vrijdag 15 september 2017

Aldous Huxley: Propaganda in a Democratic Society

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

by Aldous Huxley (written many decades ago)
excerpts -- full page --> http://deoxy.org/huxley1.htm

(propaganda = not necessarily a lie -- information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause)

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant (consistent) 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.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensible to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not forsee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account Man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. (or was it more the propagandists' unwavering commitment to shovel junk food onto the public mind until we got too sick to think straight)

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

http://deoxy.org/huxley1.htm

"The National Security State uses fascism to protect capitalism while they say they're protecting democracy from communism (or 'terrorist threats')."—Michael Parenti 1st, 2nd & 4th RA files are from Pacifica Radio

"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."
-- Aldous Huxley, 1959