Bokelskere.no

"Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy."

It is possible nowadays for a government to be
very much more oppressive than any government could be
before there was scientific technique.

Propaganda makes persuasion easier for the government;
public ownership of halls and paper makes counterpropaganda
more difficult;
and the effectiveness of modern armaments
makes popular risings impossible.

No revolution can succeed in a modern country unless it has
the support of at least a considerable section of the armed
forces.
But the armed forces can be kept loyal by being given a higher
standard of life than that of the average worker,

and this is made easier by every step in the degradation
of ordinary labor.
Thus the very evils of the system help to give it stability.

Apart from external pressure, there is no reason why such a
regime should not last for a very long time.
Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy.

It may be worth while to spend a few moments in speculating
as to possible future developments
of those that are oligarchies.

It is to be expected that advances in physiology and
psychology will give governments much more control over
individual mentality
than they now have even in totalitarian countries.

Fichte laid it down that education should aim at
destroying free will,

so that, after pupils have left school,
they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives,
of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters
would have wished.

But in his day this was an unattainable ideal:
what he regarded as the best system in existence
produced Karl Marx.

In future such failures are not likely to occur
where there is dictatorship.

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine,

from a very early age, to produce the sort of character
and the sort of beliefs that the authorities
consider desirable,

and any serious criticism of the powers that be
will become psychologically impossible.

Even if all are miserable,
all will believe themselves happy, because the government
will tell them that they are so.

A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do
things that to us would seem horrifying.

The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia,

and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities
I have in mind. They were said - I do not know with what truth -
to use prisoners in concentration camps as material
for all kinds of experiments, some involving death
after much pain.

If they had survived, they would probably have soon taken to
scientific breeding.
Any nation which adopts this practice will,
within a generation, secure great military advantages.

The system, one may surmise, will be something like this:

except possibly in the governing aristocracy, all but
5 percent of males, and 30 percent of females
will be sterilized.

The 30 per cent of females will be expected to spend the
years from eighteen to forty in reproduction,
in order to secure adequate cannon fodder.

As a rule, artificial insemination will be preferred to
the natural method.

The unsterilized, if they desire the pleasures of love,
will usually have to seek them with sterilized partners.

Sires will be chosen for various qualities, some for muscle,
others for brains.
All will have to be healthy, and unless they are to be the
fathers of oligarchs
they will have to be of a submissive and docile disposition.

Children will, as in Plato's Republic, be taken from
their mothers and reared by professional nurses.

Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences
between rulers and ruled will increase
until they become almost different species.

A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an
organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of
eating mutton.

(The Aztecs kept a domesticated alien tribe for purposes of
cannibalism.
Their regime was totalitarian.)

To those accustomed to this system, the family as we know it
would seem as queer as the tribal and totem organization
of Australian aborigines seems to us. (..)

The laboring class would have such long hours of work and
so little to eat that their desires would hardly extend beyond
sleep and food.
The upper class, being deprived of the softer pleasures
both by the abolition of the family and by the supreme duty
of devotion to the State,
would acquire the mentality of ascetics:
they would care only for power, and in pursuit of it
would not shrink from cruelty.

By the practice of cruelty men would become hardened,
so that worse and worse tortures would be required to give
the spectators a thrill.
Such possibilities, on any large scale, may seem a fantastic
nightmare.

But I firmly believe that, if the Nazis had won the last war,
and if in the end they had acquired world supremacy
they would, before long, have established just such a system
as I have been suggesting.
They would have used Russians and Poles as robots,

and when their empire was secure theywould have used also
Negroes and Chinese.
Western nations would have been converted into becoming
collaborationists, by the methods practiced in France
from 1940 to 1944.
Thirty years of these methods would have left the West with
little inclination to rebel.

_

kildetekst (1953)
The Impact of Science on Society - B. Russell

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