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Mental Slavery
C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS (J ANUARY 20, 2012)
Bob Marley, the famous reggae singer from Jamaica, sang a popular lyric: âEmancipate yourself from mental slavery.â 1 Thatâs a theme that youâve returned to quite a bit in your work.
Â
I should know that song. Yes, itâs true. When people wanted enough freedom that they couldnât be enslaved or killed or repressed, new modes of control naturally developed to try to impose forms of mental slavery so they would accept a framework of indoctrination and wouldnât raise any questions. If you can trap people into not noticing, let alone questioning, crucial doctrines, theyâre enslaved. Theyâll essentially follow orders as if there was a gun pointed at them.
Â
In some of your talks, when people ask you what to do in response to the problems you discuss, I have heard you tell people they could start by turning off their television set.
Â
Television drums certain fixed boundaries of thought into your head, which certainly dulls the mind. The doctrines are not formally stated. Itâs not the Catholic Church: âYou have to believe this. You have to read this every day, say this every day.â Itâs just presupposed. You presuppose a framework, and then people just come to accept it.
A decent propaganda system does not announce its principles or intentions. This is one of the reasons the old Soviet system was relatively in effective, as far as we know. If you tell people, âThis is what you have to think,â then they understand: this is what power wants us to think. And then they may find a way out of it. Itâs harder to extricate yourself from a system of unstated presuppositions than it is from explicitly stated doctrine. Thatâs the way a good propaganda system will operate.
Our propaganda system is highly sophisticated. The actors substantially understand what theyâre doing, it seems. Take the 2008 presidential election, which, like all elections, was a public relations extravaganza. The advertising industry was very conscious of its role. In fact, shortly after the election, Advertising Age gave the annual prize for best marketing campaign of the year to the Obama campaign, which the PR industry organized. 2 There was actually discussion in the business press afterward over this achievement. 3 There was euphoria in the business community. This will change the style in corporate boardrooms. We know how to delude people better than we did before. No one had any illusions, apparently, about the candidate winning on the basis of his policies or his intentions. It was just a good marketing campaign, better than John McCainâs.
Â
In an image-dominated culture, I wonder about the future of books. And Iâm asking this of someone who reads voraciously. Your reading habits are legendary. Weâre sitting in your office, surrounded by piles and piles of books. How do you get through all this stuff?
Â
Unfortunately, I donât. This is the urgent pile. There are many more stacks elsewhere. But one of the painful experiences which I try to avoid as much as possible is to calculate how much time it would take, if I read constantly, to go through them. And reading a book doesnât just mean turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. Thereâs no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.
I suspect that will disappear. You see various signs of it. There has been a shift in my own classes over the past ten or twenty years. Whereas I once could make casual literary references and people more or less knew what I was talking about, this is less and less true. I can see from correspondence that people
Mental Slavery
C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS (J ANUARY 20, 2012)
Bob Marley, the famous reggae singer from Jamaica, sang a popular lyric: âEmancipate yourself from mental slavery.â 1 Thatâs a theme that youâve returned to quite a bit in your work.
Â
I should know that song. Yes, itâs true. When people wanted enough freedom that they couldnât be enslaved or killed or repressed, new modes of control naturally developed to try to impose forms of mental slavery so they would accept a framework of indoctrination and wouldnât raise any questions. If you can trap people into not noticing, let alone questioning, crucial doctrines, theyâre enslaved. Theyâll essentially follow orders as if there was a gun pointed at them.
Â
In some of your talks, when people ask you what to do in response to the problems you discuss, I have heard you tell people they could start by turning off their television set.
Â
Television drums certain fixed boundaries of thought into your head, which certainly dulls the mind. The doctrines are not formally stated. Itâs not the Catholic Church: âYou have to believe this. You have to read this every day, say this every day.â Itâs just presupposed. You presuppose a framework, and then people just come to accept it.
A decent propaganda system does not announce its principles or intentions. This is one of the reasons the old Soviet system was relatively in effective, as far as we know. If you tell people, âThis is what you have to think,â then they understand: this is what power wants us to think. And then they may find a way out of it. Itâs harder to extricate yourself from a system of unstated presuppositions than it is from explicitly stated doctrine. Thatâs the way a good propaganda system will operate.
Our propaganda system is highly sophisticated. The actors substantially understand what theyâre doing, it seems. Take the 2008 presidential election, which, like all elections, was a public relations extravaganza. The advertising industry was very conscious of its role. In fact, shortly after the election, Advertising Age gave the annual prize for best marketing campaign of the year to the Obama campaign, which the PR industry organized. 2 There was actually discussion in the business press afterward over this achievement. 3 There was euphoria in the business community. This will change the style in corporate boardrooms. We know how to delude people better than we did before. No one had any illusions, apparently, about the candidate winning on the basis of his policies or his intentions. It was just a good marketing campaign, better than John McCainâs.
Â
In an image-dominated culture, I wonder about the future of books. And Iâm asking this of someone who reads voraciously. Your reading habits are legendary. Weâre sitting in your office, surrounded by piles and piles of books. How do you get through all this stuff?
Â
Unfortunately, I donât. This is the urgent pile. There are many more stacks elsewhere. But one of the painful experiences which I try to avoid as much as possible is to calculate how much time it would take, if I read constantly, to go through them. And reading a book doesnât just mean turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. Thereâs no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.
I suspect that will disappear. You see various signs of it. There has been a shift in my own classes over the past ten or twenty years. Whereas I once could make casual literary references and people more or less knew what I was talking about, this is less and less true. I can see from correspondence that people
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