Power, Control, and Manipulation

The other day I read Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley. This was a collection of essays that he wrote 20 years after he wrote Brave New World. I loved that book so I was expecting some wonderful insights as he reflected on developments in the world since he wrote it. I was not disappointed by it. Whilst I may not agree with his views on birth control, which verged on eugenics (Huxley saw overpopulation as a threat to Democracy) he had a lot of important points to make about the, what he perceived as, threats to democracy.

One of the interesting points he makes is that large populations requires large governments to control them. He thus sees overpopulation as a danger to society as it requires punishment to control the people. This was the vision of the future presented by Orwell in 1984. Huxley in contrast saw reinforcement as the best way to control behaviour. Punishment only stopped behaviour and didn't rectify and stop the motives that drive the behaviour, along with this punishment as negative byproducts the system of discipline as Zimbardo has shown with the Stanford Prison experiment corrupts those that manage it. Huxley then looked at the extreme form of positive reinforcement to manipulate society.

Something that I reflected on as I read it was that large society and large numbers reduce the individual to a number a statistic. Large scale markets cause monopolisation and concentrate power in the few. The economy of a nation is then dependant on a handful of large businesses then if a problem develops it requires intervention by the government which increases the influence and size of the government. As power becomes concentrated the numbers and economies of scale make it impossible for a local or independant producer to enter the market for they lack both the funding, influence, and scale needed to compete with the large ogliarchies that dominant the market. Huxley elaborated on this view in an excellent chapter called 'over-organisation' in which he looked at the role of increasing technology. In this he takes a Marxist stance seeing technology as a tool for the capitalist bourgeoisie. Technology reduced labor making people unemployed giving more money to the capitalist. Further, technology is complex and expensive and only the large-scale capitalist can afford it eliminating the prospective enterpriser from entering the market.

A quote from Huxley that I liked was 'Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.' This made me think of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, in which she argues that in the wake of war and catastrophe it gives governments a force to legitimize social control and intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11 numerous policies and laws were passed that allowed greater surveillance and monitoring of society in the name of protection and defence. Crisis was the doorway into the erosion of civil liberty.

However, the best chapter for me was the section when he talks about the 'Will to Order' and conformity. He starts by stating that Western society despite its economic, political, and intellectual progress has damaged humanity in other ways. It turns man into an Automaton unable to develop security, happiness, reason, and the capacity to love, as a result he pays for this failure with mental sickness, which is masked by a frantic drive for work and pleasure. This concept of a social mental sickness is what I find fascinating. I tend to agree with Huxley and since 1958 since this was published it has only got worse, we have a work culture that drives society, along with a never satisfied thirst for pleasure. This brings him to an interesting point. Neurotic symptoms are not necessarily bad, they show that there is a conflict between the forces of life. The hopeless are those that seem most normal for the are so well adjusted to a abnormal and distorted form of existence, their human voice silenced that they never develop symptoms of the neurotic he concludes that 'they are normal only for the profoundly abnormal society' this brings up many questions about what is normality and how does one define normality. In a abnormal society the perfect adjustment to its values and roles is a measure of their mental sickness for uniformity and freedom are incompatible. If man is made to conform and replicate the lifes of every other person then freedom is gone, along with mental health. The standardisation of the human individual is a crime against our biological and spiritual nature. It ignores the diversity of life. It concentrates on the common denominator, and abstracts from ths perceived universailty into an abstract law. Underlying this is the wish to impose order upon confusion. To bring harmony out of dissonance. This desire to reduce the chaos into simplified systems Huxley calls 'Will to Order.' This quest for neat explainations and tidy answers jsutifies despotism and dogmatism. 'In order to fit into these orginisations, individuals have had to de-individualise themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern.' (p31) In this incorporation into a social ideal the ideal man is one then who has dynamic conformity, who meets the requirements to a remarkable degree and plays by all the rules of the Power Elite.

I shall conclude now by bringing up in passing some of the other pertinant points Huxley makes. That is the power of distraction. If the mind is distracted then it is unable to concentrate on the most important thing, this was something he showed in Brave New World the people were so busy having pleasure they never had time to think. Chomsky in his book on propaganda echoed Huxley when he said that keep the people distracted and you control them. He looks at brainwashing, and propaganda, a great quote about symbols was 'irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness upon a failure to understand the nature of symbols' and that misleading symbols which link to Jungian archetypes and unconscious myths of society such as feminine desire to be attractive to males is a skillful method of marketing. The solution Huxley concludes is through eduction to teach children how to judge between proper and improper use of symbols. He seems then to justify media studies, which I think is no bad thing. Children should study philosophy in order to learn how to think systematically and to distinguish from true and false, meaningful and meaningless statements. This then would be a secure foundation for freedom, democracy and a life worth living.