{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

More Horror For Holden : Devils of Loudun

"Alcohol is but one of the many drugs employed by human beings as avenues of escape from the insulated self."  ~ Aldous Huxley (from the Epilogue of Devils of Loudun)

Is it uncanny that the very last pages of Devils of Loudun contain a "response" to Holden's question about what the speech from the Wolf of Wall Street has in common with Hitler's montage of speeches?  Crowd delirium.

Drugged by the mysterious poison which every excited herd secretes, they fall into a state of heightened suggestibility ... resembling that of a light hypnotic trance.  While in this state they will believe any nonsense that may be bawled at them, will act upon any command or exhortation, however senseless, mad or criminal. 

The final symptom of herd-intoxication is maniacal violence ... the revolutionary leader who hates the status quo has only one wish - to create a chaos on which, when he comes to power, he may impose a new kind of order.  When the revolutionary exploits men's urge to downward self-transcendence, he exploits it to the frantic and demoniac limit.  To men and women sick of their insulated selves and weary of the responsibilities which go with membership in a purposive human group, he offers exciting opportunities for "getting away from it all" in parades and demonstrations and public meetings.  The organs of the body politic are purposive groups.  The crowd is the social equivalent of cancer.  The poison it secretes depersonalizes its constituent members to the point where they start to behave with a savage violence, of which in this normal state, they would be completely incapable.  The revolutionary encourages his followers to manifest this last and worst symptom of herd-intoxication and then proceeds to direct their frenzy against his enemies, the holders of political, economic and religious power.

Meanwhile, new and previously undreamed of devices for exciting mobs have been invented.  There is the radio, which has enormously extended the range of the demagogue's raucous yelling.  There is the loudspeaker, amplifying and indefinitely reduplicating the heady music of class-hatred and militant nationalism.  There is the camera (of which it was once said that "it cannot lie") and its offspring, the movies and television; these three have made the objectification of tendentious fantasy absurdly easy. 

And finally there is that greatest of our social inventions, free, compulsory education.  Everyone now knows how to read and everyone consequently is at the mercy of the propagandists, governmental or commercial, who own the pulp factories, the linotype machines and the rotary presses.

Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs or criminals of so many.

Being in a crowd is the best known antidote to independent thought.  Hence the dictators' rooted objection to "mere psychology" and a private life.

Of course, you won't find the above excerpt in the cinematic adaptations of the text.  The following zootube clips are there just to entice you into contemplation ...





"What do you think, ladies and gentlemen?  I mean ... WOW ..."   

... if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages ...


"Intellectuals of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your brains."