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The Capitalist "Free Press:"
... 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
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There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms
should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing
squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass
deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about
that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient and, in an age
of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the
Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be
one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses
and their army of managers control a population of slaves who
do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day
totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper
editors, and school teachers.
...[such propagandists] accomplish their greatest triumphs,
not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great
is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view,
is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain
subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion
much more effectively than they could have done by the most
eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical
rebuttals.
--- Aldous Huxley, in his 1946 revised
forward to _Brave new world_