Brave New World Revisited

Under a dictatorship pharmacists would be in­structed to change their tune with every change of circumstances. In times of national crisis it would be their business to push the sale of stimulants. Between crises, too much alertness and energy on the part of his subjects might prove embarrassing to the tyrant. At such times the masses would be urged to buy tran­quillizers and vision-producers. Under the influence of these soothing syrups they could be relied upon to give their master no trouble.

As things now stand, the tranquillizers may prevent some people from giving enough trouble, not only to their rulers, but even to themselves. Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquillity (and especially of tranquillity imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropri­ate.

At a recent symposium on meprobamate, in which I was a participant, an eminent biochemist playfully suggested that the United States government should make a free gift to the Soviet people of fifty billion doses of this most popular of the tranquillizers. The joke had a serious point to it. In a contest between two populations, one of which is being constantly stimu­lated by threats and promises, constantly directed by one-pointed propaganda, while the other is no less con­stantly being distracted by television and tranquillized by Miltown, which of the opponents is more likely to come out on top?

As well as tranquillizing, hallucinating and stimulat­ing, the soma of my fable had the power of heighten­ing suggestibility, and so could be used to reinforce the effects of governmental propaganda. Less effectively and at a higher physiological cost, several drugs al­ready in the pharmacopoeia can be used for the same purpose. There is scopolamine, for example, the active principle of henbane and, in large doses, a powerful poison; there are pentothal and sodium amytal. Nick­named for some odd reason "the truth serum," pento­thal has been used by the police of various countries for the purpose of extracting confessions from (or per­haps suggesting confessions to) reluctant criminals. Pentothal and sodium amytal lower the barrier be­tween the conscious and the subconscious mind and are of great value in the treatment of "battle fatigue" by the process known in England as "abreaction ther­apy," in America as "narcosynthesis." It is said that these drugs are sometimes employed by the Commu­nists, when preparing important prisoners for their public appearance in court.

Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurol­ogy are on the march, and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be dis­covered. Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both en­slave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.

IX Subconscious Persuasion

In a footnote appended to the 1919 edition of his book, The Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud called attention to the work of Dr. Poetzl, an Austrian neu­rologist, who had recently published a paper de­scribing his experiments with the tachistoscope. (The tachistoscope is an instrument that comes in two forms — a viewing box, into which the subject looks at an image that is exposed for a small fraction of a second; a magic lantern with a high-speed shutter, capable of projecting an image very briefly upon a screen.) In these experiments Poetzl required the sub­jects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a tachisto­scope. . . . He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamed by the subjects during the following night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject provided ma­terial for the construction of the dream."

With various modifications and refinements Poetzl’s experiments have been repeated several times, most recently by Dr. Charles Fisher, who has contributed three excellent papers on the subject of dreams and "preconscious perception" to the Journal of the Ameri­can Psychoanalytic Association . Meanwhile the academic psychologists have not been idle. Confirming Poetzl’s findings, their studies have shown that people actually see and hear a great deal more than they consciously know they see and hear, and that what they see and hear without knowing it is recorded by the subconscious mind and may affect their conscious thoughts, feelings and behavior.

Pure science does not remain pure indefinitely. Sooner or later it is apt to turn into applied science and finally into technology. Theory modulates into in­dustrial practice, knowledge becomes power, formulas and laboratory experiments undergo a metamorphosis, and emerge as the H-bomb. In the present case, Poetzl’s nice little piece of pure science, and all the other nice little pieces of pure science in the field of preconscious perception, retained their pristine purity for a surprisingly long time. Then, in the early au­tumn of 1957, exactly forty years after the publication of Poetzl’s original paper, it was announced that their purity was a thing of the past; they had been applied, they had entered the realm of technology. The an­nouncement made a considerable stir, and was talked and written about all over the civilized world. And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projec­tion," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings mass entertainment now plays a part compara­ble to that played in the Middle Ages by religion. Our epoch has been given many nicknames — the Age of Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age. It might, with equally good reason, be called the Age of Televi­sion Addiction, the Age of Soap Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey. In such an age the announcement that Poetzl’s pure science had been applied in the form of a technique of subliminal projection could not fail to arouse the most intense interest among the world’s mass entertainees. For the new technique was aimed directly at them, and its purpose was to manipulate their minds without their being aware of what was being done to them. By means of specially designed tachistoscopes words or images were to be flashed for a millisecond or less upon the screens of television sets and motion picture theaters during (not before or after) the program. "Drink Coca-Cola" or "Light up a Camel" would be superimposed upon the lovers’ em­brace, the tears of the broken-hearted mother, and the optic nerves of the viewers would record these secret messages, their subconscious minds would respond to them and in due course they would consciously feel a craving for soda pop and tobacco. And meanwhile other secret messages would be whispered too softly, or squeaked too shrilly, for conscious hearing. Con­sciously the listener might be paying attention to some phrase as "Darling, I love you"; but subliminally, be­neath the threshold of awareness, his incredibly sensi­tive ears and his subconscious mind would be taking in the latest good news about deodorants and laxatives.