Huxley on propaganda
I just happened across Huxley’s 1958 Brave New World Revisited; specifically, part V, “Propaganda Under a Dictatorship.”
It’s primarily an analysis of how Hitler influenced the masses. I’m dubious about some aspects of what Huxley says, but there are some elements that I thought were interesting in light of modern politics. One doesn’t have to believe that a given leader is just like Hitler, nor even to believe that the US is on its way to being a dictatorship, to recognize some of these techniques as being in modern use by various people.
Here are some excerpts:
At his trial after the Second World War, Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer [said,] “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[…]. 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.”
[…]
Since Hitler’s day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. […] Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.
[…]
As [Hitler] himself said, “To be a leader means to be able to move the masses.”
[…]
[Hitler said that the masses were] 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 [always been] a devotion which has inspired [the masses], 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.”
[…]
“The masses” of whom he speaks were these bewildered, frustrated and chronically anxious millions.
[…]
Otto Strasser called [Hitler] “a loud-speaker, proclaiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation.” […] Hitler was systematically exploring and exploiting the secret fears and hopes, the cravings, anxieties and frustrations of the German masses.
[…]
[Propaganda] 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 […] feel doubt.
[…]
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 [or] shouted down[…]
(…Side note: Worth mentioning that that last paragraph is also more or less something that Saul Alinsky recommended that community organizers do, in his book Rules for Radicals. It’s an effective technique, no matter who’s using it.)