Page:Minority of One January 1961.pdf/11

In the Country of the Blind

By Robert Anton Wilson

The Strategy of Desire, by Ernest Dichter, Doubleday & Company, 1960. 314 pp., $3.95

We have been hearing a great deal in the last few years about the Motivational Researchers, those social scientists who work for Madison Avenue and tell the big advertisers how to manipulate people scientifically. Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride was an early (1948) and pioneering analysis of what these men were doing to American mores, particularly in the sexual era. Nine years later, in 1957, Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders reached the best-seller lists and alerted millions to what was going on. Meanwhile, responsible social scientists, such as Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, in ETC., denounced the MR men as "harlots."

Now the high priest, pioneer and mahatma of the MR field, Dr. Ernest Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational Research itself, has come forth with a book explaining and defending what the MR men are doing to us.

Let me say at once (knowing that Dr. Dichter's publishers might quote it out of context) that this is, in my opinion, of the most important books of the decade. Dr. Dichter seems to me a new version of the one-eyed man in the country of the blind: instead of being killed by the inhabitants, he has, indeed, become their uncrowned king. He sees what they do not see, and, using this knowledge, manipulates them with the aplomb of the professional puppeteer. The sinister fact that Dr. Dichter is himself one-eyed and blind to the richer part of the spectrum of human life makes him, in turn, a puppet of the higher, more esoteric manipulators of our culture-the "Power Elite" whose values he serves without ever once doubting or questioning.

It is a tragic, frightening and strangely comical vista that is opened to us by this book. It should really be called Doctor Dichter's Defense, because it has the true ring of Shavian farce or Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta. Dr. Dichter's attempts to answer his critics miss the mark, not by inches, but by light-years. He has no notion of what his critics are getting at.

Thus, he assures us that his methods have not been used merely to provoke people into buying new cars that they don't need and can't afford-far from it, some e never of his work has been much "loftier." (The adjective is his own.)) He then gives, as an example, a survey calculated to determine how to persuade more people to join the Air Force. That his critics might be the types who doubt that the increasing militarization of the world is a very "lofty" goal never enters his mind. (P. 17)

Another "lofty" goal to which Dr. Dichter has devoted his attention is "how could we get Americans to stop being afraid of bigness" (Page 17). Those of us who have what we are silly enough to believe are realistic reasons for dreading the activities of monolithic governments, unions and corporations are not apt to be reassured by Dr. Dichter's unctuous and frequently reiterated claim that the goals he serves are "realistic," while his opponents are "weak and defensively rational individuals" who cannot bring themselves to admit that they too have emotions." (Page 15.) The present writer for one will gladly admit that his fear of the Giant Impersonal-whether manifested in General Motors, the Nazi State or the United Mine Workers Union has a strong emotional core to it. But I can't help wondering if Dr. Dichter's frequent implication that an emotional motivation is more "realistic" than a rational one is not partially determined by his allegiance to that Power Elite whose chief characteristic is, as Dr. Robert Lindner pointed out (and Dr. Wilhelm Reich before him), psychopathic infantilism. Consider the psychopathic general in A Bell for Adano, the psychopathic advertising executive in The Hucksters, consider the careers of certain politicians, look into Lindner's jolting analysis of the effect of the psychopath on our civilization (in his Must You Conform?) and ask yourself if the power-struggle Dr. Dichter so happily serves deserves to be called "realistic" after all. Like Hitler's Realpolitik, the values Dr. Dichter defends are the self- defeating values of the infantile grab-at-once predator-mentality that never fails to consume itself in consuming others.

Dr. Dichter has few illusions about the misery of the average man under this system. He recognizes, for instance, "that possibly more than half of all human diseases are psychogenic," that "worry, maladjustment and other emotional disturbances can be responsible for almost anything from heart attack to cancer." (Page 36). Almost 30 years ago, Dr. Wilhelm Reich perceived this as an "emotional plague" ravaging the modern world, and urged social scientists to collaborate in easing the suffering. Dr. Dichter, however, does not have that "unrealistic" and "moralistic" turn of mind (these are his two favorite adjectives of contempt). Rather, he sits down to figure out how to exploit this "worry, maladjustment and other emotional disturbances" to the greater profit of the Power Elite.

He tells us unblushingly about the people who "go from one physician to another until they are finally told the things they want to hear, giving them an excuse to slow down, to take a vacation, to feel pity for themselves, to arouse sympathy." (Page 29). There are enough of these people to make it worthwhile for the Cancer Society to hire Dr. Dichter to do something about them. Dr. Dichter's motivational probing very carefully stops short of asking what there is about work in our civilization that makes people plunge into such neurotic fantasy to avoid it.

Similarly, Dr. Dichter tells us of a survey he did for the Safety Council, in which he determined that "Careless driving is often caused by frustration which results in aggressive tendencies." (Page 29). A few pages later he is unconcernedly let- ting us know that, in our society, "even in our sexual relations we are less interested in the partner than we are in ourselves." (Page 31). Both Dr. Reich, in The Function of the Orgasm, and Dr. Fromm, in The Art of Loving, see this phenomenon as a result of the "market mentality," and seek to cure it, but Dr. Dichter is concerned only with exploiting it further, in the interest of augmenting still more the market mentality. That this truncated, not-fully-human sexuality is causing the aggression unleashed in careless driving never bothers him.

Dr. Dichter once did some research into people's first uses of their first car. He found "that a preponderance of these trips led away from home and were often of several days duration," and that "the first car is often the place where first erotic experiences occur." (Page 35). Similar conclusions, more intuitively discovered, led Philip Wylie to his blistering denunciation of Momism and frustrated sexuality in America, in his Generation of Vipers. It led Dr. Dichter to a new formula for exploiting the situation to the benefit of the Plymouth Corporation.

Sometimes the power-drive behind Dr. Dichter's work is revealed with naked horror. On page 51, for instance, he writes: "The simplest persuasion technique, therefore, is to use psychological blackmail. The soldier is motivated to risk his life honorably by being threatened to lose it dishonorably through execution. Heroism then becomes the choice of the lesser evil.” He leaves little doubt that these "drastic" methods are the prime inspiration of his own more "subtle" methods.

The problem, as Dr. Dichter sees it, is to control people, in the interest of the Power Elite. Dr. Dichter's method is psycholoogical mesmerism. He has no answer to those of us who believe that man should be free to control himself in accordance with the innate laws of what biologists call homeostasis, psychologists call self-motivation and Chinese mystics once called Tao. He does not know that such a position exists, or that it has advocates. He is truly the one-eyed man who sees the blindness of his fellow citizens and manipulates it for his own ends. But he has no conception that it is possible for man to be whole, and happy, and free.