How to make a campaign
How
of a quite different kind of what
has been made before.
And I think we shall see probably
all kinds of new devices
coming into the picture.
mean, for example,
this thing which got a good deal
of publicity last autumn,
the subliminal projection.
I mean, if it stands, this thing, I think,
is of no menace at the moment.
But I was talking the other day
to one of the people
who has done most experimental work
in the psychological laboratory with this,
was saying precisely this,
that it is not at the moment
a danger,
but once you've established a principle
that something works,
you can be absolutely sure
that the technology of it is
going to improve steadily.
And I think his view of the
subject was that,
well, maybe they will use it to some extent
in the 1960 campaign,
but they will probably use it a good deal
much more effectively in the 1964 campaign,
because this is the kind of rate at which technology advances.
And we'll be persuaded to vote for a candidate that we do
not know that we are being persuaded to vote for.
Exactly. I mean, this is a rather alarming issue,
that you're be ing persuaded below the level of choice and reason.
In regard to advertising, which you mentioned just a little ago,
in your writing, particularly in
Enemies of
Freedom,
When you attack
Madison
Avenue, which controls most of our television
and radio advertising,
newspaper advertising, and so forth,
why do you consistently attack
the advertising agents?
Well, you know,
I think that voters play a very necessary role,
but the danger, it seems to me,
in a democracy is this.
I mean, what does a democracy
depend on?
A democracy depends on the individual voter
making an intelligent and rational choice
of what he regards as his enlightened self
-interest in any given circumstance.
But what these people are doing, and what both,
for their particular purposes, the selling good
and the dictatorial propagandists are doing,
is to try to bypass the rational side of man
and to appeal directly to these
unconscious forces below the surface,
so that you are in a way making nonsense
of the whole democratic procedure,
which is based on conscious
choice of operational growth.
Of course, well maybe you have just
answered this next question
because in your essay you write
about television commercials,
not just political commercials,
but television commercials as such.
And how would you put it?
Today's children walk around singing beer
commercials and toothpaste commercials
and then you link this phenomenon in some way
with the dangers of a dictatorship.
Now could you spell out the connection
or how do you feel that you have
done so sufficiently?
Well, mean, here again, this whole question of children,
I think, is a terribly important one,
because children are quite dearly much more
suggestible than the average grown -up.
And, again, suppose that, for one reason or another,
all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies.
You would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children
who are probably going to grow up and be adults quite soon.
I do think that this is not an immediate threat,
but it remains a possible threat.
You said something to the effect in your
essay that the children of
Europe used to be called cannon fodder,
and here in the
United
States they are television and radio fodder.