Synthesis: Recognizing the Exercise of Control
Joe Stay
ENG-201
June 11, 2013
Over the years there has been a lot of emphasis and movements concerning
the freedom of thought and the idea of individuality. Popular phrases such as “Be yourself” and
“You are special” have been thrown around in everything from popular culture
such as music and television to self-help and confidence programs. Perhaps one may ask, with all these messages
floating around, how do I do this effectively, or how do I know if I need these
messages or not?
In his essay “Propaganda under a
Dictatorship,” author Aldous Huxley comments on the exercise of control over
the masses by a demagogue, citing the example of Hitler during World War II in
Nazi Germany as a specific example. He
first speaks of this particular dictatorship as the first in the modern era,
employing modern technology to be able to control the masses. The term later used and that could possibly
define and illustrate the theme of the essay is the idea of “herd poisoning,”
that is, the behavior of an individual in the context of a mass. Huxley concludes by acknowledging that Hitler
was correct in his assumption of human nature in a crowd and the loss of
individualism and morality that takes place, but asserts that an individual
that is intellectual can escape the effects of herd poisoning.
College
professor at Brigham Young University Thomas G. Plummer makes a similar advance
toward the idea of individualism and the effect of a controlling power over it
in his essay “Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome.” Though he cites various examples to
illustrate his overall theme—that the expectations and demands of an
authoritative figure can be used to eliminate individual thought in a student
or learner—he uses the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a
backdrop. He compares her inability to
think or make decisions for herself with an effect that takes hold upon my learners
who merely parrot what their educators teach them without doing any actual
learning themselves.
Both writers
make fascinating observations on the effect of an external controller in the
lives of individuals, and while Huxley focuses on the influence it has on
individuals acting in a crowd, Plummer zeroes in on how it affects an
individual by him or herself in a learning setting. As I read these two essays, I asked myself
the question, how do we recognize the exertion of control in our lives from another
source? I also feel that in drawing up
an answer to this question, a solution to this problem will also be reached.
In the
examples used, the authors introduce different abstractions of the idea of the
control of one party over another.
Huxley relates the account of Hitler’s Minister for Armaments Albert
Speer and his post-war court testimony on the effects of Hitler’s manipulation
over an entire mass of followers, including both Nazi soldiers and those
sympathetic to his cause. He confirms
that through the use of modern technology employed and ruled by this one man,
“eighty million people were deprived of independent thought… (subjected) to the
will of one man” (Huxley, 1958, 247)
Huxley’s first claim, accompanying this statement and quote, is that it
was the use of modern technology, which had never before been available to the
same magnitude to any other dictator before Hitler, that was the controlling
factor over the eighty million people mentioned by Speer. While Huxley eventually specifies his topic
more on that fact that such a massive amount of people were subjected to control, Plummer makes a different assertion from
the beginning. In “Diagnosing and
Treating the Ophelia Syndrome,” he similarly references perhaps a symbolic
representation of what Huxley addresses.
He quotes the interaction between two players in “Hamlet,” being
Polonius and his daughter Ophelia. The
latter states honestly, “I do not know, my lord, what I should think,” and
Polonius responds, “I’ll teach you.
Think yourself a baby.” (Plummer,
1991, 1) Here he gives the model for what he calls the Ophelia Syndrome, and
what is described in both essays as the unrighteous influence of one person
over another.
Another
common point is the observation of an individual in a group. Hitler had a sound understanding of what a
natural man may become given the anonymity of being a single part of a large
group. Huxley explains it this way:
“To make them more masslike, more
homogenously subhuman, he assembled them, by the thousands and the tens of
thousands, in vast halls and arenas, where individuals could lose their
personal identity, even their elementary humanity, and be merged with the
crowd.” (Huxley, 249)
Hitler exercised a gargantuan amount of control over the
people by simply placing them together, taking advantage of the mere proximity
of human beings together to rouse them up and get the blood flowing, as it
were. Once he could do that, he had less
of a chance of one individual rising up in protest, because the fever of dehumanization
caught a hold of the majority of his audience.
Plummer makes a similar, if less foreboding, observation. Using the characters Polonius to describe the
teacher and Ophelia the learner, he proscribes:
“The Ophelia Syndrome manifests
itself in universities…The Ophelia wants to be a parrot, because it feels
sae. The Polonius enjoys making parrot
cages…I worry often that universities may be rendering their most serious
students…vulnerable to the Ophelia Syndrome rather than motivating them to
individuation.” (Plummer, 2)
In this particular example, Plummer notes that the same type
of thing may happen to the individual while in a group learning
environment. The student becomes a
puppet, or “a parrot” as Plummer describes, to the teacher because that is how
perhaps the universities are organized.
They tell you what to study, how to study, and what information to
recall for a test, and students, in the hope of a good grade, go along with
what the teacher says because, after all, the teacher determines the grade.
The point is
to discover what type of control is being exerted over us as individuals, and
as we discover that see what we can do to prevent it from happening and
removing our individuation. The authors
make a few suggestions. Huxley first
assures us that “the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his
victims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals,
but of men and women in masses.” (Huxley,
250) He notes that “herd poisoning” is
the method used to inflict such “imbecility” upon us, by getting us into large
groups to think as a lawless, animalistic entity as opposed to the “rationality
and interest in facts” (Huxley, 250) that “intellectuals” share. Huxley clearly supports the efforts of
individuation in his essay by condemning the act of herd poisoning, by
attributing much of the atrocities under Adolf Hitler’s reign over Nazi Germany
to this method. Plummer also gives six
“treatments” to promote individuation and the freedom of authoritative thought
control: 1) Seek Out and Learn from
Great Teachers, Regardless of What They Teach
2) Dare to Know and Trust Yourself
3) Learn to Live with Uncertainty
4) Practice Dialectical Thinking
5) Foster Idle Thinking and 6)
Plan to Step Out Of Bounds. (Plummer,
3-8) Whether it is the Ophelia Syndrome
or herd poisoning by which one loses his or her individuation, these
treatments, and understanding the effect they have as well as the consequences
of disregarding their potency, promote the freedom of individual thought and
subsequently the greater learning.
Personally I
share in these two authors’ views. Not
only in the classroom or in psychopathic fascist agendas, we see the issues of
herd poisoning and the Ophelia Syndrome at play all around us from weighty
subjects such as politics and religion (Plummer cites writer S.I. Hayawaka in
saying “As Republicans, we think what other Republicans think. As Catholics, we think what other Catholics
think. And so on….” (Plummer, 1)) to
fashion styles and other facets of popular culture. And so when we jump on the bandwagon and
participate in the herd mentality of an issue, we cloud our own judgment and
warp our own perceptions of what we actually feel or think. I agree that Plummer’s six treatments at
overcoming the Ophelia Syndrome are useful, and that they can also prevent us
from falling into the trap of herd poisoning.
Upon deep
thinking and pondering on these two essays, I feel that it is first necessary
for one to overcome the presence of the Ophelia Syndrome before one can avoid
the pitfalls of herd poisoning. We do
this by recognizing whether or not we are following popular political,
religious, or cultural trends, and if so, is it because we actually adhere to
that based on our innerness, or are we merely an Ophelia at the hands of a
Polonius? When one discovers his or her
own individuality and learns to think for him or herself, I believe that one
becomes one of the “intellectuals” of which Huxley speaks in his essay. According to him, intellectuals possess a
“critical habit of mind (that) makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda
that works so well on the majority” and “are the kind of people who demand
evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies.” (Huxley, 250)
While I assert that one may go by faith as far as it brings one and
those around him or her inner peace, I agree that this definition of an
intellectual is the definition of one immune to the mind-molding intentions of
the powers-that-be. Then and only then
we can defy the advent of the Ophelia Syndrome individually and herd poisoning
collectively, and think as an individual who is free according to his or her
own conscience.
References
Plummer, Thomas G.
“Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome.” BYU
Magazine. 5 April
Huxley, Aldous.
“Propaganda under a Dictatorship.”
Brave New World Revisited. 1958.
www.byui.edu/ilearn
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