Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Last night I picked up a book off my shelf that I read some years ago, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited. A slim volume that appeared in 1958, Huxley revisits his 1931 fiction in light of (then) present realities, even taking into consideration the more recent nightmarish dystopic future envisioned in Orwell's 1984.

The book is a penetrating analysis of the world we now inhabit, much of what he foresaw on the horizons of 1958 having, not surprisingly, come to pass. Nothing new here, it is what we are always talking about, diagnoses of the same diseases we are constantly detailing the progress of. But nevertheless they are clearly articulated diagnoses of those diseases, articulated 50 years ago, and may be of interest to some on that account. I've typed in some relevant excerpts for your consideration; if you'd like to read more, find a copy of the original (e.g. at amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/5yfrr)


*****

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 choice 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 communicaiton. 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 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 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. …


There are two kinds of propaganda…

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by menas 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, avoides 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 perpetuated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty. …


“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.”…Once more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimist. 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 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 survivial of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory.

In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man.

In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communcation 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 communication 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, feast 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 political dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, rom 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 bumble-puppy) 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 arouns 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.


Selections from Aldous Huxley (1958). Brave New World Revisited.

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