Remembering Huxley’s warning: Propaganda and totalitarianism
This classic warning from Huxley was echoed by Lord Sumption on BBC Radio Four last week when he reminded the public that free societies become tyrannies often because the people relinquish their liberties, rather than have them taken by force.
Whatever one’s opinion about the populist disruptions of the previous five years in European politics, there can be no denying a general revolt of public consent against the unelected and unaccountable governing class. It remains to be seen whether these tensions amount to anything more than a clash between disparate elites, each using populist rhetoric as leverage over rival interests. Whatever is true, there is no denying the central importance of public opinion in forming the bedrock of legitimacy and power in contemporary western democracies. In the fear and panic surrounding the coronavirus, then, we must be very vigilant about our natural fears being manipulated by those who elect themselves as our invisible rulers.
It may be too much to claim that the forces currently at work are sinister and tyrannical. However, it would not be wrong to call them something of a demagogue’s dream. As the Conservative MP Steve Baker said on the night the Coronavirus Bill was passed: ‘We are implementing tonight in this Bill at least a dystopian society. Some will call it totalitarian. I don’t think that is quite fair, but it is at least dystopian.’
Despite pledging loyalty to Boris Johnson and agreeing to support new emergency powers, Mr Baker said Britain was becoming a ‘command society’, and ‘we ought not to allow this situation to endure one moment longer than is absolutely necessary to save lives and preserve jobs.’
About a week after these words were uttered, and Parliament itself was dissolved because of the emergency, the veteran leftwing reporter John Pilger wrote on Twitter: ‘Parliaments, courts, tribunals are suspended, government is by decree. The police determine whether our presence in a street, a park, is legitimate. The media ensures a state of fear. Surveillance is routine. Protest, if any, is virtual. How does history describe such a society?’
The answer of course, is that history does not call such societies ‘free’ or ‘democratic’. History calls them ‘dictatorships’ or ‘totalitarian states’.
It is important to be mindful of the grave threat to liberty that this country faces. We have allowed fear and panic to change our society. A near-police state has been allowed to form without any real friction from the Supreme Court, parliamentary opposition, or the media. Hysteria has spread through society like a rapacious fire, and it may have scorched the very roots of the values that have preserved it for so long.
In a state of primal fear, people will consent to laws and invasions of their privacy that under ‘normal’ circumstances they would find unthinkable. Fear erodes our everyday agency, subverts our critical thought and our ability for foresight and reason, bringing us back to a state of animal terror where our only objective is survival.
Democracy cannot function if the citizens are in such a paralysed state of mind. For democracy and liberty to survive, as many citizens as possible must retain their critical thinking, the ability to weigh short and long-term policies, to balance ends and means. When these faculties fail, our institutions become hollow shells, and there is no longer any basis upon which to hold government to account.
Fear and panic are weapons of the totalitarian. They are processes by which the powerful seize power while avoiding any need to don a jackboot or to thrust a bayonet into an innocent prisoner’s belly. The powers of agency, critical thinking and democratic audit are relinquished without a fight.
This willful surrender of liberty is what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Ultimate Revolution.’
Twenty years after his famous dystopian novel Brave New World was published, Huxley examined the ways in which his imaginative world was becoming reality in 1950s America. In a series of short essays called Brave New World Revisited, he discussed the ways that modern democracies have been poisoned by propaganda tactics. He noted that in a society so dependent upon popular consent, the harnessing and influencing of opinion becomes a priceless asset in the eyes of the elite.
Huxley imagined a future in which people would not need to be beaten or tortured or physically oppressed, to be dominated. Huxley said: ‘In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler or Stalin. The future dictator’s subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained Social Engineers.’
This classic warning from Huxley was echoed by Lord Sumption on BBC Radio Four last week when he reminded the public that free societies become tyrannies often because the people relinquish their liberties, rather than have them taken by force. This capitulation is almost always preceded by mass hysteria and fear. Lord Sumption said: ‘The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now.’ Lord Sumption went on to say, ‘…anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria.’
According to Huxley there are two kinds of propaganda. There is ‘rational propaganda’ and ‘non-rational propaganda.’ The first kind elicits consent from the people through persuasion based on an appeal to reason, and it poses little threat to a free society. The second, however, is consent grounded in an appeal to ‘blind impulses’ and desires. The aim of this second type of propaganda is to short-circuit the critical faculties of individual citizens and to appeal to their subconscious lusts, needs and animal drives. The most extreme forms of this technique were, for Huxley, what lay behind the horrors of the 20th century totalitarian regimes.
Of all the practitioners of this appeal to impulse and craving, Hitler was the most effective. Huxley says that he ‘was systematically exploring the secret fears and hopes, the cravings, anxieties and frustrations of the German masses.’ By tapping into the underlying, unspoken yearnings and secret, dark fantasies of a broken people, Hitler was able to obtain consent for his evil, psychotic death cult.
In a chilling passage, Huxley quotes Hitler himself, who was never shy about laying bear his strategy to dominate the minds of the masses. Hitler said: ‘The driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, 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 to their hearts.’
Reading these chilling and unsettling words, we should reflect on the dangers of giving way to fear and panic, and what we stand to lose by allowing others to appeal to our terror of the unknown. Witnessing the mass stockpiling, the snitching, the shrill cries of TV personalities for more authoritarian measures, the reporting of shocking numbers of the deaths with no context, we can see fear riding roughshod over the institutions and traditions that keep us free and safe. We may not be at the mercy of a malignant dictator – most would agree that Boris Johnson’s faults are not those of an authoritarian – but we must be very careful about laying ourselves open as a society to less scrupulous and more pernicious forces. We must also be careful not to do the work of would-be tyrants for them, by surrendering our own critical faculties as individuals and as a culture.
Resorting to conspiracy theories about global interests behind pandemics like the coronavirus is just as paranoid as the hysteria and panic-mongering of the mainstream media. In any case, given the uselessness of our political class in the last five years, it is laughable to think they would be capable of orchestrating or capitalising on something as complex and unquantifiable as this new deadly virus. However, it is worth bearing in mind that propaganda is always grounded in truth. Mind control, contrary to what we might initially think, is rarely a matter of lying to the public wholesale. As the historian EH Carr wrote in the late thirties, the most effective propaganda is always grounded in some credible reality and is most effective when it has some spiritual or moral legitimacy.
In light of Huxley and Carr’s warnings about propaganda, we would do well to reflect on the ways our natural and legitimate fears and desires are manipulated as we navigate this dangerous time. Maintaining perspective and retaining our critical faculties will not only mean we find pragmatic solutions to a serious health crisis quicker; it will also inoculate our fragile society against the equally toxic pathogens of propaganda and slavish hysteria.
