Transcription
How can there be thought control in a democratic society such as the United States? Isn't that a contradiction?
Well, it depends what you mean by democracy. Uh, if you mean by democracy that uh ordinary people should have a play a meaningful role in controlling public affairs and determining decisions about how the system works and so on. Yeah. And it's a total contradiction.
But the point is that elite elements, privileged elite elements have never meant that by democracy. They've always regarded democracy as a threat uh which has to be contained and controlled. And this goes way back to the uh first democratic revolutions in the 17th century in England. Uh, as soon as it became clear that you're going to lose the, you know, that there would no longer be possible to control people by force, it immediately followed as an almost as a corollary that you're going to have to control what they think.
Uh, if you have a what we nowadays call a totalitarian state or a military-run state or whatever, you really don't care much about what people think. They can think anything they feel like uh, because you can control them with a bludgeon. But as the state loses its capacity to coerce through uh threats or terror, just one or another form of force uh, then other means have to be found to ensure that democracy doesn't work. Uh, that that democratic forms, in other words, persist but without interfering with the right of the privileged uh uh elements to rule.
Now, you know, what the privileged elements are may differ in different societies. In modern capitalist democracies, the privileged sectors are those who own are the corporate elite, basically they own the country more or less. In fact, more, not less, they effectively own the country and uh the and they basically control the political system. In the United States, this really a one-party state. It's a business party with two factions uh, and they control the media, the ideological system, and they impose very sharp constraints on any form of policy, any policy that's formulated. Even, even if the political system ever got out of their control, which is unlikely, it couldn't get very far out because uh the weapons of capital strike and disinvestment and reduction of business confidence and so on are sufficient to control policy. Uh, so there's there's lots of mechanisms that ensure that those who own the country govern it. And we should bear in mind that that was the principle of the founding fathers, that those who own the country ought to govern it. That's in fact a quote from John Jay, the president of the constitutional convention. Uh, that's the way the country's founded.
Now, the problem is how do you deal with all of this when people are free as they are, like the state, they can't send in the police to break up this conversation. So how do you deal with that? Well, a lot of mechanisms are used and one of them, primary one, is thought control, indoctrination. That's what the phrase necessary illusions comes from. It's uh not mine. It comes from Reinhold Niebuhr, who's a leading theologian. He's called the theologian of the establishment. He was the guru for the Kennedy intellectuals and, you know, George Kennan and so on, you know, a major figure in modern intellectual history. Uh, and he pointed out once that uh the ordinary people don't have the capacity, according to him, to become involved in public affairs. Uh, so it's the task of uh the, what he called the cool observers, meaning us smart guys. It's our task to impose necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep these poor simpletons on course.
Uh, and it would be kind of unfair to let ordinary people, to let the democratic process really work. If you really let ordinary people make decisions or, you know, think about things or whatever, they don't get in trouble. Uh, it's like letting a three-year-old cross the street. You know, it's it's for the interests of the three-year-old that you constrain them. Uh, and similarly, it's to the interests of the general public that you marginalize them and ensure that the formal political system has not very much substance. Uh, because it's only the smart guys, the cool observers uh who uh are who uh have the capacity to make the right decisions. And those, now it turns out that the cool observers who are in a position to make the right decisions are those who serve the interests of private power. Uh, other cool observers are not cool observers because they have the wrong decisions. He didn't bother mentioning that part. Uh, and and that's a very typical view. It's not just his view. In fact, it's probably the dominant view.
So, for example, the uh the book that I co-authored right before this one is called Manufacturing Consent, which borrows a phrase from Walter Lippmann. It's a sort of dean of American journalists and major foreign policy critic. Uh, and his view sort of the same was that you have to, that's a, it's a crucial part of democracy, he said, is the manufacturer of consent. The population, he referred to as the bewildered herd, and he said we have to save ourselves from the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd. Uh, and since unfortunately you can't do it by force, you have to do it by other means. Uh, the other means would be the manufacturer of consent. Uh, the United States, the public relations industry in the United States, which goes back to the early part of the century, is dedicated to that. It's a, that's a pure business operation, and they're dedicated to it. Everything from, you know, advertising to other mechanisms of influence in which they openly call, and there are more honest days, they openly call propaganda. And the same is true of much of the intellectual class. U, it's uh, it's recognized, the more sophisticated people recognize that their job is thought control, and they have, they argue that it's the right thing because the bewildered herd will only get into trouble if you let them rage on by themselves.
You'll notice, of course, the close similarity to Leninist ideology, to Bolshevism, which also assumes that the radical intellectuals are the specialized class, the vanguard. They've got to lead the stupid and ignorant masses to a better society. In fact, the two conceptions are very much alike. I think that's probably one of the reasons why there's been historically such an easy transition from one to another. The move from being a Leninist enthusiast to a, you know, a passionate supporter of state capitalism and, you know, working for American aims, that takes place overnight. It's been going on for years. Uh, it's called the "god that failed" transition, and it happens very simply, and the transition is very easy, I think, because there isn't much of a difference in ideological change. Uh, it's just a matter of where you think power lies. If you think there's going to be a popular revolution and you can ride that revolution to state power and then wield the whip over the masses, you're a Leninist enthusiast. If you see that that's not going to happen and power lies in the state capitalist institutions which you have to serve as a manager, an ideological manager, you do that. But it's basically a very similar position.
And in fact uh, in the last century or so, since there's been a more or less identifiable secular intelligentsia, I think you find typically that they fall into one or the other of these two categories. They associate themselves with one or the other system of power and hierarchy uh and subordination. Uh, in fact, what I just said is almost a tautology. It's only if you submit to those systems that you're counted as a respectable intellectual for obvious reasons.
Well, coming up to more modern times, in the post-World War II period, uh, you find again deep concern over the need to control and deceive the public, to control the public mind. Uh, presidential historian Thomas Bailey wrote in 1948, at the time when we were sort of setting off on a new war, the Cold War, he wrote, "Because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it's at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary unless we're willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand."
And uh, in 1981, as the United States was launching a new crusade for freedom, uh, Samuel Huntington, the professor of government at Harvard, said in a private but published discussion interchange, "You may have to sell intervention or other military action in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you're fighting." That's what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine, which is quite accurate and gives a certain insight into the nature of the Cold War, in particular into the nature of the war against Nicaragua, which is what he specifically had in mind.
Well, these concerns over uh controlling the public mind tend to rise to the surface particularly uh after periods of wars and turmoil, like the 17th-century revolution, the Civil War, or like the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson launched the major Red Scare, which is the major example in modern American history, all of American history, of state repression that was really large-scale and effective in destroying unions and uh uh destroying independent politics and eliminating independent thought and so on. And the same thing happened after World War II uh with the uh phenomenon that's mislabeled McCarthyism. It's mislabeled because it was actually initiated by the liberal Democrats in the late 1940s. McCarthy just came along at the tail end of it and vulgarized it a little.
Uh, the reason for this is and uh is that um periods of wars and turmoil have a tendency to uh arouse people from apathy and to make them think and to make them organize, often. So that's why you get things like the Red Scare and McCarthyism uh right after periods of war and turmoil. And the same thing happened after the Vietnam War, which had the same effect. Uh, after the Vietnam War, uh elites were concerned about what they called a crisis of democracy. In fact, one of the most interesting books on this topic, or one of the most interesting books on most of the insightful books I think on modern uh on the modern democratic system, is called The Crisis of Democracy. It's a study, the only book-length study published by the Trilateral Commission. Uh, it's an important group put together by David Rockefeller in 1973, and it represents the more or less liberal internationalists from the three major centers of modern capitalism: United States, Western Europe, and Japan, hence Trilateral. And remember, this is the liberals. This is the group out of which Jimmy Carter and most of his administration came.
Uh, the uh, what's the crisis of democracy that they're concerned with in all of the democratic societies? Well, the crisis is that uh during the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands. Uh, and that's a crisis which has to be overcome. The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's a crisis of democracy. Uh, the American spokesman, again Samuel Huntington, wrote in his report that Harry Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers. In those days, there was no crisis of democracy. Things were working just right. But in the 1960s, you got all this turmoil. I mean, young people and women and, you know, labor. I mean, all kinds of weird people who were supposed to be sitting quietly in the corners began to get involved and caused this crisis. I mean, the same crisis that arose in the 17th century and that repeatedly arises uh when people begin to try to take advantage of the uh uh formal opportunities that exist.
Uh, among the terrible things that were happening during the '60s causing this crisis, they said, was that you had this group of people who they called value-oriented intellectuals. Uh, people who are concerned with things like truth and justice and all that sort of nonsense. Uh, and they're opposed to the good guys, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. They called them the "commissars," the ones who just do the job, you know, which had these value-oriented intellectuals, and they were doing all sorts of horrible things like uh delegitimizing the institutions that are responsible for the indoctrination of the young, like schools and universities. Remember, this is an internal discussion, so they kind of let their hair down.
Uh, their general proposal at the end of all of this, these lengthy and thoughtful discussions, was that what we need is more moderation in democracy to mitigate the excess of democracy and to overcome the crisis. Uh, in plain terms, what that means is that the public has to be reduced to their proper state of apathy and obedience and driven from the public arena if democracy is to survive in the appropriate sense, with the specialized class, you know, the cool observers, us smart guys, uh, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals doing our job in the interests of the people who have real power. Uh, that's the liberal side. I won't go into what the reactionary side says about the matter.
The most prominent modern American political scientist, Harold Lasswell, who's a leading figure in communications and such things, uh, he wrote the article on propaganda in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, which was published in 1933. Uh, and in it, he says that we should not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. They are not. The best judges are the elites, us smart guys, the cool observers. And we must therefore be insured the means to impose our will for the common good. Of course, this, he said, will require a whole tech new technique of control, largely through propaganda, because of the ignorance and superstition of the masses. Same theme all the way through.
Uh, the basic problem is this. Uh, the idea is that if you have a society in which the voice of the people is heard, you got to make sure that that voice says the right thing. In totalitarian societies, it's not a big problem. You you got a club in your hand. Uh, and if people don't behave the right way, you hit them with a club or threaten them with it. So it doesn't really matter much what they think. What matters is what they do, and that you control by force. But as the capacity of the state to control by force erodes, it's necessary to control what people think.
And in fact, I think you find much more sophisticated concern uh for thought control precisely as the society becomes more free. I don't think it's surprising that the sophisticated discussion uh things like the public relations industry and the academic uh side of it and, you know, the journalistic side and all the kinds of things I've been sampling. Uh, I suspect if one did a comparative study, you'd find that they develop primarily in relatively free societies. Ours is a very free society in the sense that the state has, by comparative standards, very limited resources to control by force, and I think it's undoubtedly, in fact, the most sophisticated in the terms of in the reliance on techniques of indoctrination and control, the public relations industry in particular, as a an American creation.