11 The End of Truth

The most effective way to make everybody serve the single system of ends towards which the social plan is directed is to make everyone believe in those ends. People can’t just work towards the same ends, they must regard them as their own ends. Totalitarian governments actually succeed in making this happen. While propaganda can work in all kinds of ways- competing advertising, etc.; in a collectivist system all propaganda serves the same end, with no competing messaging.

The moral consequences of this are profound. They in fact destroy all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.  

In order to induce people to accept the official values, they have to be justified, or shown to be connected to the values people already have. This usually entails assertions about causal connections between means and ends. But these things are never clear-cut.

We’ve already seen that agreement on a complete ethical code doesn’t exist in a free society, but will have to be created in a collectivist society. The planner can’t know about all the various differences, but he learns them as he goes and makes decisions as necessity arises. The planning authority must decide on issues for which there are no definite moral rules, and furthermore, will have to justify its decisions to the people, or at least make the people believe they are the right decisions. This will force him to construct theories, which are assertions about connections between facts, which then become part of the governing doctrine.

The most effective way to make people accept the validity of the values they must serve is to persuade them that they are really the same values they’ve always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The most efficient technique is to use old words, but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are as confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of the language. If you haven’t experienced this, it’s difficult to appreciate the confusion it causes and the barriers to rational discussion which it creates.

Perhaps a majority of people are not inclined to think independently. But the minority that do will retain an inclination to criticize and these must be silenced. Coercion can’t be confined to accepting the ethical code underlying the plan. Since much of the code will never be explicitly stated, every act of the government must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism. Public criticism, or even expressions of doubt, can weaken public support, so they must be suppressed.

The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge will be coopted and used solely for these purposes. the truth or falsity of information is of no importance in this system; the only important factor is whether it undergirds the rightness of the decisions made by the authorities, and information that causes doubt or hesitation must be withheld.

A disinterested search for truth can’t be allowed in a totalitarian system. The vindication of the official views is the sole concern. Furthermore, every avenue must be directed towards the official ends. Science for science’s sake, art for art’s sake, are all abhorrent. Spontaneous unguided activity can’t be allowed because it might produce results the plan hadn’t foreseen.

A life of thought is based on the free interaction of individuals possessing different knowledge and different views. The growth of reason is a social process based on the existence of such differences. The tragedy of collectivism is that it starts out to make reason supreme, but destroys reason because it doesn’t understand the process on which its growth depends.