Chapter Twelve Manipulation and the New Elite
As we consider the coming of an elite, an authoritarian state, to fill the vacuum left by the loss of Christian principles, we must not think naively of the models of Stalin and Hitler. We must think rather of a manipulative authoritarian government. Modern governments have forms of manipulation at their disposal which the world has never known before. We will examine a number of these methods and theories of manipulation, concentrating first on the psychological techniques, then on techniques associated with biological science, and finally on the new ways in which some of the media are influencing behavior.
First, one could mention the determinists, who say man has no freedom in his choices. For example, we can think of Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychological determinism, B. F. Skinner’s (1904–1990) sociological determinism through conditioning, and Francis Crick’s (1916–2004) chemical, that is, genetic determinism.
Freud’s determinism rests upon the child’s relationship to its mother during the early portion of its life. He taught that this sets the pattern of the child’s psychological makeup.
The ideas of sociological determinism, primarily involving conditioning (behaviorism), were widely discussed after B. F. Skinner published Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). His thesis was that all that people are can be explained by the way their environment has conditioned them. Since society plays a specially important role in that environment, society can and should use positive stimuli to bring about the society it wants. That this was meant not only to be a theory but also to be put into use is shown by his earlier book, Walden Two (1948), a novel.
In Walden Two Skinner’s utopia was a totally conditioned society. The director, T. E. Frazier, manipulated everyone to control all the details of the society. He made the people think that they wanted what he had decided they and society itself should be. In this and all other forms of determinism, man dies. In fact, Skinner himself acknowledged that what is being abolished is man. He says, “To man qua [as] man we readily say good riddance.”
Skinner (like Bertrand Russell and George Wald) retains only the value of biological continuity: “Survival is the only value according to which a culture is eventually to be judged, and any practice that furthers survival has survival value by definition.” But like other people we have considered, Skinner cannot live on the basis of his own system. He lives inconsistently on the memory of Christian values for which his system has no place.
The Christian position is not that there is no element of conditioning in human life, but rather that by no means does conditioning explain what people are in their totality. To a determinist, however, if one removed all the bundle of conditioning in man, there would be no man as man. Christianity rejects this. It insists that each individual person exists as a being created in the image of God, and that therefore each person is an ongoing entity with dignity. To proud, humanist man, who demands to be autonomous, technology of one kind or another is to be used to get rid of the limitations of nature, including human nature, which autonomous man finds insufferably confining. There is here a tension in modern people, especially perhaps among students: modern people want to be free to shape their own destiny, and yet they think they know they are determined.
The sadism of Marquis de Sade is the specter standing behind any determinist because the basis of de Sade’s sadism was his concept of determinism. De Sade’s position was that what is, is right; and if a person holds any form of determinism, he must agree that de Sade’s conclusion is the only logical one. This is not to say that the determinists always carry their position to de Sade’s logical conclusion, but it is the conclusion. In any form of determinism, what is considered right or acceptable is arbitrary.
Modern determinists have not presented only abstract theories. Rather, there have been two practical results. First, and most important, as their ideas about what people are have been increasingly accepted, people consciously or unconsciously have opened themselves to being treated as machines and treating other people as machines. Second, each theory of determinism has carried with it a method of manipulation. So even though many—even most—people may reject the concept that man is totally a product of psychological, sociological, or chemical conditioning, manipulation by these methods is still very much a live possibility. In fact, these techniques are all at the disposal of authoritarian states, and they are in some degree already being used.
Some people might say that these deterministic ideas are only science fiction, but this is not so. T. George Harris (1924–), who reviewed Skinner’s book in Psychology Today (August 1971), said, “Nobody would panic at Skinner’s attack upon our idea of freedom if he were only talking. But he has a program, and followers to push it.” Voices have been raised against Skinner’s views and against behaviorism in general. For example, Noam Chomsky’s (1928–) 1959 article in Language spoke out against one of Skinner’s earlier books, Verbal Behavior (1957). But the behaviorists are numerous and, as Harris said, they have a program and followers to push it. Those who hold behavioristic concepts are often in positions of influence. For example, they often control education down to the lowest grades. Articles in the press constantly remind us that behaviorism dominates various university psychology departments. This professor or writer or then another comes into fashion and later becomes less important, but behaviorism is an ongoing and progressing factor in society.
The pressure toward the development of manipulative techniques comes through strongly in current biological research and development. We see this clearly in the outlook of Francis Crick (1916–2004), who received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine—along with James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins—for breaking the DNA code. The Spring 1971 issue of Washington University Magazine carries an article by Crick entitled “Why I Study Biology.” He gives a call for full genetic engineering at once and tells us what is his basic motive for studying biology:
My own motivation, which I have only touched on up to now, is rather elsewhere. It is difficult to say it in a few words. If you had to find a simple description of why I do biological research, it is for philosophical and what you might call religious reasons.
A crucial part of the view of life that he expounds, as we can clearly see from what he writes, is the idea that man can be essentially reduced to the chemical and physical properties that go to make up the DNA template. Philosophically, therefore, Francis Crick is a reductionist, that is, one who would reduce man to an electrochemical machine. Such a view soon leads to the idea that man can and should be manipulated and even controlled.
In this article he mentions the fact that, when he was in California visiting a university, he met a charming girl who asked him about his birthdate and talked to him about astrology and the Age of Aquarius. He also noted that the bookstores were heavily stocked with books on the occult. Here is his reaction:
. . . I think one has to say that scientifically, astrology really is complete nonsense. I have tried very hard to think of a way in which it could make some sense and it’s too much. I wonder whether people who feel that way should be at a university.
Who, then, is going to be allowed in the universities? What he is suggesting is not just that the content of astrology is wrong or meaningless, but he raises the question as to whether people with such views should be in a university.
The major conclusion which one draws from present-day biology is the importance of natural selection. The essence of natural selection, and this is the thing that people find very hard to accept, is that it’s motivated by chance events. It is not pre-programmed but is driven by chance events. You can make an argument that chance is the only real source of true novelty.
Natural selection is not programmed; it is generated by chance. A little further on in the article, however, Dr. Crick says, “You cannot lay down a general trend [for the course of evolution]; natural selection is cleverer than that. It will think of combinations and ways of doing things which haven’t been foreseen.” The language here is interesting because it attributes personality to natural selection.
In The Origin of the Genetic Code (1968), Crick begins to spell nature with a capital N about halfway through the book, and in Of Molecules and Men (1967) he refers to nature as “she.” In other words, he personalizes what by definition is impersonal according to his own system. Why? Because he can’t stand the implications of impersonality, and because this kind of semantic mysticism gives relief to people caught in the web of the impersonal. By his own definition Crick lives in an impersonal universe, but by the connotation of the language he uses, Crick personalizes the impersonal universe and calls natural selection “clever” and says it will “think.” Such language takes the pressure off, and people fail to understand what they have read.
Dr. Crick says that his scientific enterprise is governed by a basic religious stance. And while he recognizes that the particular stance he takes is antireligious in conventional terms, “. . . it is a religious attitude because it’s concerned with religious problems.” He is right. What Crick is doing is bringing forth a faith system based on the prestige of science—even though the suggestions being made have no logical relationship to that on which the prestige rests.
Later in the article Crick turns to the area of mental behavior and how it is determined. He says, “We’d like to know more about mental health—how much is genetically determined and how much depends on the environment. We’d also like to know the same thing for intelligence and creativity.” Is it not clear here how man suddenly disappears? There are only two factors: (1) heredity and (2) environment. Is it 90 percent of one and 10 of the other? Or the other way around? It makes no difference. Either factor or both together are mechanical. Man has a genetic code. He has an environment which influences that which comes as a product of the genetic code. That’s all people are.
In the last section of the article, he begins a new topic: “This leads us to the area of which I’m least at home in because it is not my particular temperament: the question of biology and politics.” What is the state to do about biology? Crick tells us:
. . . We all know, I think, or are beginning to realize, that the future is in our own hands, that we can, to some extent, do what we want.
Now what is happening at the moment? What is happening is that we know that with technology we can make life easier for human beings; we can make changes. What we are really doing is learning to tinker with the system. But there is very little thinking at the fundamental level as to what sort of people we would like to have. In the long term, that is the question you are bound to come up with. I think that you have to realize that in many contexts what will happen if we go on in the present way is not what people actually want.
. . . It’s the aim of medical research to try to cure as many diseases as possible, in particular cancer and heart conditions. Those are probably the major killers. But what is going to happen under that situation? What is going to happen essentially is that you can easily work out the age distribution, under a stable population, from the death rate. It means that gradually the population is going to become very old. What medical research is aiming for at the moment is to make the world safe for senility.
Crick is really saying: Let’s adjust the humanitarian concept of medicine. Furthermore, let’s begin now. The article continues:
. . . It’s going to be the people now between fifteen and twenty-five who are going to have to face it, so they may as well start thinking about it now.
. . . We’ve just seen that the discussion as to how many people there should be in the world has now, as it were, become quite acceptable. It is not acceptable, at the moment, to discuss who should be the parents of the next generation, who should be born, and who should have children. There’s a general feeling that if we are all nice to each other and if everybody has 2.3 children, everything will pan out. I don’t think that is true. For good genetic reasons, even though you have more medical care, transplantation of organs, and all these things, it would be an unhealthy biological situation. Some group of people should decide that some people should have more children and some should have fewer. . . . You have to decide who is to be born.
Biology is indeed a revolutionary subject when you look at it in this way. It is, in fact, the major revolutionary subject. It is the one that’s going to make the new concepts which will come into social thinking. Biology is not simply, as it were, what you can do with herds of cattle. There are much more intricate things involving people at the psychological level interacting in society, but I don’t think you’re going to solve all these problems by just tinkering with the genetic material. I think it will turn out that thinking along these lines will have to take place, and if you don’t do it in this country, it will start in another country.
Francis Crick closes “Why I Study Biology” in this way:
This comes to probably the basic thing that I would say. That really what is wanted is education—an education at the level of younger people. It’s nice to read articles in Time and Life, but if you learn something when you’re in school, you’re forced to learn it in a more regular way. You absorb it, to some extent, at a more impressionable period; you’re made to do exercise on it. And I think really there should be some thinking if we’re to take this new view of looking at man.
Crick obviously wishes to bring the subject of the biological nature of man and the acceptability of human engineering down into the education of even the lower grades.
If man is what Francis Crick says he is, then he is only the sum of the impersonal plus time plus chance; he is nothing more than the energy particle extended and more complex. Our own generation can thus disregard human life. On the one end we kill the embryo through abortion—and on the other end we will introduce euthanasia for the old. The one is already here and the door is opened for the other.
Thus, Francis Crick is one of those who put a strong emphasis on the immediate use of the full range of “genetic engineering”—with some group of people deciding who should be the parents of the next generation, who should be born, and who should have children. Too often the subject of genetic engineering is approached in an atmosphere of spectacularism, in a “Sunday Supplement” frame of mind. But men like Crick must be taken seriously as an influence in the area of biological manipulation. Crick is not alone in his view that modern medicine is a menace since it keeps the weak alive to breed a less-than-best next generation. A chancellor of one of the Swiss universities took this for the theme of his inaugural speech some years ago.
The question of genetic engineering, however, must be seen in a balanced way, for by no means are all those involved as extreme as those to whom I have referred. The British book I mentioned before, Our Future Inheritance: Choice or Chance? (1974), tries to set forth a balanced view, though it seems to me that the title itself is slanted toward accepting genetic engineering: choice sounds so much better than chance. The book has special importance because of the many scientists whose working papers were the basis for it. The following few pages are largely based on material from this book or issues which are raised by the material in it.
As we evaluate genetic engineering, it must be said first that certain things are not immediately at hand—for example, a baby grown entirely outside the body (in vitro) or the making of endless duplicates of one individual without male and female elements (cloning). However, these phenomena may be possible later, and so are part of the whole question, ethically and practically. Some things, for example, transplants, are immediately at hand. The most successful have been kidney transplants.
This surely is a breakthrough for which we can be glad, but even this medical achievement creates problems. In order to justify the early taking of the needed kidneys and other organs, the criterion for death is now generally accepted as a flat brain wave over a twenty-four-hour period. This is not an ethical problem in itself, but as we have seen, the door is opened for keeping bodies alive indefinitely (where there is a flat brain wave but where the organs all continue to function) to harvest their blood and organs for transplants and experimentation. The problem is clear: without the absolute line which Christianity gives for the distinctiveness of people, even things which can be good in themselves lead to humanness being increasingly lost.
Another example of this problem is the curing of childlessness which is caused by an infertile husband. Such childlessness often can be cured by artificial insemination using the husband’s sperm (AIH). Surely this is a help to many couples. But what about AID (sperm by a donor, another man)? Where is the boundary condition? Our Future Inheritance: Choice or Chance? says that under present laws in Britain the child born is illegitimate, and in the United States judges in some divorce cases have ruled AID children the illegitimate products of adultery, denying custody rights to the husband or relieving him of financial-support obligations. And what is the next step? The book answers, “Perhaps the most sensible suggestion made is that the concept of legitimacy be removed entirely.” If this suggestion were followed, morals would be shifted, and once more humanness would be weakened. What the family is, is weakened. What will be the relationship of parents and children? In the book this change in morals and laws is to be made upon the basis of “social hindrance.” This is what I have called sociological law.
Any of us would be glad for methods of genetic changes which would cure genetic disease and help individuals. However, removing these things from the uniqueness which Christianity gives to people, and from the Christian absolutes, tends to lead to an increasing loss of humanness, even in the milder forms. In the call for full genetic engineering the door is wide open for the most far-reaching manipulation. The call concerns who should have children and what kind of children they should have. It is a call for a group in society to determine what kind of people is wanted, and a call to set out to make them genetically. It is striking that James D. Watson (1928–), who along with Francis Crick received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for breaking the DNA code, spoke out for exercising the greatest caution. He warned a congressional committee of the dangers of experiments in these areas and sounded the same note of warning in The Atlantic (May 1971) under the title “Moving Towards the Clonal Man, Is That What We Want?”
On every side people are taught that people are only machines, and as they are so taught their resistance to manipulation in all these ways is weakened, step by step. Modern man has no real boundary condition for what he should do; he is left only with what he can do. Moral “oughts” are only what is sociologically accepted at the moment. In this setting will today’s unthinkable still be unthinkable in ten years?
Man no longer sees himself as qualitatively different from non-man. The Christian consensus gave a basis for people being unique, as made in the image of God, but this has largely been thrown away. Thus there tends, even with the good things, to be a progressive fracturedness in the practice of life as human life. Remember too that for a long time in philosophy, and popularly in some of the mass media, people have been taught that truth as objective truth does not exist. All morals and law are seen as relative. Thus people gradually accept the idea of manipulation, and a bit more gradually open themselves to accept the practice of the varying forms of manipulation.
We can also mention Jacques Monod’s (1910–1976) Chance and Necessity (1971). Here all values are up for grabs. Monod’s theory that everything is a product of chance did not rest on his scientific work, but rather on the fact that he followed the philosophy of Camus. With Monod science blurs into speculation, thus giving his work, for many people, the authority of his proper scientific prestige, when in reality no necessary relationship exists between the book’s speculative and scientific portions. Monod argues correctly that on the basis of nature there is no way man can derive the ought from the is. For him the is is merely what is naturally there, what has willy-nilly come by chance. Therefore, since what is gives no clue to what ought to be, we must choose our values arbitrarily. Once people accept this mentality, it is much easier to impose arbitrary absolutes.
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) suggested that a chemical element be developed to bring man into a place of tranquility (Horizon Magazine, Spring 1968). Based on his view of evolution, he postulates that man has three brains from his past: the brain of the reptile, the brain of the horse, and the unique human brain. Koestler urges the discovery of a chemical that will somehow bring peace between these brains and thus rid man of aggression. Essentially, he is calling for a super tranquilizer. He suggests the possibility that some community would put this in its drinking water, thus forcing all people to accept it. This actually is little different from the suggestion made by those who held the idealistic drug-taking concept of using the drinking water to give LSD to the residents of large cities. The principle involved is no different.
Newspapers reported that Kermit Krantz (1923–2007), head of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Department of the University of Kansas, urged in October 1969 that the pill to control birth be put into the world’s drinking supplies to control population. Some others have suggested that the government could then dispense as it chose another drug to nullify what was in the water, so the state could decide who would be able to have babies. It all sounds very much like the ugliness portrayed in C. S. Lewis’s (1898–1963) That Hideous Strength (1945). But this is not fiction; it is today’s news, as is evidenced by news stories on the work of such men as José M. Delgado, Kenneth B. Clark, and Russel V. Lee.
José M. Delgado (1915–2011) of Yale University has been one of the men using sensors in the brains of monkeys and human epileptics to control their behavior. In a speech to the UNESCO Committee on Human Aggression, Delgado said that we will see a revolution in medicine’s treating aggressiveness by these means in the next few years—a revolution which will be as great as the revolution in the treatment of infectious diseases with antibiotics a few years ago. The future society, he says, will be psycho-civilized with ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain).
Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005), the American social psychologist, when president of the American Psychological Association in 1971, suggested that all political leaders should have to take anti-aggression pills. Then the leaders could not be aggressive. More recently he has advocated “psychotechnology,” that is, experiments with brain control.
Newspapers reported that Clinical Professor Emeritus Russel V. Lee (1895–1982), of Stanford University Medical School, suggested that all public officials should be required to have a comprehensive psychological test each year. Then, in the case of high federal officials, when the testers decided it was necessary, the finding should be transmitted to a committee of Congress which could recommend that the official be removed from office. Both Clark and Lee were forgetting a small thing—that the man who dispensed the pills or who controlled the psychological testing would be king.
In the light of this discussion about social manipulation, three questions arise. First, who will control the controllers? Second, what will happen now that people have no boundary condition indicating what they should do in contrast to what they can do? Third, if mankind is only what modern people say it is, why does man’s biological continuation have value?
Stories on all these techniques for manipulation have been given important space in the mass media. And the more these are absorbed without analysis, the more they open the way for men to think of themselves differently, and the more manipulation becomes acceptable. It is no secret from many articles and from Valery Tarsis’s (1906–1983) book Ward 7: An Autobiographical Novel (1965) that in Russia political prisoners are put in mental wards to be “reconditioned.” A person who does not agree with the social order is declared “ill” and becomes a nonperson, lost in the mental hospital and no longer possessing civil rights. But let us not assume that conditioning must be as crude as that of Ward 7. As we have seen, there are suggestions for the emergence of an elite to manipulate society on this side of the Iron Curtain. And the technical breakthroughs necessary to make this possible have largely been accomplished. Any modern authoritarian government has almost endless means of manipulation.
We can think of subliminal influence as a further example. It is possible to flash something over and over again on a TV or movie screen at such a fast rate that, while a viewer doesn’t know he has seen it, it still has a strong influence upon him. In one experiment an audience was told, subliminally, to purchase a certain soft drink. People did not know they had seen these repeated messages, and yet when the film was over the supplies of this soft drink in the neighborhood were soon exhausted. This technique is banned by law in Western countries, but in totalitarian states why should it not be used? Even in the Western world only a law stands between us and its use; and we must not forget the drift in law toward that which is considered the sociological good at that moment. There would be no way of knowing if subliminal TV messages were beginning to be used.
Actually, TV manipulates viewers just by its normal way of operating. Many viewers seem to assume that when they have seen something on TV, they have seen it with their own eyes. It makes the viewer think he has actually been on the scene. He knows, because his own eyes have seen. He has the impression of greater direct objective knowledge than ever before. For many, what they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world.
But this is not so, for one must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the event. He sees an edited form of the event. It is not the event which is seen, but an edited symbol or an edited image of the event. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be totally the case even if the people shooting the film were completely neutral. The physical limitations of the camera dictate that only one aspect of the total situation is given. If the camera were aimed ten feet to the left or ten feet to the right, an entirely different “objective story” might come across (see ).
Plate 62 Media reporting on events. “. . . not the event which is seen, but an edited symbol.” Photos by Mustafa Arshad.
And, on top of that, the people taking the film and those editing it often do have a subjective viewpoint that enters in. When we see a political figure on TV, we are not seeing the person as he necessarily is; we are seeing, rather, the image someone has decided we should see. And if Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) Triumph of the Will, a documentary on the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg, could be a terrifyingly effective propaganda vehicle as it was for that authoritarian government, what can a properly managed TV schedule, with its edited illusion of reality, be as it enters every home and is watched for endless hours by both young and old?
With an elite providing the arbitrary absolutes, not just TV but the general apparatus of the mass media can be a vehicle for manipulation. There is no need for collusion or a plot. All that is needed is that the worldview of the elite and the worldview of the central news media coincide. One may discuss if planned collusion exists at times, but to be looking only for the possibility of a clandestine plot opens the way for failing to see a much greater danger: that many of those who are in the most prominent places of influence and many of those who decide what is news do have the common, modern, humanist worldview we have described at length in this book. It is natural that they act upon this viewpoint, with varying degrees of consciousness of what they are doing, and even varying degrees of consciousness of who is using whom. Their worldview is the grid which determines their presentation.
A good example is that much of the press (and many diplomats too) saw and spoke against Hitler’s repressions much sooner (in fact, years sooner) than Stalin’s repressions were acknowledged. This is not because the press was communistic, for most members of the press certainly were not; rather they had a worldview, a set of presuppositions, which caused them to look at what was happening in Hitler’s Germany and what was happening in Russia through two entirely different sets of glasses. Edward Behr (1926–2007), Newsweek’s European regional editor—in reviewing Oliver Todd’s The Ducks of Camau in 1975—sets forth the problem well: “. . . the liberal dilemma: how to be against injustice . . . and yet remain lucid enough to combat the authoritarian forms of government that, through the revolutionary process, replace such injustice with tyranny of a different order.”
And not all the media need to be involved in order for manipulation to be effective. In fact, rarely would all the media be involved. It is always unfair to say simply “the press” or “the media” do this or that. They are never to be all lumped together as though they were a monolithic whole. Nonetheless, the media can be a vehicle of manipulation.
There are certain news organizations, newspapers, news magazines, wire services, and news broadcasts which have the ability to generate news. They are the news makers, and when an item appears in them it becomes the news. This ability to generate news rests upon a kind of syndrome or psychology or mindset, not only in the journalistic fraternity but also in influential circles comprised of congressmen, other government officials, and professors. The influence is not necessarily based on circulation, but rather on its reputation with the right people. This is at times consciously cultivated; for example, certain news outlets release their big stories to the wires and the radio and TV networks before the “big story” hits the newsstands.
Not only do these news makers make certain things news—in contrast to that which gets “lost”—but the color they put on the news tends to be picked up as well. Often this tone is set by starting off with what is called a “hard lead,” the first sentence of a news article which is supposed to sum up the story in an eye-catching way. If this is subtly slanted, the tone of the whole story tends to be set, and it becomes the stained-glass window through which that story and perhaps even related stories are comprehended.
To put this in terms we have used before, just as we now tend to have sociological science and sociological law, we tend to have sociological news. Here too objectivity tends to be lost. One of the old ideals of journalism was objectivity, but, as White House correspondent Forrest Boyd (1921–2002) of Mutual Broadcasting remarked to me, “Objectivity has taken a beating in recent years.” The distinction between the news columns and the editorial page has, in many of the most influential papers, become much less clear. An ideological position that has nothing to do with the item under review can even be dragged into the society section or into the movie reviews. The news makers obviously have tremendous power, and if either the elite captures them or if because of their worldview they and the elite coincide, then the media is a ready vehicle for manipulative authoritarianism.
Finally we must not forget the manipulative capacity of the high-speed computer. As a tool it is useful but neutral. It can be used for good purposes or equally for harm. It is not only helpful in scientific and business procedures but even now is useful in medicine to make more rapid diagnoses.
Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man’s total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex, and microwave transmissions which carry much of today’s spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for any privacy.
And as in the case with subliminal TV, what will happen as the pressures on society mount? What will protect us from computer control? To say it another way, what use will the present totalitarian countries make of the high-speed computers being made available to them at the present time?
The question, however, is not limited to the use to which present totalitarian regimes will put the computer. The question is what will all these available manipulating techniques mean in our own countries? We must not think of an overnight change, but rather of a subtle trend by the leadership toward greater control and manipulation of the individual. Of course, some might feel uncomfortable about this increased control and manipulation in a relativistic age, but where would they draw a line? Many who talk of civil liberties are also committed to the concept of the state’s responsibility to solve all problems; so in a time of overwhelming pressures (and with the modern loss of any qualitative distinction between man and non-man) at some point the feeling of uncomfortableness will be submerged.
What of tomorrow? In the United States, for example, a manipulating authoritarian government could come from the administrative side or from the legislative side. A public official in the United States serving at the highest level wisely said, “Legislative dictatorship is no better than executive tyranny.” And one would have to add that with the concept of variable law and with the courts making law, it could come from the judicial side as well. The Supreme Court has the final voice in regard to both administrative and legislative actions, and with the concept of variable law the judicial side could become more and more the center of power. This could well be called “the imperial judiciary.” Cut away from its true foundation, the power of the Court is nothing more than the instrument of unlimited power. This is especially so when it is tied into what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “”.
And as a thinkable possibility, control could be imposed by a foreign power in the “right” mix of strength on their side and weakness on the other.
Of course, the makeup of the government in other countries is different. But that is only a minor detail and does not change the basic thrust of the possibility of a manipulative, authoritarian government arising from some part of the government in that particular country. As the memory of the Christian consensus which gave us freedom within the biblical form increasingly is forgotten, a manipulating authoritarianism will tend to fill the vacuum.
The central message of biblical Christianity is the possibility of men and women approaching God through the work of Christ. But the message also has secondary results, among them the unusual and wide freedoms which biblical Christianity gave to countries where it supplied the consensus. When these freedoms are separated from the Christian base, however, they become a force of destruction leading to chaos. When this happens, as it has today, then, to quote Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), “When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.”
At that point the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two roads to the same end. There is no difference between an authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, an authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it—from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assure the functioning of some political system, business, and the affairs of daily life. That is just what Rome did with Caesar Augustus.