Orwell Cubed

by Doug Dowd

Beyond Hypocrisy. Decoding the Mews in an Age of Propaganda (Including The Doublespeak Dictionary) by Edward S. Herman. Illustrated by Matt Wuerker. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 239 pp., $13.

In its very first. years the new United States — with its Declaration of Independence, its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights — created a set of political institutions whose principles and their promise and threat of democracy sent shivers of hope and fear aver much of the globe. In those same years, the foundations were being laid for what came to be the roast capitalist of all capitalist societies — especially after the power of planter capital was crushed by industrial capital.

Today, capitalism and its ways and means continue to ride higher here than elsewhere, the formal institutions of political democracy have been virtually emptied of their substance, and what little of economic and social democracy may ever have existed is close to being gutted. Whatever their institutional and practical limitations, the leading industrial capitalist societies of Western Europe are considerably more representative (and class conscious) in their functioning, and their peoples in some deep sense considerably better off: They need fear sickness, old age, and poverty much less, and the several dimensions of life are richer. That almost all people in the United States would find the foregoing an outrageously incorrect characterization of either the United States or of Europe is itself a measure of how impoverished we have become as a people.

How could it be so? How could the thrilling beginnings of the United States (something other than thrilling for the rising slave and falling Native American populations, of course) come to its present combination of the dreary, the terrifying, the cruel, the thoughtless, with who knows what else is on its way? A large part of the answer to that very large question lies in. the particular advantages that fell like manna from heaven on U.S. and only U.S. capitalism — not least its cornucopia of resources, its fortunate geographic place and time in history, its largely eager immigrant population, its ability to roll away from or pulverize constraining traditions — all that and more not only eased the path toward capital accumulation but reduced the tendencies toward class consciousness and conflict.

But that answer also connects with the particular abilities of those in power in the United States to meet the challenge of democratic institutions with what its practitioners call “public relations” (and that Herbert Schiller has called “mind management”). It is this vital area that Ed Herman examines so well in the book under review.

I say “Ed” because we were students together at Berkeley in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a point relevant to the kind of economist and social critic he has become (although most also there and then went off in quite different directions). It was when the Cold War and McCarthyism and global domination by the USA took hold — the years also of the imposition of a faculty “loyalty oath,” which, beginning at Berkeley, swiftly oozed its poisons over the land.

Herman's. economics writing began in the 1950s with some of the very best work in banking and finance, continued along those lines, and then broadened in the 1980s, with his powerful Corporate Control, Corporate Power (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1981). When the horrors and the toll of U.S. foreign policy rose in the 1960s, Ed increasingly turned his attention in that direction, beginning with Vietnam. The subtitle of the book he then did with Richard Du Boff, America's Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1966) prefigured the additional path his work would follow, the latest steps of which are his recent founding of the crackling periodical Lies of Our Times (L.O.O.T.) and this book, Beyond Hypocrisy. Between his first and his latest work is an admirable collection of essays (especially in the magazine “Z”) and the many books written by himself and with Noam Chomsky, Frank Broadhead, and Gerry O'Sullivan, moving analytically through the areas of systematic deception and “terrorism” (a term itself a matter of systematic deception). The two paths his work has followed place him uniquely and simultaneously in two most honorable U.S. traditions, that of Thorstein Veblen and Ambrose Bierce.

Beyond Hypocrisy may be seen as a masterly compression of what has been dealt with by him and his colleagues in preceding works. In its several chapters, plus the incisive cartoons of Matt Wuerker and Herman's wry and angering Doublespeak Dictionary, the reader finds not only a comprehensive treatment of state-of-the-art distortions of the flow of information, but also a succinct set of analyses of what it is that has been successfully manipulated — only the most important areas of our and others' lives.

We are shown the ways in which the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, an aggressive foreign policy, and innumerable large and small wars have been sold to and bought by the people; and the connected corruption and use of politics and political institutions at home (and abroad) to support the foregoing that simultaneously prevent needed changes at home (and abroad). We are shown how always substantial business privilege has been continually enhanced and, the other side of that particular coin, how class conflict has been subdued, the distribution of income and wealth kept highly unequal and, in recent years, been made much more so. Neither all of that, nor tide true “leading indicators” of our economy — consumerism, an insanely-accumulated pattern of debt, associated inadequate real investment, and a permanent level of high and rising unemployment and poverty — could have come to be without the substantial help of the mind managers in the public and private realms, those skilled and highly-paid hucksters of dangerous products and ideas.

Herman goes on from there to show how we have been both beguiled and pushed ever more deeply into an anti-social decency and pro-business (“free market”) stance, regardless of the human, social, and natural costs; and the means by which even our culture has been commodified — among the more dangerous of its obscenities being “schools for profit,” as an already desperately inadequate educational system is opened up to hyenas who provide”information” and “hardware” in exchange for making advertising materials a part of the daily classroom curriculum — as if children didn't get enough of it at home. Anything for a buck.: anything.

In the 19th century, Lord Acton — who had good reason to know — warned, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In 1948 George Orwell, who detested concentrated private and public power, warned us in his 1984 of the most modern and perhaps the most dangerous uses of concentrated power, the corruption of language. That particular corruption greases the skids for the further concentration and centralization of power, and its ever more destructive practices. Neither Acton nor Orwell foresaw just how much power could or would be accumulated in ever fewer hands, nor how very skilled and totally amoral they would become in distorting language — perhaps the principal achievement of our species — to realize their warped goals.

It has been said that the three most deadly inventions have been those of nuclear power, the automobile, and TV. Of those, it is the last that that is most deadly. Nuclear power, whether used militarily or “peacefully,” kills people and the environment, as does the automobile. We might believe that a thinking people, confronted with the obvious dangers and effects of those two mechanisms, would long ago have found ways to contain or get rid of them. Hut the great seducer, the boob tube, makes it all too easy, in Paul Baran's trenchant words, “to lead us to want what we don't need, and not to want what we do.”

In the 17th century, “Gresham's Law” was established: “Bad money drives out good.” Gresham was referring to the manner in which a currency (then either gold or silver coins), when debased, will ultimately take out of circulation any currency not debased. So it is with our language. As television has slowly but surely replaced reading, and as words have come to mean what the manipulators by constant and artful repetition wish to have them mean, mindlessness — and its couch potato buddies, recklessness and heartlessness — has become a way of life: and death.

Ed Herman and those with whom he has written so much, are sounding an alarm in the night. It is to be hoped against hope that it will be heard; that is, read.

June 23, 2003