자료: [구글도서] his Collected Works, vol.2 (Univ. of Chicago Press 2009) ; [구글도서] Routledge(1944 [2001]);Some HTML (& its contents) ; Some PDF ; ... 차례/독서노트 ;
※ This is a reading note with excerpts taken and some personal annotations or remarks added, in trying to partially read the above text. So visit the links above or elsewhere to see the original work.
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※ 발췌 (excerpts):
Chapter 11
THE END OF TRUTH
It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceeded everywhere pari passu withe the nationalization of industry.
─E. H. Carr
1. The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends. ... ...
2. This is, of course, brought about by the various forms of propaganda. ... ...
3. While in the totalitarian states this status of propaganda gives it a unique power over the minds of the people, the peculiar moral effects arise not from the technique but from the object and scope of totalitarian propaganda. ... ...
4. The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we must now consider are, however, of an even more profound kind. They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth. ... ...
5. We have seen that agreement on that complete ethical code, that all-comprehensive system of values which is implicit in an economic plan, does not exist in a free society but would have to be created. ... ...
6. And while the planning authority will constantly have to decide issues on merits about which there exist no definite moral rules, it will have to justify its decisions to the people—or, at least, have somehow to make the people believe that they are the right decisions. ... ...
7. This process of creating a “myth” to justify his action need not be conscious. ... ...
8. The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of directing and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians of the totalitarian system. ... ...
9. The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. ... ...
10. The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word “liberty.” ... ...
11. In this particular case the perversion of the meaning of the word has, of course, been well prepared by a long line of German philosophers and, not least, by many of the theoreticians of socialism. ... ...
12. If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. ... ...
13. It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. ... ...
14. Facts and theories must thus become no less the object of an official doctrine than views about values. ... ...
15. This applies even to fields apparently most remote from any political interests and particularly to all the sciences, even the most abstract. ... ...
16. Totalitarian control of opinion extends, however, also to subjects which at first seem to have no political significanc. ... ...
17. It is entirely in keeping with the whole spirit of totalitarianism that it condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose. ... ...
18. Incredible as some of these aberrations may appear, we must yet be on our guard not to dismiss them as mere accidental by-products which have nothing to do with the essential character of a planned or totalitarian system. ... ...
19. The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. ... ...
20. The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues to be decided by authority, are all things which one must personally experience—no short description can convey their extent. ... ...
21. The desire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is, of course, not a thing that is new or peculiar to our time. ... ...
22. Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe. It shows a complete confusion of thought to suggest that, because under any sort of system the majority of people follow the lead of somebody, it makes no difference if everybody has to follow the same lead. To deprecate the value of intellectual freedom because it will never mean for everybody the same possibility of independent thought is completely to miss the reasons which give intellectual freedom its value. What is essential to make it serve its function as the prime mover of intellectual progress is not that everybody may be able to think or write anything but that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody. So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some who will query the ideas ruling their contemporaries and put new ideas to the test of argument and propaganda.
23. This interaction of individuals, possessing different knowledge and different views, is what constitutes the life of thought. ... ...
24. The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. ... ...
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