a magnified projection into the future of a
present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had
witnessed the flowering of Nazism.  _Brave New World_ was written
before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the
Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride.  In 1931 systematic
terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become
in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good
deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed
by Orwell.  In the context of 1948, _1984_ seemed dreadfully
convincing.  But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances
change.  Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science
and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome
verisimilitude.  A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of
everybody's predictions.  But, assuming for the moment that the Great
Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now
looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like _Brave
New World_ than of something like _1984_.

In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in
general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that
control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less
effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of
desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works
on the whole less well than government through the non-violent
manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of
individual men, women and children.  Punishment temporarily puts a stop
to undesirable behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victim's
tendency to indulge in it.  Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products
of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an
individual has been punished.  Psychotherapy is largely concerned with
the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.

The society described in _1984_ is a society controlled almost
exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment.  In the imaginary
world of my own fable punishment is infrequent and generally mild.  The
nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by
systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly
non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by
genetic standardization.  Babies in bottles and the centralized control
of reproduction are not perhaps impossible; but it is quite clear that
for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding
at random.  For practical purposes genetic standardization may be ruled
out.  Societies will continue to be controlled 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
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 thousand of us.  And tomorrow--what?
Penicillin, DDT and clean water are cheap commodities, whose effects on
public health are out of all proportion to their cost.  Even the
poorest government is rich enough to provide its subjects with a
substantial measure of death control.  Birth control is a very
different matter.  Death control is something which can be provided for
a whole people by a few technicians working in the pay of a benevolent
government.  Birth control depends on the co-operation of an entire
people.  It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it
demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world's
teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or mechanical methods
of contraception are used) an expenditure of more money than most of
these millions can now afford.  Moreover, there are nowhere any
religious traditions in favor of unrestricted death, whereas religious
and social traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction are
widespread.  For all these reasons, death control is achieved very
easily, birth control is achieved with great difficulty.  Death rates
have therefore fallen in recent years with startling suddenness.  But
birth rates have either remained at their old high level or, if they
have fallen, have fallen very little and at a very slow rate.  In
consequence, human numbers are now increasing more rapidly than at any
time in the history of the species.

Moreover, the yearly increases are themselves increasing.  They
increase regularly, according to the rules of compound interest; and
they also increase irregularly with every application, by a
technologically backward society of the principles of Public Health.
At the present time the annual increase in world population runs to
about forty-three millions.  This means that every four years mankind
adds to its numbers the equivalent of the present population of the
United States, every eight and a half years the equivalent of the
present population of India.  At the rate of increase prevailing
between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took
sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double.  At the
present rate it will double in less than half a century.  And this
fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a
planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely
populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad
farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital
is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor
getting rid of his accumulated pay.

In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of human numbers in
their relation to natural resources had been effectively solved.  An
optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers
were maintained at this figure (a little under two billions, if I
remember rightly) generation after generation.  In the real
contemporary world, the population problem has not been solved.  On the
contrary it is becoming graver and more formidable with every passing
year.  It is against this grim biological background that all the
political, economic, cultural and psychological dramas of our time are
being played out.  As the twentieth century wears on, as the new
billions are added to the existing billions (there will be more than
five and a half billions of us by the time my granddaughter is fifty),
this biological background will advance, ever more insistently, ever
more menacingly, toward the front and center of the historical stage.
The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural
resources, to social stability and to the well-being of
individuals--this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will
remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps
for several centuries thereafter.  A new age is supposed to have begun
on October 4, 1957.  But actually, in the present context, all our
exuberant post-Sputnik talk is irrelevant and even nonsensical.  So far
as the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming time will not be the
Space Age; it will be the Age of Over-population.  We can parody the
words of the old song and ask,

  _Will the space that you're so rich in
  Light a fire in the kitchen,
  Or the little god of space turn the spit, spit, spit?_

The answer, it is obvious, is in the negative.  A settlement on the
moon may be of some military advantage to the nation that does the
settling.  But it will do nothing whatever to make life more tolerable,
during the fifty years that it will take our present population to
double, for the earth's undernourished and proliferating billions.  And
even if, at some future date, emigration to Mars should become
feasible, even if any considerable number of men and women were
desperate enough to choose a new life under conditions comparable to
those prevailing on a mountain twice as high as Mount Everest, what
difference would that make?  In the course of the last four centuries
quite a number of people sailed from the Old World to the New.  But
neither their departure nor the returning flow of food and raw
materials could solve the problems of the Old World.  Similarly the
shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a cost, for transportation
and development, of several million dollars a head) will do nothing to
solve the problem of mounting population pressures on our own planet.
Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.
Worse still, it will create conditions in which individual freedom and
the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become
impossible, almost unthinkable.  Not all dictatorships arise in the
same way.  There are many roads to Brave New World; but perhaps the
straightest and the broadest of them is the road we are traveling
today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers and accelerating
increases.  Let us briefly review the reasons for this close
correlation between too many people, too rapidly multiplying, and the
formulation of authoritarian philosophies, the rise of totalitarian
systems of government.

As large and increasing numbers press more heavily upon available
resources, the economic position of the society undergoing this ordeal
becomes ever more precarious.  This is especially true of those
underdeveloped regions, where a sudden lowering of the death rate by
means of DDT, penicillin and clean water has not been accompanied by a
corresponding fall in the birth rate.  In parts of Asia and in most of
Central and South America populations are increasing so fast that they
will double themselves in little more than twenty years.  If the
production of food and manufactured articles, of houses, schools and
teachers, could be increased at a greater rate than human numbers, it
would be possible to improve the wretched lot of those who live in
these underdeveloped and over-populated countries.  But unfortunately
these countries lack not merely agricultural machinery and an
industrial plant capable of turning out this machinery, but also the
capital required to create such a plant.  Capital is what is left over
after the primary needs of a population have been satisfied.  But the
primary needs of most of the people in underdeveloped countries are
never fully satisfied.  At the end of each year almost nothing is left
over, and there is therefore almost no capital available for creating
the industrial and agricultural plant, by means of which the people's
needs might be satisfied.  Moreover, there is, in all these
underdeveloped countries, a serious shortage of the trained manpower
without which a modern industrial and agricultural plant cannot be
operated.  The present educational facilities are inadequate; so are
the resources, financial and cultural, for improving the existing
facilities as fast as the situation demands.  Meanwhile the population
of some of these underdeveloped countries is increasing at the rate of
3 per cent per annum.

Their tragic situation is discussed in an important book, published in
1957--_The Next Hundred Years_, by Professors Harrison Brown, James
Bonner and John Weir of the California Institute of Technology.  How is
mankind coping with the problem of rapidly increasing numbers?  Not
very successfully.  "The evidence suggests rather strongly that in most
underdeveloped countries the lot of the average individual has worsened
appreciably in the last half century.  People have become more poorly
fed.  There are fewer available goods per person.  And practically
every attempt to improve the situation has been nullified by the
relentless pressure of continued population growth."

Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes precarious, the central
government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the
general welfare.  It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a
critical situation; it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the
activities of its subjects; and if, as is very likely, worsening
economic conditions result in political unrest, or open rebellion, the
central government must intervene to preserve public order and its own
authority.  More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of
the executives and their bureaucratic managers.  But the nature of
power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it
forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.  "Lead us not into
temptation," we pray--and with good reason; for when human beings are
tempted too enticingly or too long, they generally yield.  A democratic
constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding
to those particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much
power is concentrated in too few hands.  Such a constitution works
pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there is a
traditional respect for constitutional procedures.  Where the
republican or limited monarchical tradition is weak, the best of
constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians from succumbing
with glee and gusto to the temptations of power.  And in any country
where numbers have begun to press heavily upon available resources,
these temptations cannot fail to arise.  Over-population leads to
economic insecurity and social unrest.  Unrest and insecurity lead to
more control by central governments and an increase of their power.  In
the absence of a constitutional tradition, this increased power will
probably be exercised in a dictatorial fashion.  Even if Communism had
never been invented, this would be likely to happen.  But Communism has
been invented.  Given this fact, the probability of over-population
leading through unrest to dictatorship becomes a virtual certainty.  It
is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world's
over-populated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of
totalitarian rule--probably by the Communist party.

How will this development affect the over-populated, but highly
industrialized and still democratic countries of Europe?  If the newly
formed dictatorships were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of
raw materials from the underdeveloped countries were deliberately
interrupted, the nations of the West would find themselves in a very
bad way indeed.  Their industrial system would break down, and the
highly developed technology, which up till now has permitted them to
sustain a population much greater than that which could be supported by
locally available resources, would no longer protect them against the
consequences of having too many people in too small a territory.  If
this should happen, the enormous powers forced by unfavorable
conditions upon central governments may come to be used in the spirit
of totalitarian dictatorship.

The United States is not at present an over-populated country.  If,
however, the population continues to increase at the present rate
(which is higher than that of India's increase, though happily a good
deal lower than the rate now current in Mexico or Guatemala), the
problem of numbers in relation to available resources might well become
troublesome by the beginning of the twenty-first century.  For the
moment over-population is not a direct threat to the personal freedom
of Americans.  It remains, however, an indirect threat, a menace at one
remove.  If over-population should drive the underdeveloped countries
into totalitarianism, and if these new dictatorships should ally
themselves with Russia, then the military position of the United States
would become less secure and the preparations for defense and
retaliation would have to be intensified.  But liberty, as we all know,
cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or
even a near-war footing.  Permanent crisis justifies permanent control
of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.
And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which
over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship
under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable.




_II Quantity, Quality, Morality_

In the Brave New World of my fantasy eugenics and dysgenics were
practiced systematically.  In one set of bottles biologically superior
ova, fertilized by biologically superior sperm, were given the best
possible prenatal treatment and were finally decanted as Betas, Alphas
and even Alpha Pluses.  In another, much more numerous set of bottles,
biologically inferior ova, fertilized by biologically inferior sperm,
were subjected to the Bokanovsky Process (ninety-six identical twins
out of a single egg) and treated prenatally with alcohol and other
protein poisons.  The creatures finally decanted were almost subhuman;
but they were capable of performing unskilled work and, when properly
conditioned, detensioned by free and frequent access to the opposite
sex, constantly distracted by gratuitous entertainment and reinforced
in their good behavior patterns by daily doses of soma, could be
counted on to give no trouble to their superiors.

In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic
about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not
only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making
sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer
quality.  In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with
slight, hereditary defects rarely survived.  Today, thanks to
sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the
children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their
kind.  Under the conditions now prevailing, every advance in medicine
will tend to be offset by a corresponding advance in the survival rate
of individuals cursed by some genetic insufficiency.  In spite of new
wonder drugs and better treatment (indeed, in a certain sense,
precisely because of these things), the physical health of the general
population will show no improvement, and may even deteriorate.  And
along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline
in average intelligence.  Indeed, some competent authorities are
convinced that such a decline has already taken place and is
continuing.  "Under conditions that are both soft and unregulated,"
writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock tends to be outbred by stock
that is inferior to it in every respect....  It is the fashion in some
academic circles to assure students that the alarm over differential
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 may
propagate their kind?  To help the unfortunate is obviously good.  But
the wholesale transmission to our descendants of the results of
unfavorable mutations, and the progressive contamination of the genetic
pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, are no
less obviously bad.  We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to
find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good
will.




_III Over-Organization_

The shortest and broadest road to the nightmare of Brave New World
leads, as I have pointed out, through over-population and the
accelerating increase of human numbers--twenty-eight hundred millions
today, fifty-five hundred millions by the turn of the century, with
most of humanity facing the choice between anarchy and totalitarian
control.  But the increasing pressure of numbers upon available
resources is not the only force propelling us in the direction of
totalitarianism.  This blind biological enemy of freedom is allied with
immensely powerful forces generated by the very advances in technology
of which we are most proud.  Justifiably proud, it may be added; for
these advances are the fruits of genius and persistent hard work, of
logic, imagination and self-denial--in a word, of moral and
intellectual virtues for which one can feel nothing but admiration.
But the Nature of Things is such that nobody in this world ever gets
anything for nothing.  These amazing and admirable advances have had to
be paid for.  Indeed, like last year's washing machine, they are still
being paid for--and each installment is higher than the last.  Many
historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length,
and with a deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to
pay and will go on paying for technological progress.  They point out,
for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in
societies where political and economic power is being progressively
concentrated and centralized.  But the progress of technology has led
and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of
power.  As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it
tends to become more complex and more expensive--and so less available
to the enterpriser of limited means.  Moreover, mass production cannot
work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems
which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve.  In a world
of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his
inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage.  In
competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very
existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up.
As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be
wielded by fewer and fewer people.  Under a dictatorship the Big
Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin
of Little Business, is controlled by the State--that is to say, by a
small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil
servants who carry out their orders.  In a capitalist democracy, such
as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright
Mills has called the Power Elite.  This Power Elite directly employs
several millions of the country's working force in its factories,
offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the
money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of
mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the
actions of virtually everybody.  To parody the words of Winston
Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.  We
are far indeed from Jefferson's ideal of a genuinely free society
composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units--"the elementary
republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics and
the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities."

We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of
economic and political power, and to the development of a society
controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and
inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government.
But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as
they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a
happy and creative life.  How have individuals been affected by the
technological advances of recent years?  Here is the answer to this
question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:


Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material,
intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to
mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness,
reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn
him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing
mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work
and so-called pleasure.


Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic
symptoms.  These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing.
But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the
prevention of symptoms.  Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our
friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always
indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and
happiness are still fighting."  The really hopeless victims of mental
illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
"Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode
of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in
their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop
symptoms as the neurotic does."  They are normal not in what may be
called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation
to a profoundly abnormal society.  Their perfect adjustment to that
abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.  These millions
of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which,
if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still
cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to
a great extent deindividualized.  Their conformity is developing into
something like uniformity.  But "uniformity and freedom are
incompatible.  Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too....
Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis
for mental health is destroyed."

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see
that every individual is unlike every other individual.  We reproduce
our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's.
These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number
of ways.  Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique.  Any
culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some
political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human
individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity.  It
seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring
the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in
common and finally abstracting some kind of "law," in terms of which
they make sense and can be effectively dealt with.  For examples,
apples fall from the tree and the moon moves across the sky.  People
had been observing these facts from time immemorial.  With Gertrude
Stein they were convinced that an apple is an apple is an apple,
whereas the moon is the moon is the moon.  It remained for Isaac Newton
to perceive what these very dissimilar phenomena had in common, and to
formulate a theory of gravitation in terms of which certain aspects of
the behavior of apples, of the heavenly bodies and indeed of everything
else in the physical universe could be explained and dealt with in
terms of a single system of ideas.  In the same spirit the artist takes
the innumerable diversities and uniquenesses of the outer world and his
own imagination and gives them meaning within an orderly system of
plastic, literary or musical patterns.  The wish to impose order upon
confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of
multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and
fundamental urge of the mind.  Within the realms of science, art and
philosophy the workings of what I may call this "Will to Order" are
mainly beneficent.  True, the Will to Order has produced many premature
syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of
metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for
realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate
experience.  But these errors, however regrettable, do not do much
harm, at any rate directly--though it sometimes happens that a bad
philosophical system may do harm indirectly, by being used as a
justification for senseless and inhuman actions.  It is in the social
sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order
becomes really dangerous.

Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to
comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity
to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude.  In politics the
equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical
system is a totalitarian dictatorship.  In economics, the equivalent of
a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in
which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines.  The Will to
Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a
mess.  The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only
within a self-regulating community of freely 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 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 to resist does not seem to be very strong or
very widespread.  As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable
book, _The Organization Man_, a new Social Ethic is replacing our
traditional ethical system--the system in which the individual is
primary.  The key words in this Social Ethic are "adjustment,"
"adaptation," "socially orientated behavior," "belongingness,"
"acquisition of social skills," "team work," "group living," "group
loyalty," "group dynamics," "group thinking," "group creativity."  Its
basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and
significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological
differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the
rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth
century called the Rights of Man.  According to the Social Ethic, Jesus
was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man.
On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his
inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized
good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their
purposes.  This ideal man is the man who displays "dynamic conformity"
(delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging
desire to subordinate himself, to belong.  And the ideal man must have
an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely
resigned to the fact that her husband's first loyalty is to the
Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account.  "He for God only,"
as Milton said of Adam and Eve, "she for God in him."  And in one
important respect the wife of the ideal organization man is a good deal
worse off than our First Mother.  She and Adam were permitted by the
Lord to be completely uninhibited in the matter of "youthful dalliance."

      _Nor turned, I ween,
  Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
  Mysterious of connubial love refused_

Today, according to a writer in the _Harvard Business Review_, the wife
of the man who is trying to live up to the ideal proposed by the Social
Ethic, "must not demand too much of her husband's time and interest.
Because of his single-minded concentration on his job, even his sexual
activity must be relegated to a secondary place."  The monk makes vows
of poverty, obedience and chastity.  The organization man is allowed to
be rich, but promises obedience ("he accepts authority without
resentment, he looks up to his superiors"--_Mussolini ha sempre
ragione_) and he must be prepared, for the greater glory of the
organization that employs him, to forswear even conjugal love.

It is worth remarking that, in _1984_, the members of the Party are
compelled to conform to a sexual ethic of more than Puritan severity.
In _Brave New World_, on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge
their sexual impulses without let or hindrance.  The society described
in Orwell's fable is a society permanently at war, and the aim of its
rulers is first, of course, to exercise power for its own delightful
sake and, second, to keep their subjects in that state of constant
tension which a state of constant war demands of those who wage it.  By
crusading against sexuality the bosses are able to maintain the
required tension in their followers and at the same time can satisfy
their lust for power in a most gratifying way.  The society described
in _Brave New World_ is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated
and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their
subjects from making trouble.  This they achieve by (among other
methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the
abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New
Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional
tension.  In _1984_ the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain;
in _Brave New World_, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

The current Social Ethic, it is obvious, is merely a justification
after the fact of the less desirable consequences of over-organization.
It represents a pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity, to
extract a positive value from an unpleasant datum.  It is a very
unrealistic, and therefore very dangerous, system of morality.  The
social whole, whose value is assumed to be greater than that of its
component parts, is not an organism in the sense that a hive or a
termitary may be thought of as an organism.  It is merely an
organization, a piece of social machinery.  There can be no value
except in relation to life and awareness.  An organization is neither
conscious nor alive.  Its value is instrumental and derivative.  It is
not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the
good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole.  To
give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to
means.  What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly
demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin.  Under their hideous rule personal
ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixture of violence
and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of
minds.  In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will
probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin.  The
future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of
highly trained social engineers.  "The challenge of social engineering
in our time," writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, "is
like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago.  If the
first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical
engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social
engineers"--and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of
World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.  To
the question _quis 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 movement in space.  The
impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the
social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us
in the direction of a new medieval system.  This revival will be made
more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New-Worldian amenities
as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but,
for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.




_IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society_

"The doctrines of Europe," Jefferson wrote, "were that men in numerous
associations cannot be restrained within the limits of order and
justice, except by forces physical and moral wielded over them by
authorities independent of their will....  We (the founders of the new
American democracy) believe that man was a rational animal, endowed by
nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice, and that he
could be restrained from wrong, and protected in right, by moderate
powers, confided to persons of his own choice and held to their duties
by dependence on his own will."  To post-Freudian ears, this kind of
language seems touchingly quaint and ingenuous.  Human beings are a
good deal less rational and innately just than the optimists of the
eighteenth century supposed.  On the other hand they are neither so
morally blind nor so hopelessly unreasonable as the pessimists of the
twentieth would have us believe.  In spite of the Id and the
Unconscious, in spite of endemic neurosis and the prevalence of low
IQ's, most men and women are probably decent enough and sensible enough
to be trusted with the direction of their own destinies.

Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with
individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power
of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled.  The
fact that, in western Europe and America, these devices have worked,
all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the
eighteenth-century optimists were not entirely wrong.  Given a fair
chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves
better, though perhaps with less mechanical efficiency, than they can
be governed by "authorities independent of their will."  Given a fair
chance, I repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensable prerequisite.
No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the
rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political
independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic
institutions work.  Again, no people in a precarious economic condition
has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically.
Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as
declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene
ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects.
Over-population and over-organization are two conditions which, as I
have already pointed out, deprive a society of a fair chance of making
democratic institutions work effectively.  We see, then, that there are
certain historical, economic, demographic and technological conditions
which make it very hard for Jefferson's rational animals, endowed by
nature with inalienable rights and an innate sense of justice, to
exercise their reason, claim their rights and act justly within a
democratically organized society.  We in the West have been supremely
fortunate in having been given our fair chance of making the great
experiment in self-government.  Unfortunately it now looks as though,
owing to recent changes in our circumstances, this infinitely precious
fair chance were being, little by little, taken away from us.  And
this, of course, is not the whole story.  These blind impersonal forces
are not the only enemies of individual liberty and democratic
institutions.  There are also forces of another, less abstract
character, forces that can be deliberately used by power-seeking
individuals whose aim is to establish partial or complete control over
their fellows.  Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely
self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and
massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the
past.  Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a
bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question.  After
all, we were living in the twentieth century.  A few years later these
people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were
committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans
and Asiatics.  In the light of recent history it would be foolish to
suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen again.  It can and, no
doubt, it will.  But in the immediate future there is some reason to
believe that the punitive methods of _1984_ will give place to the
reinforcements and manipulations of _Brave New World_.

There are two kinds of propaganda--rational propaganda in favor of
action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those
who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational
propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened
self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.  Where the
actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exalted
than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be
taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened
self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives.  If
politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or
their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an
earthly paradise.  As it is, they often act against their own
interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the
world, in consequence, is a place of misery.  Propaganda in favor of
action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to
reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available
evidence fully and honestly set forth.  Propaganda in favor of action
dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false,
garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to
influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the
furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by
cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so
that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most
cynical kind of _Realpolitik_ is treated as a matter of religious
principle and patriotic duty.

In John Dewey's words, "a renewal of faith in common human nature, in
its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to
respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism
than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special
legal and political forms."  The power to respond to reason and truth
exists in all of us.  But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to
respond to unreason and falsehood--particularly in those cases where
the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to
unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths
of our being.  In certain fields of activity men have learned to
respond to reason and truth pretty consistently.  The authors of
learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow
scientists and technologists.  They set forth what, to the best of
their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality,
they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they
support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in
other people.  All this is fairly easy in the fields of physical
science and technology.  It is much more difficult in the fields of
politics and religion and ethics.  Here the relevant facts often elude
us.  As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends upon the
particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose to interpret
them.  And these are not the only difficulties that confront the
rational truth-seeker.  In public and in private life, it often happens
that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh
their significance.  We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and
by a light considerably less steady than that of logic.  With the best
will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or
consistently rational.  All that is in our power is to be as truthful
and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well
as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasonings offered for our
consideration by others.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it
expects what never was and never will be....  The people cannot be safe
without information.  Where the press is free, and every man able to
read, all is safe."  Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in
reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely similar
terms.  Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the
utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon
the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is
allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained, if the
whole population were able to read, and if all sorts of opinions were
allowed to be addressed to them by word or in writing, and if by the
suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the
opinions they had adopted."  _All is safe, all would be gained_!  Once
more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimism.  Jefferson, it is
true, was a realist as well as an optimist.  He knew by bitter
experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused.
"Nothing," he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a
newspaper."  And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him),
"within the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally
the friend of science and civil liberty."  Mass communication, in a
word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other
force, it can be used either well or ill.  Used in one way, the press,
the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of
democracy.  Used in another way, they are among the most powerful
weapons in the dictator's armory.  In the field of mass communications
as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress
has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man.  As lately as fifty
years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of
small journals and local newspapers.  Thousands of country editors
expressed thousands of independent opinions.  Somewhere or other almost
anybody could get almost anything printed.  Today the press is still
legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared.  The cost
of woodpulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too
high for the Little Man.  In the totalitarian East there is political
censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the
State.  In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the
media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power
Elite.  Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of
communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less
objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but
certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could
possibly approve.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a
free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be
true, or it might be false.  They did not foresee what in fact has
happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies--the
development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the
main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more
or less totally irrelevant.  In a word, they failed to take into
account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this
appetite.  They might long for distractions, but the distractions were
not provided.  Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and
rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest
approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where
the performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous.  For
conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must
return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by
frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment--from
poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to
all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public
executions.  But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop
distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio,
television and the cinema.  In _Brave New World_ non-stop distractions
of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal
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 metaphysical fantasy,
will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would
manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on
repetition, suppression and rationalization--the repetition of
catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of
facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of
passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.
As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood,
the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these
techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now
threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda
essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of
democratic institutions.




_V Propaganda Under a Dictatorship_

At his trial after the Second World War, Hitler's Minister for
Armaments, Albert Speer, delivered a long speech in which, with
remarkable acuteness, he described the Nazi tyranny and analyzed its
methods.  "Hitler's dictatorship," he said, "differed in one
fundamental point from all its predecessors in history.  It was the
first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical
development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical
means for the domination of its own country.  Through technical devices
like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were
deprived of independent thought.  It was thereby possible to subject
them to the will of one man....  Earlier dictators needed highly
qualified assistants even at the lowest level--men who could think and
act independently.  The totalitarian system in the period of modern
technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to modern
methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize the lower
leadership.  As a result of this there has arisen the new type of the
uncritical recipient of orders."

In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable technology had advanced
far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler's day; consequently the
recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi
counterparts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite.  Moreover,
they had been genetically standardized and postnatally conditioned to
perform their subordinate functions, and could therefore be depended
upon to behave almost as predictably as machines.  As we shall see in a
later chapter, this conditioning of "the lower leadership" is already
going on under the Communist dictatorships.  The Chinese and the
Russians are not relying merely on the indirect effects of advancing
technology; they are working directly on the psychophysical organisms
of their lower leaders, subjecting minds and bodies to a system of
ruthless and, from all accounts, highly effective conditioning.  "Many
a man," said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day
nations might be dominated by technical means.  That nightmare was
almost realized in Hitler's totalitarian system."  Almost, but not
quite.  The Nazis did not have time--and perhaps did not have the
intelligence and the necessary knowledge--to brainwash and condition
their lower leadership.  This, it may be, is one of the reasons why
they failed.

Since Hitler's day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of
the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged.  As well as the
radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera and the rotary press,
the contemporary propagandist can make use of television to broadcast
the image as well as the voice of his client, and can record both image
and voice on spools of magnetic tape.  Thanks to technological
progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.  Nor is
it only on the technical front that the hand of the would-be dictator
has been strengthened.  Since Hitler's day a great deal of work has
been carried out in those fields of applied psychology and neurology
which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator
and the brainwasher.  In the past these specialists in the art of
changing people's minds were empiricists.  By a method of trial and
error they had worked out a number of techniques and procedures, which
they used very effectively without, however, knowing precisely why they
were effective.  Today the art of mind-control is in process of
becoming a science.  The practitioners of this science know what they
are doing and why.  They are guided in their work by theories and
hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental
evidence.  Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made
possible by these insights, the nightmare that was "all but realized in
Hitler's totalitarian system" may soon be completely realizable.

But before we discuss these new insights and techniques let us take a
look at the nightmare that so nearly came true in Nazi Germany.  What
were the methods used by Hitler and Goebbels for "depriving eighty
million people of independent thought and subjecting them to the will
of one man"?  And what was the theory of human nature upon which those
terrifyingly successful methods were based?  These questions can be
answered, for the most part, in Hitler's own words.  And what
remarkably clear and astute words they are!  When he writes about such
vast abstractions as Race and History and Providence, Hitler is
strictly unreadable.  But when he writes about the German masses and
the methods he used for dominating and directing them, his style
changes.  Nonsense gives place to sense, bombast to a hard-boiled and
cynical lucidity.  In his philosophical lucubrations Hitler was either
cloudily daydreaming or reproducing other people's half-baked notions.
In his comments on crowds and propaganda he was writing of things he
knew by firsthand experience.  In the words of his ablest biographer,
Mr. Alan Bullock, "Hitler was the greatest demagogue in history."
Those who add, "only a demagogue," fail to appreciate the nature of
political power in an age of mass politics.  As he himself said, "To be
a leader means to be able to move the masses."  Hitler's aim was first
to move the masses and then, having pried them loose from their
traditional loyalties and moralities, to impose upon them (with the
hypnotized consent of the majority) a new authoritarian order of his
own devising.  "Hitler," wrote Hermann Rauschning in 1939, "has a deep
respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit order; not because of
their Christian doctrine, but because of the 'machinery' they have
elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical system, their extremely
clever tactics, their knowledge of human nature and their wise use of
human weaknesses in ruling over believers."  Ecclesiasticism without
Christianity, the discipline of a monastic rule, not for God's sake or
in order to achieve personal salvation, but for the sake of the State
and for the greater glory and power of the demagogue turned
Leader--this was the goal toward which the systematic moving of the
masses was to lead.

Let us see what Hitler thought of the masses he moved and how he did
the moving.  The first principle from which he started was a value
judgment: the masses are utterly contemptible.  They are incapable of
abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of
their immediate experience.  Their behavior is determined, not by
knowledge and reason, but by feelings and unconscious drives.  It is in
these drives and feelings that "the roots of their positive as well as
their negative attitudes are implanted."  To be successful a
propagandist must learn how to manipulate these instincts and emotions.
"The driving force which has brought about the most tremendous
revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching
which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has
inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into
action.  Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that
will open the door of their hearts." ... In post-Freudian jargon, of
their unconscious.

Hitler made his strongest appeal to those members of the lower middle
classes who had been ruined by the inflation of 1923, and then ruined
all over again by the depression of 1929 and the following years.  "The
masses" of whom he speaks were these bewildered, frustrated and
chronically anxious millions.  To make them more masslike, more
homogeneously subhuman, he assembled them, by the thousands and the
tens of thousands, in vast halls and arenas, where individuals could
lose their personal identity, even their elementary humanity, and be
merged with the crowd.  A man or woman makes direct contact with
society in two ways: as a member of some familial, professional or
religious group, or as a member of a crowd.  Groups are capable of
being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a
crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything
except intelligent action and realistic thinking.  Assembled in a
crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for
moral choice.  Their suggestibility is increased to the point where
they cease to have any judgment or will of their own.  They become very
excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective
responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm
and panic.  In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had
swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant.  He is a victim of
what I have called "herd-poisoning."  Like alcohol, herd-poison is an
active, extraverted drug.  The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes
from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic,
animal mindlessness.

During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects
of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own
purposes.  He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those
"hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effectively
than can the writer.  Reading is a private, not a collective activity.
The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state
of normal sobriety.  The orator speaks to masses of individuals,
already well primed with herd-poison.  They are at his mercy and, if he
knows his business, he can do what he likes with them.  As an orator,
Hitler knew his business supremely well.  He was able, in his own
words, "to follow the lead of the great mass in such a way that from
the living emotion of his hearers the apt word which he needed would be
suggested to him and in its turn this would go straight to the heart of
his hearers."  Otto Strasser called him "a loud-speaker, proclaiming
the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings
and personal revolts of a whole nation."  Twenty years before Madison
Avenue embarked upon "Motivational Research," Hitler was systematically
exploring and exploiting the secret fears and hopes, the cravings,
anxieties and frustrations of the German masses.  It is by manipulating
"hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their
wares--a tooth-paste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate.
And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces--and to others too
dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with--that Hitler induced the
German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the
Second World War.

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an
interest in facts.  Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant
to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority.  Among
the masses "instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith....
While the healthy common folk instinctively close their ranks to form a
community of the people" (under a Leader, it goes without saying)
"intellectuals run this way and that, like hens in a poultry yard.
With them one cannot make history; they cannot be used as elements
composing a community."  Intellectuals are the kind of people who
demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and
fallacies.  They regard over-simplification as the original sin of the
mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and
sweeping generalizations which are the propagandist's stock in trade.
"All effective propaganda," Hitler wrote, "must be confined to a few
bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped
formulas."  These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for
"only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea
upon the memory of a crowd."  Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain
about the things that seem to us self-evident.  Propaganda, on the
other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it
would be reasonable to suspend our judgment or to feel doubt.  The aim
of the demagogue is to create social coherence under his own
leadership.  But, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, "systems of
dogma without empirical foundations, such as scholasticism, Marxism and
fascism, have the advantage of producing a great deal of social
coherence among their disciples."  The demagogic propagandist must
therefore be consistently dogmatic.  All his statements are made
without qualification.  There are no grays in his picture of the world;
everything is either diabolically black or celestially white.  In
Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt "a systematically
one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with."
He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a
different point of view might be even partially right.  Opponents
should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or,
if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated.  The morally
squeamish intellectual may be shocked by this kind of thing.  But the
masses are always convinced that "right is on the side of the active
aggressor."

Such, then, was Hitler's opinion of humanity in the mass.  It was a
very low opinion.  Was it also an incorrect opinion?  The tree is known
by its fruits, and a theory of human nature which inspired the kind of
techniques that proved so horribly effective must contain at least an
element of truth.  Virtue and intelligence belong to human beings as
individuals freely associating with other individuals in small groups.
So do sin and stupidity.  But the subhuman mindlessness to which the
demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies
when he goads his victims into action, are characteristic not of men
and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses.  Mindlessness
and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are
symptoms of herd-poisoning.  In all the world's higher religions,
salvation and enlightenment are for individuals.  The kingdom of heaven
is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness
of a crowd.  Christ promised to be present where two or three are
gathered together.  He did not say anything about being present where
thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison.  Under the
Nazis enormous numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous
amount of time marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and
back again to point A.  "This keeping of the whole population on the
march seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy.  Only much
later," adds Hermann Rauschning, "was there revealed in it a subtle
intention based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means.
Marching diverts men's thoughts.  Marching kills thought.  Marching
makes an end of individuality.  Marching is the indispensable magic
stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical,
quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature."

From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his
dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human
nature.  To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather
than as members of crowds, or of regimented collectives, he seems
hideously wrong.  In an age of accelerating over-population, of
accelerating over-organization and ever more efficient means of mass
communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value
of the human individual?  This is a question that can still be asked
and perhaps effectively answered.  A generation from now it may be too
late to find an answer and perhaps impossible, in the stifling
collective climate of that future time, even to ask the question.




_VI The Arts of Selling_

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of
people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or
distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to
enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice, to the
powerful "hidden forces," as Hitler called them, present in the
unconscious depths of every human mind.

In the West, democratic principles are proclaimed and many able and
conscientious publicists do their best to supply electors with adequate
information and to persuade them, by rational argument, to make
realistic choices in the light of that information.  All this is
greatly to the good.  But unfortunately propaganda in the Western
democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided
personality.  In charge of the editorial department there is often a
democratic Dr. Jekyll--a propagandist who would be very happy to prove
that John Dewey had been right about the ability of human nature to
respond to truth and reason.  But this worthy man controls only a part
of the machinery of mass communication.  In charge of advertising we
find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde--or rather a
Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and has a master's
degree as well in the social sciences.  This Dr. Hyde would be very
unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John Dewey's faith in
human nature.  Truth and reason are Jekyll's affair, not his.  Hyde is
a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and
failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which
so much of men's conscious thinking and overt doing is determined.  And
he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make
people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their
health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage
of their ignorance and to 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 release large quantities of
adrenalin and noradrenalin) physiological satisfaction.  People may
start out with an initial prejudice against tyrants; but when tyrants
or would-be tyrants treat them to adrenalin-releasing propaganda about
the wickedness of their enemies--particularly of enemies weak enough to
be persecuted--they are ready to follow him with enthusiasm.  In his
speeches Hitler kept repeating such words as "hatred," "force,"
"ruthless," "crush," "smash"; and he would accompany these violent
words with even more violent gestures.  He would yell, he would scream,
his veins would swell, his face would turn purple.  Strong emotion (as
every actor and dramatist knows) is in the highest degree contagious.
Infected by the malignant frenzy of the orator, the audience would
groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion.  And these
orgies were so enjoyable that most of those who had experienced them
eagerly came back for more.  Almost all of us long for peace and
freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts,
feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom.  Conversely
almost nobody wants war or tyranny; but a great many people find an
intense pleasure in the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for
war and tyranny.  These thoughts, feelings and actions are too
dangerous to be exploited for commercial purposes.  Accepting this
handicap, the advertising man must do the best he can with the less
intoxicating emotions, the quieter forms of irrationality.

Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a
clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of
symbols and of their relations to the things and events symbolized.
Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general
failure to understand the nature of symbols.  Simple-minded people tend
to equate the symbol with what it stands for, to attribute to things
and events some of the qualities expressed by the words in terms of
which the propagandist has chosen, for his own purposes, to talk about
them.  Consider a simple example.  Most cosmetics are made of lanolin,
which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an
emulsion.  This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates
the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so
forth.  But the commercial propagandists do not speak about the genuine
virtues of the emulsion.  They give it some picturesquely voluptuous
name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show
pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food.
"The cosmetic manufacturers," one of their number has written, "are not
selling lanolin, they are selling hope."  For this hope, this
fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured,
women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the
propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading
symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish--the wish
to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex.  The principles
underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely simple.  Find some
common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out
some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell;
then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your
customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream
to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream
come true.  "We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality.  We do not buy
just an auto, we buy prestige."  And so with all the rest.  In
toothpaste, for example, we buy, not a mere cleanser and antiseptic,
but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive.  In vodka and
whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which, in small doses,
may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we
are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell
and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern.  With our laxatives we buy
the health of a Greek god, the radiance of one of Diana's nymphs.  With
the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less
literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated.  In every case
the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose
energy can be used to move the consumer to part with cash and so,
indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.  Stored in the minds and
bodies of countless individuals, this potential energy is released by,
and transmitted along, a line of symbols carefully laid out so as to
bypass rationality and obscure the real issue.

Sometimes the symbols take effect by being disproportionately
impressive, haunting and fascinating in their own right.  Of this kind
are the rites and pomps of religion.  These "beauties of holiness"
strengthen faith where it already exists and, where there is no faith,
contribute to conversion.  Appealing, as they do, only to the aesthetic
sense, they guarantee neither the truth nor the ethical value of the
doctrines with which they have been, quite arbitrarily, associated.  As
a matter of plain historical fact, the beauties of holiness have often
been matched and indeed surpassed by the beauties of unholiness.  Under
Hitler, for example, the yearly Nuremberg rallies were masterpieces of
ritual and theatrical art.  "I had spent six years in St. Petersburg
before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet," writes Sir
Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Hitler's Germany, "but for
grandiose beauty I have never seen any ballet to compare with the
Nuremberg rally."  One thinks of Keats--"beauty is truth, truth
beauty."  Alas, the identity exists only on some ultimate, supramundane
level.  On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly
compatible with nonsense and tyranny.  Which is very fortunate; for if
beauty were incompatible with nonsense and tyranny, there would be
precious little art in the world.  The masterpieces of painting,
sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political
propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a government or a
priesthood.  But most kings and priests have been despotic and all
religions have been riddled with superstition.  Genius has been the
servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult.
Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad metaphysics.
Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it
is actually taking place?  That is the question.

In commercial propaganda the principle of the disproportionately
fascinating symbol is clearly understood.  Every propagandist has his
Art Department, and attempts are constantly being made to beautify the
billboards with striking posters, the advertising pages of magazines
with lively drawings and photographs.  There are no masterpieces; for
masterpieces appeal only to a limited audience, and the commercial
propagandist is out to captivate the majority.  For him, the ideal is a
moderate excellence.  Those who like this not too good, but
sufficiently striking, art may be expected to like the products with
which it has been associated and for which it symbolically stands.

Another disproportionately fascinating symbol is the Singing
Commercial.  Singing Commercials are a recent invention; but the
Singing Theological and the Singing Devotional--the hymn and the
psalm--are as old as religion itself.  Singing Militaries, or marching
songs, are coeval with war, and Singing Patriotics, the precursors of
our national anthems, were doubtless used to promote group solidarity,
to emphasize the distinction between "us" and "them," by the wandering
bands of paleolithic hunters and food gatherers.  To most people music
is intrinsically attractive.  Moreover, melodies tend to ingrain
themselves in the listener's mind.  A tune will haunt the memory during
the whole of a lifetime.  Here, for example, is a quite uninteresting
statement or value judgment.  As it stands nobody will pay attention to
it.  But now set the words to a catchy and easily remembered tune.
Immediately they become words of power.  Moreover, the words will tend
automatically to repeat themselves every time the melody is heard or
spontaneously remembered.  Orpheus has entered into an alliance with
Pavlov--the power of sound with the conditioned reflex.  For the
commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of
politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage.  Nonsense
which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or
hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with
pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.  Can we learn
to separate the pleasure of singing or of listening to song from the
all too human tendency to believe in the propaganda which the song is
putting over?  That again is the question.

Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist
has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually
every adult in every civilized country.  Today, thanks to radio and
television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate
even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children.

Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda.
They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely
unsuspecting.  Their critical faculties are undeveloped.  The youngest
of them have not yet reached the age of reason and the older ones lack
the experience on which their new-found rationality can effectively
work.  In Europe, conscripts used to be playfully referred to as
"cannon fodder."  Their little brothers and sisters have now become
radio fodder and television fodder.  In my childhood we were taught to
sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns.  Today the little
ones warble the Singing Commercials.  Which is better--"Rheingold is my
beer, the dry beer," or "Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle"?
"Abide with me" or "You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush
your teeth with Pepsodent"?  Who knows?

"I don't say that children should be forced to harass their parents
into buying products they've seen advertised on television, but at the
same time I cannot close my eyes to the fact that it's being done every
day."  So writes the star of one of the many programs beamed to a
juvenile audience.  "Children," he adds, "are living, talking records
of what we tell them every day."  And in due course these living,
talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and
buy the products of industry.  "Think," writes Mr. Clyde Miller
ecstatically, "think of what it can mean to your firm in profits if you
can condition a million or ten million children, who will grow up into
adults trained to buy your product, as soldiers are trained in advance
when they hear the trigger words, Forward March!"  Yes, just think of
it!  And at the same time remember that the dictators and the would-be
dictators have been thinking about this sort of thing for years, and
that millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of children are
in process of growing up to buy the local despot's ideological product
and, like well-trained soldiers, to respond with appropriate behavior
to the trigger words implanted in those young minds by the despot's
propagandists.

Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers.  The larger the
constituency, the less the value of any particular vote.  When he is
merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be
impotent, a negligible quantity.  The candidates he has voted into
office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power.  Theoretically
they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who
give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid,
who must obey.  Increasing population and advancing technology have
resulted in an increase in the number and complexity of organizations,
an increase in the amount of power concentrated in the hands of
officials and a corresponding decrease in the amount of control
exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in the public's regard
for democratic procedures.  Already weakened by the vast impersonal
forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now
being undermined from within by the politicians and their propagandists.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them
seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable
choice in the light of available evidence.  Democratic institutions can
be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge
and to encourage rationality.  But today, in the world's most powerful
democracy, the politicians and their propagandists prefer to make
nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to
the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.  "Both parties," we
were told in 1956 by the editor of a leading business journal, "will
merchandize their candidates and issues by the same methods that
business has developed to sell goods.  These include scientific
selection of appeals and planned repetition....  Radio spot
announcements and ads will repeat phrases with a planned intensity.
Billboards will push slogans of proven power....  Candidates need, in
addition to rich voices and good diction, to be able to look
'sincerely' at the TV camera."

The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters,
never to their potential strength.  They make no attempt to educate the
masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely
to manipulate and exploit them.  For this purpose all the resources of
psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work.
Carefully selected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in
depth."  These interviews in depth reveal the unconscious fears and
wishes most prevalent in a given society at the time of an election.
Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these
fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then
chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or
improved in the light of the information thus obtained.  After which
the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators.  All that
is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look
"sincere."  Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans
for specific action have come to lose most of their importance.  The
personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the
advertising experts are the things that really matter.

In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the
candidate must be glamorous.  He must also be an entertainer who never
bores his audience.  Inured to television and radio, that audience is
accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to
concentrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort.  All speeches by
the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy.  The
great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the
most--and preferably (since the audience will be eager to pass on to
something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty
seconds flat.  The nature of oratory is such that there has always been
a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex
issues.  From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of
speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.  The methods
now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were
a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing
the truth about anything.




_VII Brainwashing_

In the two preceding chapters I have described the techniques of what
may be called wholesale mind-manipulation, as practiced by the greatest
demagogue and the most successful salesmen in recorded history.  But no
human problem can be solved by wholesale methods alone.  The shotgun
has its place, but so has the hypodermic syringe.  In the chapters that
follow I shall describe some of the more effective techniques for
manipulating not crowds, not entire publics, but isolated individuals.

In the course of his epoch-making experiments on the conditioned
reflex, Ivan Pavlov observed that, when subjected to prolonged physical
or psychic stress, laboratory animals exhibit all the symptoms of a
nervous breakdown.  Refusing to cope any longer with the intolerable
situation, their brains go on strike, so to speak, and either stop
working altogether (the dog loses consciousness), or else resort to
slow-downs and sabotage (the dog behaves unrealistically, or develops
the kind of physical symptoms which, in a human being, we would call
hysterical).  Some animals are more resistant to stress than others.
Dogs possessing what Pavlov called a "strong excitatory" constitution
break down much more quickly than dogs of a merely "lively" (as opposed
to a choleric or agitated) temperament.  Similarly "weak inhibitory"
dogs reach the end of their tether much sooner than do "calm
imperturbable" dogs.  But even the most stoical dog is unable to resist
indefinitely.  If the stress to which he is subjected is sufficiently
intense or sufficiently prolonged, he will end by breaking down as
abjectly and as completely as the weakest of his kind.

Pavlov's findings were confirmed in the most distressing manner, and on
a very large scale, during the two World Wars.  As the result of a
single catastrophic experience, or of a succession of terrors less
appalling but frequently repeated, soldiers develop a number of
disabling psychophysical symptoms.  Temporary unconsciousness, extreme
agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis, completely
unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals of
lifelong patterns of behavior--all the symptoms, which Pavlov observed
in his dogs, reappeared among the victims of what in the First World
War was called "shell shock," in the Second, "battle fatigue."  Every
man, like every dog, has his own individual limit of endurance.  Most
men reach their limit after about thirty days of more or less
continuous stress under the conditions of modern combat.  The more than
averagely susceptible succumb in only fifteen days.  The more than
averagely tough can resist for forty-five or even fifty days.  Strong
or weak, in the long run all of them break down.  All, that is to say,
of those who are initially sane.  For, ironically enough, the only
people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are
psychotics.  Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of
collective insanity.

The fact that every individual has his breaking point has been known
and, in a crude unscientific way, exploited from time immemorial.  In
some cases man's dreadful inhumanity to man has been inspired by the
love of cruelty for its own horrible and fascinating sake.  More often,
however, pure sadism was tempered by utilitarianism, theology or
reasons of state.  Physical torture and other forms of stress were
inflicted by lawyers in order to loosen the tongues of reluctant
witnesses; by clergymen in order to punish the unorthodox and induce
them to change their opinions; by the secret police to extract
confessions from persons suspected of being hostile to the government.
Under Hitler, torture, followed by mass extermination, was used on
those biological heretics, the Jews.  For a young Nazi, a tour of duty
in the Extermination Camps was (in Himmler's words) "the best
indoctrination on inferior beings and the subhuman races."  Given the
obsessional quality of the anti-Semitism which Hitler had picked up as
a young man in the slums of Vienna, this revival of the methods
employed by the Holy Office against heretics and witches was
inevitable.  But in the light of the findings of Pavlov and of the
knowledge gained by psychiatrists in the treatment of war neuroses, it
seems a hideous and grotesque anachronism.  Stresses amply sufficient
to cause a complete cerebral breakdown can be induced by methods which,
though hatefully inhuman, fall short of physical torture.

Whatever may have happened in earlier years, it seems fairly certain
that torture is not extensively used by the Communist police today.
They draw their inspiration, not from the Inquisitor or the SS man, but
from the physiologist and his methodically conditioned laboratory
animals.  For the dictator and his policemen, Pavlov's findings have
important practical implications.  If the central nervous system of
dogs can be broken down, so can the central nervous system of political
prisoners.  It is simply a matter of applying the right amount of
stress for the right length of time.  At the end of the treatment, the
prisoner will be in a state of neurosis or hysteria, and will be ready
to confess whatever his captors want him to confess.

But confession is not enough.  A hopeless neurotic is no use to anyone.
What the intelligent and practical dictator needs is not a patient to
be institutionalized, or a victim to be shot, but a convert who will
work for the Cause.  Turning once again to Pavlov, he learns that, on
their way to the point of final breakdown, dogs become more than
normally suggestible.  New behavior patterns can easily be installed
while the dog is at or near the limit of its cerebral endurance, and
these new behavior patterns seem to be ineradicable.  The animal in
which they have been implanted cannot be deconditioned; that which it
has learned under stress will remain an integral part of its make-up.

Psychological stresses can be produced in many ways.  Dogs become
disturbed when stimuli are unusually strong; when the interval between
a stimulus and the customary response is unduly prolonged and the
animal is left in a state of suspense; when the brain is confused by
stimuli that run counter to what the dog has learned to expect; when
stimuli make no sense within the victim's established frame of
reference.  Furthermore, it has been found that the deliberate
induction of fear, rage or anxiety markedly heightens the dog's
suggestibility.  If these emotions are kept at a high pitch of
intensity for a long enough time, the brain goes 'on strike.'  When
this happens, new behavior patterns may be installed with the greatest
of ease.

Among the physical stresses that increase a dog's suggestibility are
fatigue, wounds and every form of sickness.

For the would-be dictator these findings possess important practical
implications.  They prove, for example, that Hitler was quite right in
maintaining that mass meetings at night were more effective than mass
meetings in the daytime.  During the day, he wrote, "man's will power
revolts with highest energy against any attempt at being forced under
another's will and another's opinion.  In the evening, however, they
succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will."

Pavlov would have agreed with him; fatigue increases suggestibility.
(That is why, among other reasons, the commercial sponsors of
television programs prefer the evening hours and are ready to back
their preference with hard cash.)

Illness is even more effective than fatigue as an intensifier of
suggestibility.  In the past, sickrooms were the scene of countless
religious conversions.  The scientifically trained dictator of the
future will have all the hospitals in his dominions wired for sound and
equipped with pillow speakers.  Canned persuasion will be on the air
twenty-four hours a day, and the more important patients will be
visited by political soul-savers and mind-changers just as, in the
past, their ancestors were visited by priests, nuns and pious laymen.

The fact that strong negative emotions tend to heighten suggestibility
and so facilitate a change of heart had been observed and exploited
long before the days of Pavlov.  As Dr. William Sargant has pointed out
in his enlightening book, _Battle for the Mind_, John Wesley's enormous
success as a preacher was based upon an intuitive understanding of the
central nervous system.  He would open his sermon with a long and
detailed description of the torments to which, unless they underwent
conversion, his hearers would undoubtedly be condemned for all
eternity.  Then, when terror and an agonizing sense of guilt had
brought his audience to the verge, or in some cases over the verge, of
a complete cerebral breakdown, he would change his tone and promise
salvation to those who believed and repented.  By this kind of
preaching, Wesley converted thousands of men, women and children.
Intense, prolonged fear broke them down and produced a state of greatly
intensified suggestibility.  In this state they were able to accept the
preacher's theological pronouncements without question.  After which
they were reintegrated by words of comfort, and emerged from their
ordeal with new and generally better behavior patterns ineradicably
implanted in their minds and nervous systems.

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon
the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught.  These doctrines
may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious--it makes little or no
difference.  If the indoctrination is given in the right way at the
proper stage of nervous exhaustion, it will work.  Under favorable
conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically
anything.

We possess detailed descriptions of the methods used by the Communist
police for dealing with political prisoners.  From the moment he is
taken into custody, the victim is subjected systematically to many
kinds of physical and psychological stress.  He is badly fed, he is
made extremely uncomfortable, he is not allowed to sleep for more than
a few hours each night.  And all the time he is kept in a state of
suspense, uncertainty and acute apprehension.  Day after day--or rather
night after night, for these Pavlovian policemen understand the value
of fatigue as an intensifier of suggestibility--he is questioned, often
for many hours at a stretch, by interrogators who do their best to
frighten, confuse and bewilder him.  After a few weeks or months of
such treatment, his brain goes on strike and he confesses whatever it
is that his captors want him to confess.  Then, if he is to be
converted rather than shot, he is offered the comfort of hope.  If he
will but accept the true faith, he can yet be saved--not, of course, in
the next life (for, officially, there is no next life), but in this.

Similar but rather less drastic methods were used during the Korean War
on military prisoners.  In their Chinese camps the young Western
captives were systematically subjected to stress.  Thus, for the most
trivial breaches of the rules, offenders would be summoned to the
commandant's office, there to be questioned, browbeaten and publicly
humiliated.  And the process would be repeated, again and again, at any
hour of the day or night.  This continuous harassment produced in its
victims a sense of bewilderment and chronic anxiety.  To intensify
their sense of guilt, prisoners were made to write and rewrite, in ever
more intimate detail, long autobiographical accounts of their
shortcomings.  And after having confessed their own sins, they were
required to confess the sins of their companions.  The aim was to
create within the camp a nightmarish society, in which everybody was
spying on, and informing against, everyone else.  To these mental
stresses were added the physical stresses of malnutrition, discomfort
and illness.  The increased suggestibility thus induced was skilfully
exploited by the Chinese, who poured into these abnormally receptive
minds large doses of pro-Communist and anti-capitalist literature.
These Pavlovian techniques were remarkably successful.  One out of
every seven American prisoners was guilty, we are officially told, of
grave collaboration with the Chinese authorities, one out of three of
technical collaboration.

It must not be supposed that this kind of treatment is reserved by the
Communists exclusively for their enemies.  The young field workers,
whose business it was, during the first years of the new regime, to act
as Communist missionaries and organizers in China's innumerable towns
and villages were made to take a course of indoctrination far more
intense than that to which any prisoner of war was ever subjected.  In
his _China under Communism_ R. L. Walker describes the methods by which
the party leaders are able to fabricate out of ordinary men and women
the thousands of selfless fanatics required for spreading the Communist
gospel and for enforcing Communist policies.  Under this system of
training, the human raw material is shipped to special camps, where the
trainees are completely isolated from their friends, families and the
outside world in general.  In these camps they are made to perform
exhausting physical and mental work; they are never alone, always in
groups; they are encouraged to spy on one another; they are required to
write self-accusatory autobiographies; they live in chronic fear of the
dreadful fate that may befall them on account of what has been said
about them by informers or of what they themselves have confessed.  In
this state of heightened suggestibility they are given an intensive
course in theoretical and applied Marxism--a course in which failure to
pass examinations may mean anything from ignominious expulsion to a
term in a forced labor camp or even liquidation.  After about six
months of this kind of thing, prolonged mental and physical stress
produces the results which Pavlov's findings would lead one to expect.
One after another, or in whole groups, the trainees break down.
Neurotic and hysterical symptoms make their appearance.  Some of the
victims commit suicide, others (as many, we are told, as 20 per cent of
the total) develop a severe mental illness.  Those who survive the
rigors of the conversion process emerge with new and ineradicable
behavior patterns.  All their ties with the past--friends, family,
traditional decencies and pieties--have been severed.  They are new
men, 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 fanatics dedicated
heart and soul, reflex and nervous system, to the destruction of
old-fashioned liberalism, wherever it can be found.

Brainwashing, as it is now practiced, is a hybrid technique, depending
for its effectiveness partly on the systematic use of violence, partly
on skilful psychological manipulation.  It represents the tradition of
_1984_ on its way to becoming the tradition of _Brave New World_.
Under a long-established and well-regulated dictatorship our current
methods of semiviolent manipulation will seem, no doubt, absurdly
crude.  Conditioned from earliest infancy (and perhaps also
biologically predestined), the average middle- or lower-caste
individual will never require conversion or even a refresher course in
the true faith.  The members of the highest caste will have to be able
to think new thoughts in response to new situations; consequently their
training will be much less rigid than the training imposed upon those
whose business is not to reason why, but merely to do and die with the
minimum of fuss.  These upper-caste individuals will be members, still,
of a wild species--the trainers and guardians, themselves only slightly
conditioned, of a breed of completely domesticated animals.  Their
wildness will make it possible for them to become heretical and
rebellious.  When this happens, they will have to be either liquidated,
or brainwashed back into orthodoxy, or (as in _Brave New World_) exiled
to some island, where they can give no further trouble, except of
course to one another.  But universal infant conditioning and the other
techniques of manipulation and control are still a few generations away
in the future.  On the road to the Brave New World our rulers will have
to rely on the transitional and provisional techniques of brainwashing.




_VIII Chemical Persuasion_

In the Brave New World of my fable there was no whisky, no tobacco, no
illicit heroin, no bootlegged cocaine.  People neither smoked, nor
drank, nor sniffed, nor gave themselves injections.  Whenever anyone
felt depressed or below par, he would swallow a tablet or two of a
chemical compound called soma.  The original soma, from which I took
the name of this hypothetical drug, was an unknown plant (possibly
_Asclepias 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 transcendently blissful and
enlightening that soma drinking was regarded as a high privilege.  For
this privilege no price was too great.

The soma of _Brave New World_ had none of the drawbacks of its Indian
original.  In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses
it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink
in a few minutes into refreshing sleep.  And all at no physiological or
mental cost.  The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their
black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without
sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.

In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a
political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and
Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.  But this most
precious of the subjects' inalienable privileges was at the same time
one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator's armory.
The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State
(and incidentally, of course, for their own delight) was a main plank
in the policy of the World Controllers.  The daily soma ration was an
insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread
of subversive ideas.  Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the
people.  In the Brave New World this situation was reversed.  Opium, or
rather soma, was the people's religion.  Like religion, the drug had
power to console and compensate, it called up visions of another,
better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity.
Beer, a poet has written,

  ... does more than Milton can
  To justify God's ways to man.

And let us remember that, compared with soma, beer is a drug of the
crudest and most unreliable kind.  In this matter of justifying God's
ways to man, soma is to alcohol as alcohol is to the theological
arguments of Milton.

In 1931, when I was writing about the imaginary synthetic by means of
which future generations would be made both happy and docile, the
well-known American biochemist, Dr. Irvine Page, was preparing to leave
Germany, where he had spent the three preceding years at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute, working on the chemistry of the brain.  "It is hard
to understand," Dr. Page has written in a recent article, "why it took
so long for scientists to get around to investigating the chemical
reactions in their own brains.  I speak," he adds, "from acute personal
experience.  When I came home in 1931 ... I could not get a job in this
field (the field of brain chemistry) or stir a ripple of interest in
it."  Today, twenty-seven years later, the non-existent ripple of 1931
has become a tidal wave of biochemical and psychopharmacological
research.  The enzymes which regulate the workings of the brain are
being studied.  Within the body, hitherto unknown chemical substances
such as adrenochrome and serotonin (of which Dr. Page was a
co-discoverer) have been isolated and their far-reaching effects on our
mental and physical functions are now being investigated.  Meanwhile
new drugs are being synthesized--drugs that reinforce or correct or
interfere with the actions of the various chemicals, by means of which
the nervous system performs its daily and hourly miracles as the
controller of the body, the instrument and mediator of consciousness.
From our present point of view, the most interesting fact about these
new drugs is that they temporarily alter the chemistry of the brain and
the associated state of the mind without doing any permanent damage to
the organism as a whole.  In this respect they are like soma--and
profoundly unlike the mind-changing drugs of the past.  For example,
the classical tranquillizer is opium.  But opium is a dangerous drug
which, from neolithic times down to the present day, has been making
addicts and ruining health.  The same is true of the classical
euphoric, alcohol--the drug which, in the words of the Psalmist,
"maketh glad the heart of man."  But unfortunately alcohol not only
maketh glad the heart of man; it also, in excessive doses, causes
illness and addiction, and has been a main source, for the last eight
or ten thousand years, of crime, domestic unhappiness, moral
degradation and avoidable accidents.

Among the classical stimulants, tea, coffee and mat are, thank
goodness, almost completely harmless.  They are also very weak
stimulants.  Unlike these "cups that cheer but not inebriate," cocaine
is a very powerful and a very dangerous drug.  Those who make use of it
must pay for their ecstasies, their sense of unlimited physical and
mental power, by spells of agonizing depression, by such horrible
physical symptoms as the sensation of being infested by myriads of
crawling insects and by paranoid delusions that may lead to crimes of
violence.  Another stimulant of more recent vintage is amphetamine,
better known under its trade name of Benzedrine.  Amphetamine works
very effectively--but works, if abused, at the expense of mental and
physical health.  It has been reported that, in Japan, there are now
about one million amphetamine addicts.

Of the classical vision-producers the best known are the peyote of
Mexico and the southwestern United States and _Cannabis sativa_,
consumed all over the world under such names as hashish, bhang, kif and
marihuana.  According to the best medical and anthropological evidence,
peyote is far less harmful than the White Man's gin or whisky.  It
permits the Indians who use it in their religious rites to enter
paradise, and to feel at one with the beloved community, without making
them pay for the privilege by anything worse than the ordeal of having
to chew on something with a revolting flavor and of feeling somewhat
nauseated for an hour or two.  _Cannabis sativa_ is a less innocuous
drug--though not nearly so harmful as the sensation-mongers would have
us believe.  The Medical Committee, appointed in 1944 by the Mayor of
New York to investigate the problem of marihuana, came to the
conclusion, after careful investigation, that _Cannabis sativa_ is not
a serious menace to society, or even to those who indulge in it.  It is
merely a nuisance.

From these classical mind-changes we pass to the latest products of
psychopharmacological research.  Most highly publicized of these are
the three new tranquillizers, reserpine, chlorpromazine and
meprobamate.  Administered to certain classes of psychotics, the first
two have proved to be remarkably effective, not in curing mental
illnesses, but at least in temporarily abolishing their more
distressing symptoms.  Meprobamate (alias Miltown) produces similar
effects in persons suffering from various forms of neurosis.  None of
these drugs is perfectly harmless; but their cost, in terms of physical
health and mental efficiency, is extraordinarily low.  In a world where
nobody gets anything for nothing tranquillizers offer a great deal for
very little.  Miltown and chlorpromazine are not yet soma; but they
come fairly near to being one of the aspects of that mythical drug.
They provide temporary relief from nervous tension without, in the
great majority of cases, inflicting permanent organic harm, and without
causing more than a rather slight impairment, while the drug is
working, of intellectual and physical efficiency.  Except as narcotics,
they are probably to be preferred to the barbiturates, which blunt the
mind's cutting edge and, in large doses, cause a number of undesirable
psychophysical symptoms and may result in a full-blown addiction.

In LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) the pharmacologists have
recently created another aspect of soma--a perception-improver and
vision-producer that is, physiologically speaking, almost costless.
This extraordinary drug, which is effective in doses as small as fifty
or even twenty-five millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to
transport people into the other world.  In the majority of cases, the
other world to which LSD-25 gives access is heavenly; alternatively it
may be purgatorial or even infernal.  But, positive or negative, the
lysergic acid experience is felt by almost everyone who undergoes it to
be profoundly significant and enlightening.  In any event, the fact
that minds can be changed so radically at so little cost to the body is
altogether astonishing.

Soma was not only a vision-producer and a tranquillizer; it was also
(and no doubt impossibly) a stimulant of mind and body, a creator of
active euphoria as well as of the negative happiness that follows the
release from anxiety and tension.

The ideal stimulant--powerful but innocuous--still awaits discovery.
Amphetamine, as we have seen, was far from satisfactory; it exacted too
high a price for what it gave.  A more promising candidate for the role
of soma in its third aspect is Iproniazid, which is now being used to
lift depressed patients out of their misery, to enliven the apathetic
and in general to increase the amount of available psychic energy.
Still more promising, according to a distinguished pharmacologist of my
acquaintance, is a new compound, still in the testing stage, to be
known as Deaner.  Deaner is an ammo-alcohol and is thought to increase
the production of acetyl-choline within the body, and thereby to
increase the activity and effectiveness of the nervous system.  The man
who takes the new pill needs less sleep, feels more alert and cheerful,
thinks faster and better--and all at next to no organic cost, at any
rate in the short run.  It sounds almost too good to be true.

We see then that, though soma does not yet exist (and will probably
never exist), fairly good substitutes for the various aspects of soma
have already been discovered.  There are now physiologically cheap
tranquillizers, physiologically cheap vision-producers and
physiologically cheap stimulants.

That a dictator could, if he so desired, make use of these drugs for
political purposes is obvious.  He could ensure himself against
political unrest by changing the chemistry of his subjects' brains and
so making them content with their servile condition.  He could use
tranquillizers to calm the excited, stimulants to arouse enthusiasm in
the indifferent, halluciants to distract the attention of the wretched
from their miseries.  But how, it may be asked, will the dictator get
his subjects to take the pills that will make them think, feel and
behave in the ways he finds desirable?  In all probability it will be
enough merely to make the pills available.  Today alcohol and tobacco
are available, and people spend considerably more on these very
unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants and sedatives than they are
ready to spend on the education of their children.  Or consider the
barbiturates and the tranquillizers.  In the United States these drugs
can be obtained only on a doctor's prescription.  But the demand of the
American public for something that will make life in an
urban-industrial environment a little more tolerable is so great that
doctors are now writing prescriptions for the various tranquillizers at
the rate of forty-eight millions a year.  Moreover, a majority of these
prescriptions are refilled.  A hundred doses of happiness are not
enough: send to the drugstore for another bottle--and, when that is
finished, for another....  There can be no doubt that, if
tranquillizers could be bought as easily and cheaply as aspirin, they
would be consumed, not by the billions, as they are at present, but by
the scores and hundreds of billions.  And a good, cheap stimulant would
be almost as popular.

Under a dictatorship pharmacists would be instructed to change their
tune with every change of circumstances.  In times of national crisis
it would be their business to push the sale of stimulants.  Between
crises, too much alertness and energy on the part of his subjects might
prove embarrassing to the tyrant.  At such times the masses would be
urged to buy tranquillizers and vision-producers.  Under the influence
of these soothing syrups they could be relied upon to give their master
no trouble.

As things now stand, the tranquillizers may prevent some people from
giving enough trouble, not only to their rulers, but even to
themselves.  Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little.
There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess
of tranquillity (and especially of tranquillity imposed from the
outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate.

At a recent symposium on meprobamate, in which I was a participant, an
eminent biochemist playfully suggested that the United States
government should make a free gift to the Soviet people of fifty
billion doses of this most popular of the tranquillizers.  The joke had
a serious point to it.  In a contest between two populations, one of
which is being constantly stimulated by threats and promises,
constantly directed by one-pointed propaganda, while the other is no
less constantly being distracted by television and tranquillized by
Miltown, which of the opponents is more likely to come out on top?

As well as tranquillizing, hallucinating and stimulating, the soma of
my fable had the power of heightening suggestibility, and so could be
used to reinforce the effects of governmental propaganda.  Less
effectively and at a higher physiological cost, several drugs already
in the pharmacopoeia can be used for the same purpose.  There is
scopolamine, for example, the active principle of henbane and, in large
doses, a powerful poison; there are pentothal and sodium amytal.
Nicknamed for some odd reason "the truth serum," pentothal has been
used by the police of various countries for the purpose of extracting
confessions from (or perhaps suggesting confessions to) reluctant
criminals.  Pentothal and sodium amytal lower the barrier between the
conscious and the subconscious mind and are of great value in the
treatment of "battle fatigue" by the process known in England as
"abreaction therapy," in America as "narcosynthesis."  It is said that
these drugs are sometimes employed by the Communists, when preparing
important prisoners for their public appearance in court.

Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march,
and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years,
new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and
lowering psychological resistance will be discovered.  Like everything
else, these discoveries may be used well or badly.  They may help the
psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the
dictator in his battle against freedom.  More probably (since science
is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and
at the same time destroy.




_IX Subconscious Persuasion_

In a footnote appended to the 1919 edition of his book, _The
Interpretation of Dreams_, Sigmund Freud called attention to the work
of Dr. Poetzl, an Austrian neurologist, who had recently published a
paper describing his experiments with the tachistoscope.  (The
tachistoscope is an instrument that comes in two forms--a viewing box,
into which the subject looks at an image that is exposed for a small
fraction of a second; a magic lantern with a high-speed shutter,
capable of projecting an image very briefly upon a screen.)  In these
experiments "Poetzl required the subjects to make a drawing of what
they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a
tachistoscope....  He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamed
by the subjects during the following night and required them once more
to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams.  It was shown
unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had _not_
been noted by the subject provided material for the construction of the
dream."

With various modifications and refinements Poetzl's experiments have
been repeated several times, most recently by Dr. Charles Fisher, who
has contributed three excellent papers on the subject of dreams and
"preconscious perception" to the _Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association_.  Meanwhile the academic psychologists have
not been idle.  Confirming Poetzl's findings, their studies have shown
that people actually see and hear a great deal more than they
consciously know they see and hear, and that what they see and hear
without knowing it is recorded by the subconscious mind and may affect
their conscious thoughts, feelings and behavior.

Pure science does not remain pure indefinitely.  Sooner or later it is
apt to turn into applied science and finally into technology.  Theory
modulates into industrial practice, knowledge becomes power, formulas
and laboratory experiments undergo a metamorphosis, and emerge as the
H-bomb.  In the present case, Poetzl's nice little piece of pure
science, and all the other nice little pieces of pure science in the
field of preconscious perception, retained their pristine purity for a
surprisingly long time.  Then, in the early autumn of 1957, exactly
forty years after the publication of Poetzl's original paper, it was
announced that their purity was a thing of the past; they had been
applied, they had entered the realm of technology.  The announcement
made a considerable stir, and was talked and written about all over the
civilized world.  And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal
projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass
entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings mass
entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle
Ages by religion.  Our epoch has been given many nicknames--the Age of
Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age.  It might, with equally good
reason, be called the Age of Television Addiction, the Age of Soap
Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey.  In such an age the announcement
that Poetzl's pure science had been applied in the form of a technique
of subliminal projection could not fail to arouse the most intense
interest among the world's mass entertainees.  For the new technique
was aimed directly at them, and its purpose was to manipulate their
minds without their being aware of what was being done to them.  By
means of specially designed tachistoscopes words or images were to be
flashed for a millisecond or less upon the screens of television sets
and motion picture theaters during (not before or after) the program.
"Drink Coca-Cola" or "Light up a Camel" would be superimposed upon the
lovers' embrace, the tears of the broken-hearted mother, and the optic
nerves of the viewers would record these secret messages, their
subconscious minds would respond to them and in due course they would
consciously feel a craving for soda pop and tobacco.  And meanwhile
other secret messages would be whispered too softly, or squeaked too
shrilly, for conscious hearing.  Consciously the listener might be
paying attention to some 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 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 Jones and popcorn, already alive to the dangers of
body odors and the public ownership of the means of production.  But to
strengthen existing faith is not enough; the propagandist, if he is
worth his salt, must create new faith, must know how to bring the
indifferent and the undecided over to his side, must be able to mollify
and perhaps even convert the hostile.  To subliminal assertion and
command he knows that he must add subliminal persuasion.

Above the threshold of awareness, one of the most effective methods of
non-rational persuasion is what may be called
persuasion-by-association.  The propagandist arbitrarily associates his
chosen product, candidate or cause with some idea, some image of a
person or thing which most people, in a given culture, unquestioningly
regard as good.  Thus, in a selling campaign female beauty may be
arbitrarily associated with anything from a bulldozer to a diuretic; in
a political campaign patriotism may be associated with any cause from
_apartheid_ to integration, and with any kind of person, from a Mahatma
Gandhi to a Senator McCarthy.  Years ago, in Central America, I
observed an example of persuasion-by-association which filled me with
an appalled admiration for the men who had devised it.  In the
mountains of Guatemala the only imported art works are the colored
calendars distributed free of charge by the foreign companies whose
products are sold to the Indians.  The American calendars showed
pictures of dogs, of landscapes, of young women in a state of partial
nudity.  But to the Indian dogs are merely utilitarian objects,
landscapes are what he sees only too much of, every day of his life,
and half-naked blondes are uninteresting, perhaps a little repulsive.
American calendars were, in consequence, far less popular than German
calendars; for the German advertisers had taken the trouble to find out
what the Indians valued and were interested in.  I remember in
particular one masterpiece of commercial propaganda.  It was a calendar
put out by a manufacturer of aspirin.  At the bottom of the picture one
saw the familiar trademark on the familiar bottle of white tablets.
Above it were no snow scenes or autumnal woods, no cocker spaniels or
bosomy chorus girls.  No--the wily Germans had associated their
pain-relievers with a brightly colored and extremely lifelike picture
of the Holy Trinity sitting on a cumulus cloud and surrounded by St.
Joseph, the Virgin Mary, assorted saints and a large number of angels.
The miraculous virtues of acetyl salicylic acid were thus guaranteed,
in the Indians' simple and deeply religious minds, by God the Father
and the entire heavenly host.

This kind of persuasion-by-association is something to which the
techniques of subliminal projection seem to lend themselves
particularly well.  In a series of experiments carried out at New York
University, under the auspices of the National Institute of Health, it
was found that a person's feelings about some consciously seen image
could be modified by associating it, on the subconscious level, with
another image, or, better still, with value-bearing words.  Thus, when
associated, on the subconscious level, with the word "happy," a blank
expressionless face would seem to the observer to smile, to look
friendly, amiable, outgoing.  When the same face was associated, also
on the subconscious level, with the word "angry," it took on a
forbidding expression, and seemed to the observer to have become
hostile and disagreeable.  (To a group of young women, it also came to
seem very masculine--whereas when it was associated with "happy," they
saw the face as belonging to a member of their own sex.  Fathers and
husbands, please take note.)  For the commercial and political
propagandist, these findings, it is obvious, are highly significant.
If he can put his victims into a state of abnormally high
suggestibility, if he can show them, while they are in that state, the
thing, the person or, through a symbol, the cause he has to sell, and
if, on the subconscious level, he can associate this thing, person or
symbol with some value-bearing word or image, he may be able to modify
their feelings and opinions without their having any idea of what he is
doing.  It should be possible, according to an enterprising commercial
group in New Orleans, to enhance the entertainment value of films and
television plays by using this technique.  People like to feel strong
emotions and therefore enjoy tragedies, thrillers, murder mysteries and
tales of passion.  The dramatization of a fight or an embrace produces
strong emotions in the spectators.  It might produce even stronger
emotions if it were associated, on the subconscious level, with
appropriate words or symbols.  For example, in the film version of _A
Farewell to Arms_, the death of the heroine in childbirth might be made
even more distressing than it already is by subliminally flashing upon
the screen, again and again, during the playing of the scene, such
ominous words as "pain," "blood" and "death."  Consciously, the words
would not be seen; but their effect upon the subconscious mind might be
very great and these effects might powerfully reinforce the emotions
evoked, on the conscious level, by the acting and the dialogue.  If, as
seems pretty certain, subliminal projection can consistently intensify
the emotions felt by moviegoers, the motion picture industry may yet be
saved from bankruptcy--that is, if the producers of television plays
don't get there first.

In the light of what has been said about persuasion-by-association and
the enhancement of emotions by subliminal suggestion, let us try to
imagine what the political meeting of tomorrow will be like.  The
candidate (if there is still a question of candidates), or the
appointed representative of the ruling oligarchy, will make his speech
for all to hear.  Meanwhile the tachistoscopes, the whispering and
squeaking machines, the projectors of images so dim that only the
subconscious mind can respond to them, will be reinforcing what he says
by systematically associating the man and his cause with positively
charged words and hallowed images, and by strobonically injecting
negatively charged words and odious symbols whenever he mentions the
enemies of the State or the Party.  In the United States brief flashes
of Abraham Lincoln and the words "government by the people" will be
projected upon the rostrum.  In Russia the speaker will, of course, be
associated with glimpses of Lenin, with the words "people's democracy,"
with the prophetic beard of Father Marx.  Because all this is still
safely in the future, we can afford to smile.  Ten or twenty years from
now, it will probably seem a good deal less amusing.  For what is now
merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact.

Poetzl was one of the portents which, when writing _Brave New World_, I
somehow overlooked.  There is no reference in my fable to subliminal
projection.  It is a mistake of omission which, if I were to rewrite
the book today, I should most certainly correct.




_X Hypnopaedia_

In the late autumn of 1957 the Woodland Road Camp, a penal institution
in Tulare County, California, became the scene of a curious and
interesting experiment.  Miniature loud-speakers were placed under the
pillows of a group of prisoners who had volunteered to act as
psychological guinea pigs.  Each of these pillow speakers was hooked up
to a phonograph in the Warden's office.  Every hour throughout the
night an inspirational whisper repeated a brief homily on "the
principles of moral living."  Waking at midnight, a prisoner might hear
this still small voice extolling the cardinal virtues or murmuring, on
behalf of his own Better Self, "I am filled with love and compassion
for all, so help me God."

After reading about the Woodland Road Camp, I turned to the second
chapter of _Brave New World_.  In that chapter the Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning for Western Europe explains to a group of
freshman conditioners and hatchers the workings of that
state-controlled system of ethical education, known in the seventh
century After Ford as hypnopaedia.  The earliest attempts at
sleep-teaching, the Director told his audience, had been misguided, and
therefore unsuccessful.  Educators had tried to give intellectual
training to their slumbering pupils.  But intellectual activity is
incompatible with sleep.  Hypnopaedia became successful only when it
was used for _moral_ training--in other words, for the conditioning of
behavior through verbal suggestion at a time of lowered psychological
resistance.  "Wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale, cannot
inculcate the more complex courses of behavior required by the State.
For that there must be words, but words without reason" ... the kind of
words that require no analysis for their comprehension, but can be
swallowed whole by the sleeping brain.  This is true hypnopaedia, "the
greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."  In the Brave
New World, no citizens belonging to the lower castes ever gave any
trouble.  Why?  Because, from the moment he could speak and understand
what was said to him, every lower-caste child was exposed to endlessly
repeated suggestions, night after night, during the hours of drowsiness
and sleep.  These suggestions were "like drops of liquid sealing wax,
drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall
on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.  Till at last the
child's mind is these suggestions and the sum of these suggestions is
the child's mind.  And not the child's mind only.  The adult's mind
too--all his life long.  The mind that judges and desires and
decides--made up of these suggestions.  But these suggestions are _our_
suggestions--suggestions from the State...."

To date, so far as I know, hypnopaedic suggestions have been given by
no state more formidable than Tulare County, and the nature of Tulare's
hypnopaedic suggestions to lawbreakers is unexceptionable.  If only all
of us, and not only the inmates of the Woodland Road Camp, could be
effectively filled, during our sleep, with love and compassion for all!
No, it is not the message conveyed by the inspirational whisper that
one objects to; it is the principle of sleep-teaching by governmental
agencies.  Is hypnopaedia the sort of instrument that officials,
delegated to exercise authority in a democratic society, ought to be
allowed to use at their discretion?  In the present instance they are
using it only on volunteers and with the best intentions.  But there is
no guarantee that in other cases the intentions will be good or the
indoctrination on a voluntary basis.  Any law or social arrangement
which makes it possible for officials to be led into temptation is bad.
Any law or arrangement which preserves them from being tempted to abuse
their delegated power for their own advantage, or for the benefit of
the State or of some political, economic or ecclesiastical
organization, is good.  Hypnopaedia, if it is effective, would be a
tremendously powerful instrument in the hands of anyone in a position
to impose suggestions upon a captive audience.  A democratic society is
a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused and
should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts and
for limited periods of time.  In such a society, the use of hypnopaedia
by officials should be regulated by law--that is, of course, if
hypnopaedia is genuinely an instrument of power.  But is it in fact an
instrument of power?  Will it work now as well as I imagined it working
in the seventh century A.F.?  Let us examine the evidence.

In the _Psychological Bulletin_ for July, 1955, Charles W. Simon and
William H. Emmons have analyzed and evaluated the ten most important
studies in the field.  All these studies were concerned with memory.
Does sleep-teaching help the pupil in his task of learning by rote?
And to what extent is material whispered into the ear of a sleeping
person remembered next morning when he wakes?  Simon and Emmons answer
as follows: "Ten sleep-learning studies were reviewed.  Many of these
have been cited uncritically by commercial firms or in popular
magazines and news articles as evidence in support of the feasibility
of learning during sleep.  A critical analysis was made of their
experimental design, statistics, methodology and criteria of sleep.
All the studies had weaknesses in one or more of these areas.  The
studies do not make it unequivocally clear that learning during _sleep_
actually takes place.  But some learning appears to take place in a
special kind of waking state wherein the subjects do not remember later
on if they had been awake.  This may be of great practical importance
from the standpoint of economy in study time, but it cannot be
construed as _sleep learning_....  The problem is partially confounded
by an inadequate definition of sleep."

Meanwhile the fact remains that in the American Army during the Second
World War (and even, experimentally, during the First) daytime
instruction in the Morse Code and in foreign languages was supplemented
by instruction during sleep--apparently with satisfactory results.
Since the end of World War II several commercial firms in the United
States and elsewhere have sold large numbers of pillow speakers and
clock-controlled phonographs and tape recorders for the use of actors
in a hurry to learn their parts, of politicians and preachers who want
to give the illusion of being extemporaneously eloquent, of students
preparing for examinations and, finally and most profitably, of the
countless people who are dissatisfied with themselves as they are and
would like to be suggested or autosuggested into becoming something
else.  Self-administered suggestion can easily be recorded on magnetic
tape and listened to, over and over again, by day and during sleep.
Suggestions from the outside may be bought in the form of records
carrying a wide variety of helpful messages.  There are on the market
records for the release of tension and the induction of deep
relaxation, records for promoting self-confidence (much used by
salesmen), records for increasing one's charm and making one's
personality more magnetic.  Among the best sellers are records for the
achievement of sexual harmony and records for those who wish to lose
weight.  ("I am cold to chocolate, insensible to the lure of potatoes,
utterly unmoved by muffins.")  There are records for improved health
and even records for making more money.  And the remarkable thing is
that, according to the unsolicited testimonials sent in by grateful
purchasers of these records, many people actually do make more money
after listening to hypnopaedic suggestions to that effect, many obese
ladies do lose weight and many couples on the verge of divorce achieve
sexual harmony and live happily ever after.

In this context an article by Theodore X. Barber, "Sleep and Hypnosis,"
which appeared in _The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis_
for October, 1956, is most enlightening.  Mr. Barber points out that
there is a significant difference between light sleep and deep sleep.
In deep sleep the electroencephalograph records no alpha waves; in
light sleep alpha waves make their appearance.  In this respect light
sleep is closer to the waking and hypnotic states (in both of which
alpha waves are present) than it is to deep sleep.  A loud noise will
cause a person in deep sleep to awaken.  A less violent stimulus will
not arouse him, but will cause the reappearance of alpha waves.  Deep
sleep has given place for the time being to light sleep.

A person in deep sleep is unsuggestible.  But when subjects in light
sleep are given suggestions, they will respond to them, Mr. Barber
found, in the same way that they respond to suggestions when in the
hypnotic trance.

Many of the earlier investigators of hypnotism made similar
experiments.  In his classical _History, Practice and Theory of
Hypnotism_, first published in 1903, Milne Bramwell records that "many
authorities claim to have changed natural sleep into hypnotic sleep.
According to Wetterstrand, it is often very easy to put oneself _en
rapport_ with sleeping persons, especially children....  Wetterstrand
thinks this method of inducing hypnosis of much practical value and
claims to have often used it successfully."  Bramwell cites many other
experienced hypnotists (including such eminent authorities as Bernheim,
Moll and Forel) to the same effect.  Today an experimenter would not
speak of "changing natural into hypnotic sleep."  All he is prepared to
say is that light sleep (as opposed to deep sleep without alpha waves)
is a state in which many subjects will accept suggestions as readily as
they do when under hypnosis.  For example, after being told, when
lightly asleep, that they will wake up in a little while, feeling
extremely thirsty, many subjects will duly wake up with a dry throat
and a craving for water.  The cortex may be too inactive to think
straight; but it is alert enough to respond to suggestions and to pass
them on to the autonomic nervous system.

As we have already seen, the well-known Swedish physician and
experimenter, Wetterstrand, was especially successful in the hypnotic
treatment of sleeping children.  In our own day Wetterstrand's methods
are followed by a number of pediatricians, who instruct young mothers
in the art of giving helpful suggestions to their children during the
hours of light sleep.  By this kind of hypnopaedia children can be
cured of bed wetting and nail biting, can be prepared to go into
surgery without apprehension, can be given confidence and reassurance
when, for any reason, the circumstances of their life have become
distressing.  I myself have seen remarkable results achieved by the
therapeutic sleep-teaching of small children.  Comparable results could
probably be achieved with many adults.

For a would-be dictator, the moral of all this is plain.  Under proper
conditions, hypnopaedia actually works--works, it would seem, about as
well as hypnosis.  Most of the things that can be done with and to a
person in hypnotic trance can be done with and to a person in light
sleep.  Verbal suggestions can be passed through the somnolent cortex
to the midbrain, the brain stem and the autonomic nervous system.  If
these suggestions are well conceived and frequently repeated, the
bodily functions of the sleeper can be improved or interfered with, new
patterns of feeling can be installed and old ones modified,
posthypnotic commands can be given, slogans, formulas and trigger words
deeply ingrained in the memory.  Children are better hypnopaedic
subjects than adults, and the would-be dictator will take full
advantage of the fact.  Children of nursery-school and kindergarten age
will be treated to hypnopaedic suggestions during their afternoon nap.
For older children and particularly the children of party members--the
boys and girls who will grow up to be leaders, administrators and
teachers--there will be boarding schools, in which an excellent
day-time education will be supplemented by nightly sleep-teaching.  In
the case of adults, special attention will be paid to the sick.  As
Pavlov demonstrated many years ago, strong-minded and resistant dogs
become completely suggestible after an operation or when suffering from
some debilitating illness.  Our dictator will therefore see that every
hospital ward is wired for sound.  An appendectomy, an accouchement, a
bout of pneumonia or hepatitis, can be made the occasion for an
intensive course in loyalty and the true faith, a refresher in the
principles of the local ideology.  Other captive audiences can be found
in prisons, in labor camps, in military barracks, on ships at sea, on
trains and airplanes in the night, in the dismal waiting rooms of bus
terminals and railway stations.  Even if the hypnopaedic suggestions
given to these captive audiences were no more than 10 per cent
effective, the results would still be impressive and, for a dictator,
highly desirable.

From the heightened suggestibility associated with light sleep and
hypnosis let us pass to the normal suggestibility of those who are
awake--or at least who think they are awake.  (In fact, as the
Buddhists insist, most of us are half asleep all the time and go
through life as somnambulists obeying somebody else's suggestions.
Enlightenment is total awakeness.  The word "Buddha" can be translated
as "The Wake.")

Genetically, every human being is unique and in many ways unlike every
other human being.  The range of individual variation from the
statistical norm is amazingly wide.  And the statistical norm, let us
remember, is useful only in actuarial calculations, not in real life.
In real life there is no such person as the average man.  There are
only particular men, women and children, each with his or her in-born
idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or being compelled) to
squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some
cultural mold.

Suggestibility is one of the qualities that vary significantly from
individual to individual.  Environmental factors certainly play their
part in making one person more responsive to suggestion than another;
but there are also, no less certainly, constitutional differences in
the suggestibility of individuals.  Extreme resistance to suggestion is
rather rare.  Fortunately so.  For if everyone were as unsuggestible as
some people are, social life would be impossible.  Societies can
function with a reasonable degree of efficiency because, in varying
degrees, most people are fairly suggestible.  Extreme suggestibility is
probably about as rare as extreme unsuggestibility.  And this also is
fortunate.  For if most people were as responsive to outside
suggestions as the men and women at the extreme limits of
suggestibility, free, rational choice would become, for the majority of
the electorate, virtually impossible, and democratic institutions could
not survive, or even come into existence.

A few years ago, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a group of
researchers carried out a most illuminating experiment on the
pain-relieving effects of placebos.  (A placebo is anything which the
patient believes to be an active drug, but which in fact is
pharmacologically inactive.)  In this experiment the subjects were one
hundred and sixty-two patients who had just come out of surgery and
were all in considerable pain.  Whenever a patient asked for medication
to relieve pain, he or she was given an injection, either of morphine
or of distilled water.  All the patients received some injections of
morphine and some of the placebo.  About 30 per cent of the patients
never obtained relief from the placebo.  On the other hand 14 per cent
obtained relief after _every_ injection of distilled water.  The
remaining 55 per cent of the group were relieved by the placebo on some
occasions, but not on others.

In what respects did the suggestible reactors differ from the
unsuggestible non-reactors?  Careful study and testing revealed that
neither age nor sex was a significant factor.  Men reacted to placebo
as frequently as did women, and young people as often as old ones.  Nor
did intelligence, as measured by the standard tests, seem to be
important.  The average IQ of the two groups was about the same.  It
was above all in temperament, in the way they felt about themselves and
other people that the members of the two groups were significantly
different.  The reactors were more co-operative than the non-reactors,
less critical and suspicious.  They gave the nurses no trouble and
thought that the care they were receiving in the hospital was simply
"wonderful."  But though less unfriendly toward others than the
non-reactors, the reactors were generally much more anxious about
themselves.  Under stress, this anxiety tended to translate itself into
various psychosomatic symptoms, such as stomach upsets, diarrhea and
headaches.  In spite of or because of their anxiety, most of the
reactors were more uninhibited in the display of emotion than were the
non-reactors, and more voluble.  They were also much more religious,
much more active in the affairs of their church and much more
preoccupied, on a subconscious level, with their pelvic and abdominal
organs.  It is interesting to compare these figures for reaction to
placebos with the estimates made, in their own special field, by
writers on hypnosis.  About a fifth of the population, they tell us,
can be hypnotized very easily.  Another fifth cannot be hypnotized at
all, or can be hypnotized only when drugs or fatigue have lowered
psychological resistance.  The remaining three-fifths can be hypnotized
somewhat less easily than the first group, but considerably more easily
than the second.  A manufacturer of hypnopaedic records has told me
that about 20 per cent of his customers are enthusiastic and report
striking results in a very short time.  At the other end of the
spectrum of suggestibility there is an 8 per cent minority that
regularly asks for its money back.  Between these two extremes are the
people who fail to get quick results, but are suggestible enough to be
affected in the long run.  If they listen perseveringly to the
appropriate hypnopaedic instructions they will end by getting what they
want--self-confidence or sexual harmony, less weight or more money.

The ideals of democracy and freedom confront the brute fact of human
suggestibility.  One-fifth of every electorate can be hypnotized almost
in the twinkling of an eye, one-seventh can be relieved of pain by
injections of water, one-quarter will respond promptly and
enthusiastically to hypnopaedia.  And to these all too co-operative
minorities must be added the slow-starting majorities, whose less
extreme suggestibility can be effectually exploited by anyone who knows
his business and is prepared to take the necessary time and trouble.

Is individual freedom compatible with a high degree of individual
suggestibility?  Can democratic institutions survive the subversion
from within of skilled mind-manipulators trained in the science and art
of exploiting the suggestibility both of individuals and of crowds?  To
what extent can the inborn tendency to be too suggestible for one's own
good or the good of a democratic society be neutralized by education?
How far can the exploitation of inordinate suggestibility by
businessmen and ecclesiastics, by politicians in and out of power, be
controlled by law?  Explicitly or implicitly, the first two questions
have been discussed in earlier articles.  In what follows I shall
consider the problems of prevention and cure.




_XI Education for Freedom_

Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating
values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing
the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to
ignore the facts or deny the values.

In an earlier chapter I have discussed the Social Ethic, in terms of
which the evils resulting from over-organization and over-population
are justified and made to seem good.  Is such a system of values
consonant with what we know about human physique and temperament?  The
Social Ethic assumes that nurture is all-important in determining human
behavior and that nature--the psychophysical equipment with which
individuals are born--is a negligible factor.  But is this true?  Is it
true that human beings are nothing but the products of their social
environment?  And if it is not true, what justification can there be
for maintaining that the individual is less important than the group of
which he is a member?

All the available evidence points to the conclusion that in the life of
individuals and societies heredity is no less significant than culture.
Every individual is biologically unique and unlike all other
individuals.  Freedom is therefore a great good, tolerance a great
virtue and regimentation a great misfortune.  For practical or
theoretical reasons, dictators, organization men and certain scientists
are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men's natures to some
kind of manageable uniformity.  In the first flush of his Behavioristic
fervor, J. B. Watson roundly declared that he could find "no support
for hereditary patterns of behavior, nor for special abilities
(musical, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families."  And even
today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B. F. Skinner of
Harvard, insisting that, "as scientific explanation becomes more and
more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the
individual himself appears to approach zero.  Man's vaunted creative
powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to
choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of
his choice--none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific
self-portrait."  In a word, Shakespeare's plays were not written by
Shakespeare, nor even by Bacon or the Earl of Oxford; they were written
by Elizabethan England.

More than sixty years ago William James wrote an essay on "Great Men
and Their Environment," in which he set out to defend the outstanding
individual against the assaults of Herbert Spencer.  Spencer had
proclaimed that "Science" (that wonderfully convenient personification,
of the opinions, at a given date, of Professors X, Y and Z) had
completely abolished the Great Man.  "The great man," he had written,
"must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him
birth, as a product of its antecedents."  The great man may be (or seem
to be) "the proximate initiator of changes....  But if there is to be
anything like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in
that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have
arisen."  This is one of those empty profundities to which no
operational meaning can possibly be attached.  What our philosopher is
saying is that we must know everything before we can fully understand
anything.  No doubt.  But in fact we shall never know everything.  We
must therefore be content with partial understanding and proximate
causes including the influence of great men.  "If anything is humanly
certain," writes William James, "it is that the great man's society,
properly so called, does not make him before he can remake it.
Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical
and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and
just as little to do as the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the
flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him.  Can it be
that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to
have so impinged upon Stratford-upon-Avon about the twenty-sixth of
April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities,
had to be born there? ... And does he mean to say that if the aforesaid
W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother at
Stratford-upon-Avon would need have engendered a duplicate copy of him,
to restore the sociologic equilibrium?"

Professor Skinner is an experimental psychologist, and his treatise on
"Science and Human Behavior" is solidly based upon facts.  But
unfortunately the facts belong to so limited a class that when at last
he ventures upon a generalization, his conclusions are as sweepingly
unrealistic as those of the Victorian theorizer.  Inevitably so; for
Professor Skinner's indifference to what James calls the "physiological
forces" is almost as complete as Herbert Spencer's.  The genetic
factors determining human behavior are dismissed by him in less than a
page.  There is no reference in his book to the findings of
constitutional medicine, nor any hint of that constitutional
psychology, in terms of which (and in terms of which alone, so far as I
can judge) it might be possible to write a complete and realistic
biography of an individual in relation to the relevant facts of his
existence--his body, his temperament, his intellectual endowments, his
immediate environment from moment to moment, his time, place and
culture.  A science of human behavior is like a science of motion in
the abstract--necessary, but, by itself, wholly inadequate to the
facts.  Consider a dragonfly, a rocket and a breaking wave.  All three
of them illustrate the same fundamental laws of motion; but they
illustrate these laws in different ways, and the differences are at
least as important as the identities.  By itself, a study of motion can
tell us almost nothing about that which, in any given instance, is
being moved.  Similarly a study of behavior can, by itself, tell us
almost nothing about the individual mind-body that, in any particular
instance, is exhibiting the behavior.  But to us who are mind-bodies, a
knowledge of mind-bodies is of paramount importance.  Moreover, we know
by observation and experience that the differences between individual
mind-bodies are enormously great, and that some mind-bodies can and do
profoundly affect their social environment.  On this last point Mr.
Bertrand Russell is in full agreement with William James--and with
practically everyone, I would add, except the proponents of Spencerian
or Behavioristic scientism.  In Russell's view the causes of historical
change are of three kinds--economic change, political theory and
important individuals.  "I do not believe," says Mr. Russell, "that any
of these can be ignored, or wholly explained away as the effect of
causes of another kind."  Thus, if Bismarck and Lenin had died in
infancy, our world would be very different from what, thanks in part to
Bismarck and Lenin, it now is.  "History is not yet a science, and can
only be made to seem scientific by falsifications and omissions."  In
real life, life as it is lived from day to day, the individual can
never be explained away.  It is only in theory that his contributions
appear to approach zero; in practice they are all-important.  When a
piece of work gets done in the world, who actually does it?  Whose eyes
and ears do the perceiving, whose cortex does the thinking, who has the
feelings that motivate, the will that overcomes obstacles?  Certainly
not the social environment; for a group is not an organism, but only a
blind unconscious organization.  Everything that is done within a
society is done by individuals.  These individuals are, of course,
profoundly influenced by the local culture, the taboos and moralities,
the information and misinformation handed down from the past and
preserved in a body of spoken traditions or written literature; but
whatever each individual takes from society (or, to be more accurate,
whatever he takes from other individuals associated in groups, or from
the symbolic records compiled by other individuals, living or dead)
will be used by him in his own unique way--with _his_ special senses,
_his_ biochemical 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 widely accepted
and is held by a great body of social psychologists, sociologists,
social anthropologists, and many others, including historians,
economists, educationalists, legal scholars and men in public life.
This doctrine has been incorporated into the prevailing mode of thought
of many who have had to do with shaping educational and governmental
policies and is often accepted unquestioningly by those who do little
critical thinking of their own."

An ethical system that is based upon a fairly realistic appraisal of
the data of experience is likely to do more good than harm.  But many
ethical systems have been based upon an appraisal of experience, a view
of the nature of things, that is hopelessly unrealistic.  Such an ethic
is likely to do more harm than good.  Thus, until quite recent times,
it was universally believed that bad weather, diseases of cattle and
sexual impotence could be, and in many cases actually were, caused by
the malevolent operations of magicians.  To catch and kill magicians
was therefore a duty--and this duty, moreover, had been divinely
ordained in the second Book of Moses: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live."  The systems of ethics and law that were based upon this
erroneous view of the nature of things were the cause (during the
centuries, when they were taken most seriously by men in authority) of
the most appalling evils.  The orgy of spying, lynching and judicial
murder, which these wrong views about magic made logical and mandatory,
was not matched until our own days, when the Communist ethic, based
upon erroneous views about economics, and the Nazi ethic, based upon
erroneous views about race, commanded and justified atrocities on an
even greater scale.  Consequences hardly less undesirable are likely to
follow the general adoption of a Social Ethic, based upon the erroneous
view that ours is a fully social species, that human infants are born
uniform and that individuals are the product of conditioning by and
within the collective environment.  If these views were correct, if
human beings were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if
their individual differences were trifling and could be completely
ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be
no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the
heretics who demanded it.  For the individual termite, service to the
termitary is perfect freedom.  But human beings are not completely
social; they are only moderately gregarious.  Their societies are not
organisms, like the hive or the anthill; they are organizations, in
other words _ad hoc_ machines for collective living.  Moreover, the
differences between individuals are so great that, in spite of the most
intensive cultural ironing, an extreme endomorph (to use W. H.
Sheldon's terminology) will retain his sociable viscerotonic
characteristics, an extreme mesomorph will remain energetically
somatotonic through thick and thin and an extreme ectomorph will always
be cerebrotonic, introverted and over-sensitive.  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 pernicious propaganda cannot be
neutralized except by a thorough training in the art of analyzing its
techniques and seeing through its sophistries.  Language has made
possible man's progress from animality to civilization.  But language
has also inspired that sustained folly and that systematic, that
genuinely diabolic wickedness which are no less characteristic of human
behavior than are the language-inspired virtues of systematic
forethought and sustained angelic benevolence.  Language permits its
users to pay attention to things, persons and events, even when the
things and persons are absent and the events are not taking place.
Language gives definition to our memories and, by translating
experiences into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving or
abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles of feeling and
conduct.  In some way of which we are wholly unconscious, the reticular
system of the brain selects from a countless host of stimuli those few
experiences which are of practical importance to us.  From these
unconsciously selected experiences we more or less consciously select
and abstract a smaller number, which we label with words from our
vocabulary and then classify within a system at once metaphysical,
scientific and ethical, made up of other words on a higher level of
abstraction.  In cases where the selecting and abstracting have been
dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as a view of the nature
of things, and where the verbal labels have been intelligently chosen
and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our behavior is apt to be
realistic and tolerably decent.  But under the influence of badly
chosen words, applied, without any understanding of their merely
symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected and
abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt to
behave with a fiendishness and an organized stupidity, of which dumb
animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are
blessedly incapable.

In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically
pervert the resources of language in order to wheedle or stampede their
victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the
mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act.  An education for
freedom (and for the love and intelligence which are at once the
conditions and the results of freedom) must be, among other things, an
education in the proper uses of language.  For the last two or three
generations philosophers have devoted a great deal of time and thought
to the analysis of symbols and the meaning of meaning.  How are the
words and sentences which we speak related to the things, persons and
events, with which we have to deal in our day-to-day living?  To
discuss this problem would take too long and lead us too far afield.
Suffice it to say that all the intellectual materials for a sound
education in the proper use of language--an education on every level
from the kindergarten to the postgraduate school--are now available.
Such an education in the art of distinguishing between the proper and
the improper use of symbols could be inaugurated immediately.  Indeed
it might have been inaugurated at any time during the last thirty or
forty years.  And yet children are nowhere taught, in any systematic
way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless,
statements.  Why is this so?  Because their elders, even in the
democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of
education.  In this context the brief, sad history of the Institute for
Propaganda Analysis is highly significant.  The Institute was founded
in 1937, when Nazi propaganda was at its noisiest and most effective,
by Mr. Filene, the New England philanthropist.  Under its auspices
analyses of non-rational propaganda were made and several texts for the
instruction of high school and university students were prepared.  Then
came the war--a total war on all the fronts, the mental no less than
the physical.  With all the Allied governments engaging in
"psychological warfare," an insistence upon the desirability of
analyzing propaganda seemed a bit tactless.  The Institute was closed
in 1941.  But even before the outbreak of hostilities, there were many
persons to whom its activities seemed profoundly objectionable.
Certain educators, for example, disapproved of the teaching of
propaganda analysis on the grounds that it would make adolescents
unduly cynical.  Nor was it welcomed by the military authorities, who
were afraid that recruits might start to analyze the utterances of
drill sergeants.  And then there were the clergymen and the
advertisers.  The clergymen were against propaganda analysis as tending
to undermine belief and diminish churchgoing; the advertisers objected
on the grounds that it might undermine brand loyalty and reduce sales.

These fears and dislikes were not unfounded.  Too searching a scrutiny
by too many of the common folk of what is said by their pastors and
masters might prove to be profoundly subversive.  In its present form,
the social order depends for its continued existence on the acceptance,
without too many embarrassing questions, of the propaganda put forth by
those in authority and the propaganda hallowed by the local traditions.
The problem, once more, is to find the happy mean.  Individuals must be
suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work,
but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of
professional mind-manipulators.  Similarly, they should be taught
enough about propaganda analysis to preserve them from an uncritical
belief in sheer nonsense, but not so much as to make them reject
outright the not always rational outpourings of the well-meaning
guardians of tradition.  Probably the happy mean between gullibility
and a total skepticism can never be discovered and maintained by
analysis alone.  This rather negative approach to the problem will have
to be supplemented by something more positive--the enunciation of a set
of generally acceptable values based upon a solid foundation of facts.
The value, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of
human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and
compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by
modern psychiatry--the fact that, whatever their mental and physical
diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter;
and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent
and freedom unattainable.  This set of values will provide us with a
criterion by which propaganda may be judged.  The propaganda that is
found to be both nonsensical and immoral may be rejected out of hand.
That which is merely irrational, but compatible with love and freedom,
and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be
provisionally accepted for what it is worth.




_XII What Can Be Done?_

We 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 yet to
be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the
representatives of the national State, or of some private interest
within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.  There will never
be such a thing as a writ of _habeas mentem_; for no sheriff or jailer
can bring an illegally imprisoned mind into court, and no person whose
mind had been made captive by the methods outlined in earlier articles
would be in a position to complain of his captivity.  The nature of
psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint
remain under the impression that they are acting on their own
initiative.  The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a
victim.  To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes
himself to be free.  That he is not free is apparent only to other
people.  His servitude is strictly objective.

No, I repeat, there can never be such a thing as a writ of _habeas
mentem_.  But there can be preventive legislation--an outlawing of the
psychological slave trade, a statute for the protection of minds
against the unscrupulous purveyors of poisonous propaganda, modeled on
the statutes for the protection of bodies against the unscrupulous
purveyors of adulterated food and dangerous drugs.  For example, there
could and, I think, there should be legislation limiting the right of
public officials, civil or military, to subject the captive audiences
under their command or in their custody to sleep-teaching.  There could
and, I think, there should be legislation prohibiting the use of
subliminal projection in public places or on television screens.  There
could and, I think, there should be legislation to prevent political
candidates not merely from spending more than a certain amount of money
on their election campaigns, but also to prevent them from resorting to
the kind of anti-rational propaganda that makes nonsense of the whole
democratic process.

Such preventive legislation might do some good; but if the great
impersonal forces now menacing freedom continue to gather momentum,
they cannot do much good for very long.  The best of constitutions and
preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing
pressures of over-population and of the over-organization imposed by
growing numbers and advancing technology.  The constitutions will not
be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but
these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly
illiberal substance.  Given unchecked over-population and
over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a
reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy,
while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy.  Under the
relentless thrust of accelerating 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 cultural and psychological inertia, how can
those who ought to take the pill, but don't want to, be persuaded to
change their minds?  And what about the objections on the part of the
Roman Catholic Church, to any form of birth control except the
so-called Rhythm Method--a method, incidentally, which has proved,
hitherto, to be almost completely ineffective in reducing the birth
rate of those industrially backward societies where such a reduction is
most urgently necessary?  And these questions about the future,
hypothetical Pill must be asked, with as little prospect of eliciting
satisfactory answers, about the chemical and mechanical methods of
birth control already available.

When we pass from the problems of birth control to the problems of
increasing the available food supply and conserving our natural
resources, we find ourselves confronted by difficulties not perhaps
quite so great, but still enormous.  There is the problem, first of
all, of education.  How soon can the innumerable peasants and farmers,
who are now responsible for raising most of the world's supply of food,
be educated into improving their methods?  And when and if they are
educated, where will they find the capital to provide them with the
machines, the fuel and lubricants, the electric power, the fertilizers
and the improved strains of food plants and domestic animals, without
which the best agricultural education is useless?  Similarly, who is
going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of
conservation?  And how are the hungry peasant-citizens of a country
whose population and demands for food are rapidly rising to be
prevented from "mining the soil"?  And, if they can be prevented, who
will pay for their support while the wounded and exhausted earth is
being gradually nursed back, if that is still feasible, to health and
restored fertility?  Or consider the backward societies that are now
trying to industrialize.  If they succeed, who is to prevent them, in
their desperate efforts to catch up and keep up, from squandering the
planet's irreplaceable resources as stupidly and wantonly as was done,
and is still being done, by their forerunners in the race?  And when
the day of reckoning comes where, in the poorer countries, will anyone
find the scientific manpower and the huge amounts of capital that will
be required to extract the indispensable minerals from ores in which
their concentration is too low, under existing circumstances to make
extraction technically feasible or economically justifiable?  It may be
that, in time, a practical answer to all these questions can be found.
But in how much time?  In any race between human numbers and natural
resources, time is against us.  By the end of the present century,
there may, if we try very hard, be twice as much food on the world's
markets as there is today.  But there will also be about twice as many
people, and several billions of these people will be living in
partially industrialized countries and consuming ten times as much
power, water, timber and irreplaceable minerals as they are consuming
now.  In a word, the food situation will be as bad as it is today, and
the raw materials situation will be considerably worse.

To find a solution to the problem of over-organization is hardly less
difficult than to find a solution to the problem of natural resources
and increasing numbers.  On the verbal level and in general terms the
answer is perfectly simple.  Thus, it is a political axiom that power
follows property.  But it is now a historical fact that the means of
production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business
and Big Government.  Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make
arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

Or take the right to vote.  In principle, it is a great privilege.  In
practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by
itself, is no guarantee of liberty.  Therefore, if you wish to avoid
dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional
collectives into self-governing, voluntarily 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, 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.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting
question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?  Does a majority
of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble,
in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward
totalitarian control of everything?  In the United States--and America
is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it
will be a few years from now--recent public opinion polls have revealed
that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of
tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to
the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of
the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if
they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed
them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts.
That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world's
most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea
of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and
the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising.  "Free as
a bird," we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of
unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions.  But, alas, we
forget the dodo.  Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good
living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the
privilege of flight and remain forever grounded.  Something analogous
is true of human beings.  If the bread is supplied regularly and
copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to
live by bread alone--or at least by bread and circuses alone.  "In the
end," says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's parable, "in the end
they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'make us your
slaves, but feed us.'"  And when Alyosha Karamazov asks his brother,
the teller of the story, if the Grand Inquisitor is speaking
ironically, Ivan answers, "Not a bit of it!  He claims it as a merit
for himself and his Church that they have vanquished freedom and done
so to make men happy."  Yes, to make men happy; "for nothing," the
Inquisitor insists, "has ever been more insupportable for a man or a
human society than freedom."  Nothing, except the absence of freedom;
for when things go badly, and the rations are reduced, the grounded
dodos will clamor again for their wings--only to renounce them, yet
once more, when times grow better and the dodo-farmers become more
lenient and generous.  The young people who now think so poorly of
democracy may grow up to become fighters for freedom.  The cry of "Give
me television and hamburgers, but don't bother me with the
responsibilities of liberty," may give place, under altered
circumstances, to the cry of "Give me liberty or give me death."  If
such a revolution takes place, it will be due in part to the operation
of forces over which even the most powerful rulers have very little
control, in part to the incompetence of those rulers, their inability
to make effective use of the mind-manipulating instruments with which
science and technology have supplied, and will go on supplying, the
would-be tyrant.  Considering how little they knew and how poorly they
were equipped, the Grand Inquisitors of earlier times did remarkably
well.  But their successors, the well-informed, thoroughly scientific
dictators of the future will undoubtedly be able to do a great deal
better.  The Grand Inquisitor reproaches Christ with having called upon
men to be free and tells Him that "we have corrected Thy work and
founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority."  But miracle, mystery
and authority are not enough to guarantee the indefinite survival of a
dictatorship.  In my fable of _Brave New World_, the dictators had
added science to the list and thus were able to enforce their authority
by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of infants and the
minds of children and adults.  And, instead of merely talking about
miracles and hinting symbolically at mysteries, they were able, by
means of drugs, to give their subjects the direct experience of
mysteries and miracles--to transform mere faith into ecstatic
knowledge.  The older dictators fell because they could never supply
their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and
mysteries.  Nor did they possess a really effective system of
mind-manipulation.  In the past free-thinkers and revolutionaries were
often the products of the most piously orthodox education.  This is not
surprising.  The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still
are extremely inefficient.  Under a scientific dictator education will
really work--with the result that most men and women will grow up to
love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.  There seems
to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should
ever be overthrown.

Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world.  Many young
people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom.  But some of us still
believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human
and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable.  Perhaps the forces
that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long.
It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.



      *      *      *      *      *




  _Books by Aldous Huxley_

  NOVELS

  The Genius and the Goddess
  Ape and Essence
  Time Must Have a Stop
  After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
  Eyeless in Gaza
  Point Counter Point
  Those Barren Leaves
  Antic Hay
  Crome Yellow
  Brave New World


  ESSAYS AND BELLES LETTRES

  Brave New World Re-visited
  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
  Heaven and Hell
  The Doors of Perception
  The Devils of Loudun
  Themes and Variations
  Ends and Means
  Texts and Pretexts
  The Olive Tree
  Music at Night
  Vulgarity in Literature
  Do What You Will
  Proper Studies
  Jesting Pilate
  Along the Road
  On the Margin
  Essays New and Old
  The Art of Seeing
  The Perennial Philosophy
  Science, Liberty and Peace


  SHORT STORIES

  Collected Short Stories
  Brief Candles
  Two or Three Graces
  Limbo
  Little Mexican
  Mortal Coils


  BIOGRAPHY

  Grey Eminence


  POETRY

  The Cicadas
  Leda


  TRAVEL

  Beyond the Mexique Bay


  DRAMA

  Mortal Coils--A Play
  The World of Light
  The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan


  SELECTED WORKS

  Rotunda
  The World of Aldous Huxley






[End of Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley]
