The media are controlled by members of the Power elite.
The non-stop distraction of the various forms of media deliberately used to prevent people from paying too much attention to the reality of the social and political situation.
A society most of whose members spend a great part of their time in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera etc will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
Today's dictators rely on repitition, suppression and rationalization- the repitition of catchwords they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or State.
In the words of Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armaments "Through technical devices like the radio and loud-speaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.....subject to the will of one man."
Children can now become radio or television fodder for the propagandist.
Hitler viewed the masses of man as utterly contemptible and incapable of abstract thought. They are determined by feelings and unconscious drives which the succesful propagandist must learn to manipulate.
In the words of Hitler himself- "All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and expressed in a few stereotyped formulas constantly repeated". ["War on terror" anyone?]
The propagandist's statements are made without qualification. Everything is either diabolically black or celestially white...."
Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, or shouted down.
Though here Huxley omits to mention ignored. The media simply deprive them of a public voice.
The effects of propaganda cannot be neutralised except by a thorough training in analysing its techniques and seeing through its sophistries.
A democracy is a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused and should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts.
Just to add a final quote from the DH Lawrence character of Huxley's Point Counter Point: 'The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don't let them. Make the effort of being human.'
17 comments:
We are not 'the masses' anymore, are we? What are you on about? We are individuals. I am an individual. I am special. I am beautiful. I deserve to be happy. I like to spend my money on nice things. I like to watch television. I like eating. I like drinking beer. I like sex. I don't like pain. I don't like politics. I don't like being bored. Nobody tells me what to do! Who the fuck is Aldous Huxley? Boring fucker. I'm going to the pub.
Gore Vidal notes that when he's appeared on tv, any time he says anything remotely controversial, the interviewer laughs "that sounds like a conspiracy theory!", thus effectively ending any further discussion. It's like a magic button you press to silence people - conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory! shut up! shut up!
it's almost like some sort of, i dunno, like a conspiracy
Aldous would approve of your attitude, Neil; don't let them turn you into an idiot.
To quote my own brilliant notion, Elberry, from a short time ago:
In the pure form, because of the absolute alignment of the person with the slave mentality, a truth revealing attack on the social order of things is experienced as an attack on his personal being, and despite the power of the evidence presented to awake him to reality, the structure of self which he believes himself to be acts as an impenetrable force-field exactly like in those sci-fi films where incoming misssiles are annihilated by this defence mechanism. This shield is doubly effective in that it actually tends to re-direct the attack back on the person trying to wake him up- this typically rendered where the messenger of the uncomfortable truth is mocked as a "Conspiracy Theorist," & the slave strucure left intact & even reinforced. As in the films, however, in all but the purest slaves this defence-shield can be weakened if enough outside force generated, or ideally from an enlightenment experience within where this hallucinated self vanishes of its own non-real accord.
My comment above is a parody of one of my neighbours. You weren't to know that. I had met him on the street earlier. So none of what I said above is me, except for the sex part. Other than that, I'm rather uncomfortable, unsure, but trying to understand this whole existence business. Sorry about the comment. I found it rather cathartic, I suppose.
I don't see any need for an apology, Neil. I think layers of irony are hardly alien territory in these parts.
When you think about the minor conspiracies we have been part of ourselves -- against our bosses, our work colleagues, our friends, lovers and, if we have them, enemies -- it seems to me no less than reasonable to suppose that when the stakes are so much higher and are demonstrably lusted after so much more by the main players, that conspiracies – the more global, ingenious, and vicious the better -- are really the general rule rather than the exception
And also when it is generally accepted as patently true that many of these politicians are a shower of corrupt gangsters at the lower levels, so tp speak. But the same people who will accept this seem to imagine there exists a kind of saturation point beyond which this corruption will not go, such as in matters of going to war or demanding the reversal of civil liberties in fighting purported enemies to the existence of our way of life. Thatby some strange alchemical means they turn from untrustworthy crooks into earnest idealists when the issues reach a certain level of gravity.
I don't so much not buy the whole 9/11 conspiracy thing because it's too unthinkably evil/crooked but because of its inelegance as an explanation - Occams Razor and all that (don't multiple beyond your needs, explanation-wise). Simplier and easier surely for the conspiracy to be one of knowing something was going to happen and simply not stopping it.
That wouldn't explain obvious controlled demolitions, Gearoid, especially WTC7 as shown here. Occam's Razor would tell us that a steel-structured building collapsing at a rate of freefall into its own footprint, in other words a perfect symmetrical collapse, is exactly the hallmarks of a controlled demolition, & there is no plausible scientific alternative; therefore it is a controlled demolition. The official pancake theories are totally incompatible with these collpases. Letting the attacks happen doesn't work as a hypothesis. An in-depth look at the attack on the Pentagon also shows letting it happen doesn't work. Ever wonder how come one of the most security conscious buildings on the planet has failed to yield any footage of a plane hitting it? This video, In Plane Site is excellent on the Pentagon evidence.
Even as I was pressing the publish button I was kinda thinking "If I squared what I know about this I still wouldn’t know as much as Andrew does. Perhaps I should hold my piece." Then I sent it.
At the risk of getting myself in further trouble let me just make my position (or lack of a position) clear…
I'm not an expert in demolition, explosives or construction engineering; I’m so far from being an expert in any of those things that I don’t even have the ability to say what an expert should look like. In other areas where there isn’t a great amount of contention between those who appear to be the experts (it seems clear for example that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are to blame, only a bias few seem to refute this point) this isn’t a problem for me. I just go with the expert majority opinion. Re the 9/11 controlled demolition debate however there is a lot of disagreement between parties who seem to tick at least some of the boxes for what we might expect an expert to look like. Here for example is a whole rake of web sites debunking the conspiracy theories that have sprung up about 9/11. This is an article written by a sane-sounding man with seemingly no agenda written from an “anti-demolition” position. And if you want something more technical try this . Perhaps you’ll say these are biased individuals in the pay of the government and perhaps they are. I’ll never know. And you won’t either. Not really. I think everything and anything’s possible (maybe even all at the same time). All I can do (or would do if I had the time) is to try to look behind the (for me) impenetrable science and ask myself what version of things seems most likely. My point in the earlier post was this: the massive conspiracy and cover-up which would be involved in the US government blowing up its own buildings is not to be thought improbable because we should believe there is a limit to the wickedness of man (because we have evidence to suggest otherwise) but more so because it seems the hardest, and least-likely-to-succeed plan of all possible plans for any group to follow in achieving the aims you and others sign then up for (war back as big business, erosion of civil liberties, more power, more oil, creation of new world order etc etc).
Now I’ve probably really left myself in for it…
Missing links in order(thought I put in that href= thing):
http://www.debunking911.com/links.htm
http://www.jnani.org/mrking/writings/911/king911.htm
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
There will inevitably be contrary positions, Gearoid; there is no way the official position wil be undefended. However, if one thinks of the nature of steel, especially of the thickness needed to sustain a massive building & think of these buildings collapsing in the way they do, which is to say, at the rate of gravity...then what we are talking about is all this steel melting simultaneously allowing the collapses to occur in this manner. This is actually what the official theory has to allow for. WTC7 had merely fires on a couple of floors...no steel structured building had ever collapsed due to fire before or since. Controlled demolition explains this collapse perfectly. If there were nothing at stake anyone would accept this explanation, there being no known case where a steel structured building collapsed due to fire. Does anyone seriously believe that there are 3 known exceptions to this & all 3 happened to occur on 911? We also have the news agencies announcing the unexpected collapse of WTC7 half an hour before its unexpected collapse. As far as Occams Razor, avoiding this being an inside job is an endelessly complex & ridiculous position. The 911 Commission failed to even mention WTC7's collapse, so embarrassing was it as something that could be explained in any plausible manner. As Danny Jowenko, the Dutch demolitions expert explains subsequently to the earlier video, if any expert in the US says what he believes to be self-evident, that WTC7 is a controlled demo, then he will most likely not work again. Here where he confirms his earlier position...I don't see how cnyone can force themselves to believe this footage is of anything but a controlled demo. It's like the slave mentality piece I wrote- people willing to even defy the laws of physics to maintain a social-political position.
Also to add if anyhting remotely like standard procedure were followed that day, those planes would have not have got anywhere near their targets as the air-force would have intercepted them within minutes of their deviating from their courses. To say they let it happen is to coordinate probably much more than if they actually did the attacks themselves, & to hope that unarmed men would successfully hijack planes, & amateur pilots though they were, succeed in steering Boeings into their targets.
I think the real problem about discussions such as those provoked by Huxley is that they often run quickly into the populist sand. I mean that his fundamental point (and it was one made earlier by Arnold and others in the 19th Century) is that modern forms of mass culture are in the hands of the producers who want us to buy the same few books in large quantities (the 3 for 2 philosophy), consume what they want us to consume etc etc rather than "the masses" ie individual men and women making their own choices and calling the shots. The populists pretend to be on the side of "the masses" but actually what they are doing is colluding with their 'soft power'. See Huxley passim on "creation-saving devices".
Sorry a mistyping there, I meant collude with their ie the producers' soft power, the Murdochs, Microsofts etc
Thanks, Nicholas. I see I've, in a less elegant way, tried to say something similar about Carey & this masquerade of pretending to be a champion of the masses at your blog earlier. Just in case anyone finds theur way down to this point of the discussion, Nicholas wrote a fine biography of Huxley recently.
A point that now interests me & to a large extent is probably incapable of solution is the degree to which the collusion of the populists is conscious or unconscious. Obviously, the intellectual foot-soldiers can simply be mouth-pieces of a position they genuinely believe to be desirable & true. I'd have, probably through lack of thought, seen this justification of ignorance as being unconscious in general, but now I'm far less sure. Does someone like Carey know what he is doing? It would seem, if the answer is yes, to explain the kind of character assassination piece he wrote of Huxley when reviewing your book, Nicholas, more convincingly than through some independent conviction of Huxley's malign influence; a bizarre stance towards a figure so clearly defending the fights of the individual agains the kind of forces you describe.
Yes I read that review also Andrew and must say I was struck by the unwarrented vitoral of Carey's attack on both Nicholas's book and, mainly if memory serves, Huxley himself. Very strange and weirdly personal attack I thought.
Is there some discussion on this somewhere or a copy of Carey's ludicrous aricle? I always felt bad for not coming to Huxley's defence (not that he needs it ofc).
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