A few years ago, I came across this sentence, which was attributed to the US Army Ranger Handbook:
“The two greatest general threats to survival are a desire for comfort and a passive attitude.” While that certainly is good advice for soldiers in combat, I believe it also applies to life in general—yet it is counsel that many of us generally ignore.
We Americans seem to be focused on diverting ourselves from the realities of existence through entertainment, recreation, and a fixation on comfort. We are passive spectators of life, sitting in front of our televisions, living vicariously through the plots of comedies and dramas, or of sports events. Worse, we surf the internet, jumping from site to site in a mindless game of hopscotch. In one of the novels by the late Jim Harrison, a character remarks that, “Computers allow people to waste endless hours on the novelty of their weaker interests.” How true. Our senses are pummeled by advertising offering comfort and luxury—automobiles, houses, hotels, even health insurance policies. We seek a life of 72 degrees, thick carpet, fine wine, and leather upholstery.
While this may offer some comfort from the reality of life, it does indeed threaten our survival, individually and as a society. More than thirty years ago, the author Neil Postman wrote with frightening prescience, in the introduction to his book Amusing Ourselves to Death,
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
What I fear is that both Huxley and Orwell were correct, that our fixation on entertainment, comfort, and other distractions is creating apathy among many Americans, making us vulnerable to those who are ever alert for opportunities to increase their influence and power over us. The threat is not so much from the government as from the powerful plutocrats in the private sector who use the tools of government for their personal gain. Eisenhower warned about the danger of the power of the military-industrial complex. I fear the high tech-entertainment complex more.