A New Opium for the (Not So) New Masses

“Sheeple” is a condescending and somewhat dirty word implying that people (sometimes the majority) are like sheep; that is, they are easily led and manipulated. The fact of the matter is that the term half-captures a reality most people ignore: any society is primarily composed of people whose opinions are formed by adaptable social and cultural pressures.

Take for example, Karl Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opium of the masses.” Aside from the negative connotation of the word “opium,” Marx is at least part right. Religion, specifically in this case Christianity, does inculcate humility, service, and gratefulness. Even if Christianity is true, it relaxes a populace by its emphasis on humble submission. Marx, for all his attacks on religion, was essentially giving the masses a new faith filled with new values, a point Whittaker Chambers makes at length in his seminal work, Witness: “it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.”

Every age is ruled by some great idea or ideas. To say the age is ruled means that most people are ruled, and to say that ideas rule is to say that disseminators of ideas play a part. In the Middle Ages, the Church was the cultural hegemon to whom almost all men paid some form of homage. But for the peasant, without any other authoritative information-providing institution, it was everything.

Today things are the same and yet profoundly different. Technology has made mass media possible, causing perhaps history’s greatest irony besides the death of Condorcet: the technology that was intended to liberate has made possible mass mental manipulation. The mass media allows for the most widespread and deeply ingrained dissemination of information in history. As Jacques Ellul writes:

Through the myth it creates, propaganda [read the mass media] imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.

I can give you the reason for our confusion, a major reason why angry drum-beating is more powerful than reasoned dialogue. The technology we have come to trust has made possible something of which Marx’s medieval opium could only dream. I am no libertarian conspiracy theorist draped in an American flag and wearing a tin foil hat; I am not even someone who believes in most, if any, conspiracy theories. But I do recognize that the problem of our age is the problem of technology and that without a major paradigm shift we will be stuck in the same arguments, with most people entrenched in the attitudes produced by spinsters on both sides. I invite you to think about what I have written and then to meditate on what Marx and Ellul have said. What good is freedom in a technological society? Which is better: the opium or the android?