Dissonant

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„Even the mother thought-city, the World Encyclopaedia Establishment, was not founded until 2012.“

– H. G. Wells: The Shape of Things To Come

Erich Fromm:

1. Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and socalled pleasure.
2. The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be the most normal. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.

Charles Galton Darwin:

1. Civilization might, loosely speaking, be counted as a sort of domestication, in that it imposes on man conditions not at all typical of wild life.
2. Life in the crowded conditions of cities has many unattractive features, but in the long run these may be overcome, not so much by altering them, but simply by changing the human race into liking them.
3. (...) pressure from excess populations [leads] to a consequent callousness about the value of the individual’s life, and often there will be cruelty to a degree of which we do not willingly think.

Aldous Huxley:

1. [D]emocracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
2. [L]ife in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence of schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of industrial slums); nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a genuine democ­racy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract.
3. [E]ven in those coun­tries that have a tradition of democratic government, freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane.
4. [N]o people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself demo­cratically.
5. [A] controlling oligarchy (…) [has] always existed and presumably will always exist.
6. [A] new social ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system - the system in which the individual is the primary. The key words in this [new] Social Ethic are 'adjustment', 'belongingness', 'acquisition of social skills', 'team work', 'group living', 'group loyalty', 'group dynamics', 'group thinking', 'group creativity'. Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity (…).
7. Language permits its users to pay attention to things, persons and events, even when the things and persons are absent and the events are not taking place. Language gives definition to our memories and, by translating experiences into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles of feeling and conduct. (…) In cases where the selecting and abstracting have been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal labels have been intelligently chosen and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our behaviour is apt to be realistic and tolerably decent. But under the influence of badly chosen words, applied, without any understanding of their merely symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected and abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt to behave with a fiendishness and an organized stupidity, of which dumb animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are blessedly incapable. In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources of language in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act.
8. [W]e may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature, the quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial – but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained élite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
9. The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
10. Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their rela­tions to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols. Simple-minded people tend to equate the symbol with what it stands for, to attribute to things and events some of the qualities expressed by the words in terms of which the propagandist has chosen, for his own purposes, to talk about them.

Julian Huxley:

1. Overcrowding in animal leads to distorted neurotic and downright pathological behavior. We can be sure that the same is true in principle of people. City life today is definitely leading to mass mental disease, to growing vandalism and possible eruptions of mass violence.

John Dewey:

1. A renewal of faith in com­mon human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout wor­ship of special legal and political forms.

Edward Bernays:

1. Democracy is administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.
2. As civilization becomes more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

Bertrand Russell:

1. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.
2. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented.
3. Almost all [children] will be normal, happy, healthy boys or girls. [They] will be given no more booklearning than is absolutely necessary. [They] will learn from an early stage to be what is called "co-operative", i.e. to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged (…).
4. As soon as working hours are over, amusements will be provided, of a sort calculated to cause wholesome mirth, and to prevent any thoughts of discontent which otherwise might cloud their happiness.
5. [S]cience (…) will control our lives as much as religion has ever done. I foresee the time when all who care for the freedom of the human spirit will have to rebel against a scientific tyranny.
6. The society of experts will control propaganda and education. It will teach loyalty to the world government, and make nationalism high treason. The government, being an oligarchy, will instil submissiveness into the great bulk of the population, confining initiative and the habit of command to its own members. It (…) may invent ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact. (…) Whatever the outward forms may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation.
7. Love-making will be subjected to no restricions either of law or of public opinion, but it will be casual and temporary, involving none of the deeper feelings and no serious affection.
8. Education is the most influental method of propaganda.
9. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.
10. War has been, throughout history, the chief source of social cohesion; and since science began, it has been the strongest incentive to technical progress.
11. Servant-girls and nurses, and, in later years, schoolteachers, are, as a rule, sexually starved. Education authorities are of opinion that those who have to deal with the young ought always to be unhappy spinsters.
12. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.
13. All of the modern developments [central power stations, distribution of electricity over wide areas, atomic energy] increase the control over the lives of individuals possessed by those who govern large organisations (…).
14. The fact that messages could travel faster than human beings was useful, above all, to the police. Before the telegraph, a highwayman on a galloping horse could escape to a place where his crame had not yet been heard of, and this made it very much harder to catch him. Unfortunately, however, the men whom the police wish to catch are frequently benefactors to mankind [as in totalitarian regimes]. (…) The effect of the telegraph was to increase the power of the central government and diminish the initiative of distant subordinates. (…) Broadcasting has completed what the telegraph began. Electricity (…) [a]s an influence on social organisation (…) promote[s] centralization. (…) [A]s soon as a community has become dependent upon [electricity] for lighting, heating and cooking, [anyone who] had been deliberately cut off for being rebels (…) had to give in. (…) Aeroplanes have increased immeasurably the power of governments. (…) [I]t has increased the disproportion between great and small Powers.
15. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.
16. [I]t is now possible for men of energy and intelligence, if they once become possessed of the governmental machine, to retain power even though at first they may have to face the opposition of the majority of the population. We must therefore increasingly expect to see government falling into the hands of oligarchies, not of birth but of opinion. In countries long accustomed to democracy, the empire of these oligarchies may be concealed behind democratic forms, as was that of Augustus in Rome (…) [U]ltimately some one oligarchy will acquire world domination, and will produce a world-wide organization as complete and elaborate as that now existing in the U.S.S.R.

Jacques Ellul:

1. The nation is no longer primarily a human, geographic, and historical entity. It is an economic power whose resources must be put to work, and to which a "yield" must be returned.
2. If a sudden change should occur and public opinion should turn against technique, we would see the propaganda machinery set into motion to re-create a favorable atmosphere, for the whole social edifice would be at stake.
3. We will be able to modify man's emotions, desires and thoughts as we have already done in a rudimentary way with tranquilizers.
4. [The technological society] has undertaken with the help of techniques of every kind to make supportable what was not previously so, and not indeed by modifying anything in man’s environment, but by taking action upon man himself. Man can support the harshest and most inhumane living conditions provided his morale holds. Psychological conditions must be created to enable the individual to give his utmost (…) in the face of the dreadful conditions of life into which technique has forced him.
5. Social conformism must be impressed upon the child. (…) He must be adapted to his society, he must not impair its development. His integration into the body social must be assured with the least possible friction. The technique [of liberation] permits the broadening of the child, the development of his social personality and happiness, and consequently, of his equilibrium. Opposition to society, the lack of social adaptation, produces serious personality difficulties that lead to the loss of psychic equilibrium. This means that despite all the pretentious talk about the aims of education it is not the child in and for himself who is being educated, but the child in and for society. [This] society is not an ideal one, with full justice and truth, but society as it is.
6. Speier says that the role of the propagandist is to hide political reality by talking about it. Sauvy says that the propagandist administers the anesthetic so the surgeon can operate without public interference. [I]n many cases (…) complete secrecy is a handicap to the propagandist; he must be free to speak, for only then can he sufficiently confuse things, reveal elements too disconnected to be put together, and so on. He must keep the public from understanding reality, while giving the public the opposite impression, that it understands everything clearly.
7. The more the individual is integrated into a group, the more he is receptive to propaganda, and the more he is apt to participate in the political life of his group.
8. Man remembers no specific news. He retains only a general impression (which propaganda furnishes him) inserted in the collective current of society. This obviously facilitates the work of the propagandist and permits extraordinary contraditions. (…) [T]he individual who questions an item of information because he distrusts the informant, ultimately forgets the suspicious nature of the source and retains only the impression of the information. In the long run, belief in a reliable source of information decreases and belief in information from the suspicious source increases.
9. Goebbels constantly protested the affirmations of victory emanating from the Führer's headquarters. The pull toward the future should refer to general currents of society rather than to precise events.
10. It has been said quite accurately, for example, that if public opinion were really unanimous there would be no way for propaganda to work. It is only because in any body of public opinion there are groups of private opinions that propaganda can use these as seeds with which to reverse the trend of opinion.
11. At the most elementary level, propaganda will play on the need for physical survival (in time of war). (…) For example, Goebbels used this theme in 1945 to prolong resistance: "By fighting you have a chance for survival."
12. [E]ven in a democracy, a government that is honest (…) cannot follow public opinion. (…) So, what can it do? Only one solution is possible: as the government cannot follow opinion, opinion must follow the government. (…) [T]he political parties already have the role of adjusting public opinion to that of the government. (…) [They] channel free-floating opinion into existing formulas, polarizing it on opposites that do not necessarily correspond to the original tenets of such opinion. Because parties are so rigid, because they deal with only a part of any question, and because they are purely politically motivated, they distort public opinion and prevent it from naturally evolving.
13. Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, a constant exercise of the critical faculties and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda. [In the U.S.S.R. it] has been recognized [that] too much discussion, too much depth of doctrine risk creating divergent currents and permitting the intelluctual to escape social control.
14. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. (…) Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment. The uncultured man cannot be reached by propaganda. The more an individual participates in the society in which he lives, the more he will cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective notions about the past and the future of his groups.
15. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progess (…), that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads (…). Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). (…) The vast majority of the people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. (…) And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.
16. [T]he propagandee becomes a man without a past and without a future, a man who receives from propaganda his portion of thought and action for the day; his discontinuous personality must be given continuity from the outside, and this makes the need for propaganda very strong. Because propaganda has been his only channel for perceiving the world, he has the feeling of being delivered, tied hand and foot, to an unknown destiny. (…) [Propaganda] can [not stop], only grow and perfect itself, for its discontinuation would ask too great a sacrifice for the propagandee, a too thorough remaking of himself. This is more than he is ready to accept.
17. Nowadays, man acts without thinking, and in turn his thought can no longer be translated into action. Thinking has become a superfluous existence, without reference to reality; it is purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game. It is literature's domain; and I am not referring solely to "intellectual" thought, but to all thought, whether it concerns works or politics or family life. (…) [Modern man] does not need to think in order to act; his action is determined by the techniques he uses and by the sociological conditions. He acts without really wanting to, without ever reflecting on the meaning or reason for his actions.
18. What man thinks either is totally without effect or must remain unsaid. (…) [L]anguage, the instrument of the mind, becomes "pure sound", a symboly directly evoking feelings and reflexes. This is one of the most serious dissociations that propaganda causes. There is another: the dissociation between the verbal universe, in which propaganda makes us live, and reality. Propaganda sometimes deliberately seperates from man's real world the verbal world that it creates; it then tends to destroy man's conscience.
19. To defend himself against [the shock effect of two intense, opposing propagandas], man automatically reacts in one of two ways. (a) He takes refuge in inertia. (…) But this is not the abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of resignation. (…) [T]his inhibition not only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender. (…) The often-studied skepticism of German youth after 1945, that famous formula Ohne Mich, arose from the counter-shock of a propaganda opposed to Nazi propaganda. (…) b) The other defensive reflex is flight into involvement [in political parties and organisations]. (…) He escapes the opposing clash of propagandas; now, all that his side says is true and right; all that comes from elsewhere is false and wrong. Thus one propaganda arms him against the other propaganda.
20. The fact that [the propagandist] reinforces a democratic belief in the public is of no importance: one now knows that such beliefs are no obstacle to the establishment of dictatorship.
21. The propagandee and the non-propagandee cannot discuss: no psychologically acceptable communication or exchange is possible between them. (…) No opinion is of any consequence unless it is first communicated to the masses by the vast media of dissemination and propaganda, and if it is not assimilated on a massive scale.
22. Because he considered the newspaper the principal instrument of propaganda, Lenin insisted on the necessity of teaching reading. It was even more the catchword of the New Economic Policy: the school became the place to prepare students to receive propaganda.
23. The expression of criticism is permitted because its repression would be even more catastrophic. But it is permitted only on condition that it entail no serious consequences, or, better put, so that no serious consequences to the power of the state can result. (…) [Henry] Miller's book, far from pushing a man to revolt, vicariously satisfies the potential revolutionary, just as the sexual act itself stills sexual desire, or jazz soothes the Negroes' bitter longing for freedom. (…) [Jazz] is the music of men who are satisfied with the illusion of freedom provoked by its sounds, while the chains of iron wind round them ever tighter. (…) Seeing his discontent expressed far better than he could express it himself, [the critical reader] is satisfied vicariously with an official revolt and ceases to criticize … at least for a while – but by then he will have received the next issue. (…) Technique diffuses the revolt of the few and thus appeases the need of the millions for revolt.
24. There is no longer any doubt about the effect [of films]: (…) films do not leave a person intact. The emotional shock is too powerful, but not just in the story that is told: even the atmosphere in the theater, the collective darkness which leaves each person in the crowd solitary and caught up in the hypnotic light of the screen. (…) Taking advantage of the relaxation in mental tension, self-control over one's feelings and emotions becomes less effective during darkness: a kind of giving up of oneself to "things as they are" takes place as the impact of images reaches its maximum. (…) The film viewer is placed in a state of emotional accessibility that opens him wide to influences, forms, and myths. (…) Frequent film watching creates a new personality and leads to a kind of addiction while at the same time aggravating internal lack of balance in the imagination or emotions.
25. Experience tends to show that a person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word.

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

1. Television gives the young viewer a first glimpse of the outside world. It first defines and does so compellingly by combining the visual and audio impact, the meaning of the good life. It sets the standard of what is to be considered achievement, fulfillment, good taste and proper conduct. It conditions desires, defines aspirations and expectations and draws the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. With audiences around the world increasingly glued to television sets, there is nothing comparable either in the era of enforced religious orthodoxy or even at the high point of totalitarian indoctrination to the cultural and philosophical conditioning that television exercises on its viewers.
2. It could be said indeed that far from being an expression of majority desire, as the [television] networks say, television programs are the imposition of a social minority on the majority, the minority consisting of the fifty top advertisers, the three networks, and a dozen or so advertising agencies.
3. Tension is unavoidable as man strives to assimilate the new into the framework of the old. For a time the established framework resiliently integrates the new by adapting it in a more familiar shape. But at some point the old framework becomes overloaded. The new input can no longer be redefined into traditional forms, and eventually it asserts itself with compelling force.

Carroll Quigley:

1. Any war performs two rather contradictionary services for the social context in which it occurs. On the one hand, it changes the minds of men, especially the defeated, about the factual power relationship between the combatants. And, on the other hand, it alters the factual situation itself, so that changes which in peacetime might have occured over decades are brought about in a few years.
2. [Men's] freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.

Theodor W. Adorno:

1. Die letzte Perversität des Stils [der neuen Musik] ist universale Nekrophilie.
2. Der Infantilismus [der neuen Musik] ist der Stil des Kaputten.
3. [Die neue] Musik verkörpert die Idee, dass es kein Leben mehr gibt.
4. Rhytmische Verhaltensweisen kommen überaus nahe dem Schema der katatonischen Zustände.
5. Die Abweisung des Ausdrucks [in der neuen Musik], das sinnfälligste Moment von Depersonalisierung (…), hat in der Schizophrenie sein klinisches Gegenstück in der Hebephrenie, der Gleichgültigkeit des Kranken gegen das Auswendige. (…) Gefühlskälte und emotionale Flachheit, wie sie an Schizophrenen durchweg beobachtet wird, (…) entspringt im Mangel an libidinöser Besetzung der Objektwelt, der Entfremdung, die das Innere zur Starrheit und Unbeweglichkeit veräußert. Daraus macht [die neue Musik] ihre Tugend.
6. [Der Trick der neuen Musik] zur hierarchisch starren Ordnung, zur Selbsterhaltung durch Selbstauslöschung, fällt ins behavioristische Schema der total eingegliederten Menschheit.
7. Gesellschaftlich ist die Groteske allgemein die Form, unter der Verfremdetes und Avanciertes akzeptabel gemacht wird. Der Bürger ist bereit, mit moderner Kunst sich einzulassen, wenn sie ihm selber, durch ihre Gestalt, versichert, sie sei nicht ernst zu nehmen.
8. [Die Kulturindustrie] gebe den Menschen in einer angeblich chaotischen Welt etwas wie Maßstäbe zur Orientierung, und das allein schon sei billigenswert. Was sie jedoch von der Kulturindustrie bewahrt wähnen, wird von ihr desto gründlicher zerstört. Das gemütliche alte Wirtshaus demoliert der Farbfilm mehr, als Bomben es vermochten: er rottet noch seine imago aus. Keine Heimat überlebt ihre Aufbereitung in den Filmen, die sie feiern und alles Unverwechselbare, wovon sie zehren, zum Verwechseln gleichmachen.

Maurice Strong:

1. Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsiblity to bring that about?