Folly

From the Man Without Qualities:
The ambitious moneyman finds himself in a difficult spot these days. To place himself on a level with the established powers, he must dress up his activities in great ideas. But great ideas that command instant allegiance no longer exist, because our skeptical contemporaries believe in neither God nor humanity, kings nor morality—unless they believe in them all indiscriminately, which amounts to the same thing. So the captain of industry, disinclined to forego greatness, which serves him as a compass, must resort to the democratic dodge of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness with the measurable greatness of influence. So now whatever counts as great *is* great; but this means that eventually whatever is most loudly hawked as great is also great, and not all of us have the knack of swallowing this innermost truth of our times without gagging a little.

… Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the state.

In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not 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.

…. 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 enroachments 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.

Aldous Huxley, 1958

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside is a book based on a series of lectures given by Doris Lessing back in the mid-1980s. It’s kind of a literary & political pre-cursor of Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.

Here are a few excerpts from the book, though they don’t really do it justice:

One learns nothing, about anything, ever, when in a state of boiling ferment, or partisan enthusiasm.

Looking back over my life, which has now lasted 66 years, what I see is a succession of great mass events, boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion, that pass, but while they last it is not possible to do more than think: “These slogans, or these accusations, these trumpetings, quite soon they will seem to everyone ridiculous and even shameful.” Meanwhile, it is not possible to say so.

One mass movement, each a set of mass opinions, succeeds another: for war, against war; against nuclear war; for technology, against technology. And each breeds a certain frame of mind: violent, emotional, partisan, always suppressing facts that don’t suit it, lying, making it impossible to talk in the cool, quiet, sensible low-keyed tone of voice which, it seems me, is the only one that can produce truth.

In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable…in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war.

Or how about the Falklands War? … I have friends who exclaim the worst part of that war was watching our country suddently reverting to what they described as outworn jingoism and simple-minded patriotism. Why outmoded? Any nation can be made to revert to drum-beating, to dancing around a campfire waiving tomahawks-metaphorically speaking-by any leader able to use the appropriate phrases and war cries.

It is said that those highly intelligent people who set up the Bolshevik party in London in, I think, 1905, said to each other, “Let us learn from the French Revolution and let us not split violently over points of doctrine and then start murdering each other.” But this is exactly what happened. They were helpless in the face of forces they had helped let loose.

…the reason why the Left is in such trouble is that people have seen Socialism in action in country after country and are terrified of it. The Soviet Union: a tyranny, where if you disagree you find yourself in a mental hospital… [Lessing describes her conversion to communisim in the 1950s in another portion of the book.]

Meanwhile, there is no country in the world whose structure is not of a privileged class and a poor class. There is always a power elite with the mass of the people excluded from wealth and any sort of political power…If I say that I think elites, privileged groups are often useful, then that makes me reactionary, but it depends on who the elite is…