The most effective way of making everybody serve the single
system of ends towards which the social plan is directed is to
make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian
system function efficiently it is not enough that everybody
should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that
the people should come to regard them as their own ends.
Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed
upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted
creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spon-
taneously in the way the planner wants. If the feeling of oppres-
sion in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than
most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the
totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making
people think as they want them to.
This is, of course, brought about by the various forms of
propaganda. Its technique is now so familiar that we need say
little about it. The only point that needs to be stressed is that
neither propaganda in itself, nor the techniques employed, are
peculiar to totalitarianism, and that what so completely changes
its nature and effect in a totalitarian state is that all propaganda
serves the same goal, that all the instruments of propaganda are
co-ordinated to influence the individuals in the same direction
and to produce the characteristic Gleichschaltung of all minds. As a
result, the effect of propaganda in totalitarian countries is differ-
ent not only in magnitude but in kind from that of the propa-
ganda made for different ends by independent and competing
agencies. If all the sources of current information are effectively
under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely
persuading the people of this or that. The skilful propagandist
then has power to mould their minds in any direction he
chooses and even the most intelligent and independent people
cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated
from all other sources of information.
While in the totalitarian states this status of propaganda gives
it a unique power over the minds of the people, the peculiar
moral effects arise not from the technique but from the object
and scope of totalitarian propaganda. If it could be confined to
indoctrinating the people with the whole system of values
towards which the social effort is directed, propaganda would
represent merely a particular manifestation of the characteristic
features of collectivist morals which we have already considered.
If its object were merely to teach the people a definite and com-
prehensive moral code, the problem would be solely whether
this moral code is good or bad. We have seen that the moral code
of a totalitarian society is not likely to appeal to us, that even the
striving for equality by means of a directed economy can only
result in an officially enforced inequality-an authoritarian
determination of the status of each individual in the new
hierarchical order; that most of the humanitarian elements of
our morals, the respect for human life, for the weak and for the
individual generally, will disappear. However repellent this may
be to most people, and though it involves a change in moral
standards, it is not necessarily entirely anti-moral. Some features
of such a system may even appeal to the sternest moralists of
a conservative tint and seem to them preferable to the softer
standards of a liberal society.
The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we
must now consider are, however, of an even more profound
kind. They are destructive of all morals because they undermine
one of the foundations of all morals, the sense of and the respect
for truth. From the nature of its task, totalitarian propaganda
cannot confine itself to values, to questions of opinion and
moral convictions in which the individual always will conform
more or less to the views ruling his community, but must extend
to questions of fact where human intelligence is involved in a
different way. This is so, firstly, because in order to induce
people to accept the official values, these must be justified, or
shown to be connected with the values already held by the
people, which usually will involve assertions about causal con-
nections between means and ends; and, secondly, because the
distinction between ends and means, between the goal aimed at
and the measures taken to achieve it, is in fact never so clear-cut
and definite as any general discussion of these problems is apt to
suggest; and because, therefore, people must be brought to agree
not only with the ultimate aims but also with the views about
the facts and possibilities on which the particular measures are
based.
