MIND INDUSTRY
103
not hope to catch up with the far-reaching effects of the industrializa–
tion of the mind, since it is a process which will abolish the distinction
between private and public consciousness.
Thus, while radio, cinema, television, recording, advertising and
public relations, new techniques of manipulation and propaganda, are
being keenly discussed, each on its own terms, the mind industry, taken
as a whole, is disregarded. Newsprint and publishing, its oldest and
in many respects still its most interesting branch, hardly comes up for
serious comment any longer, presumably because it lacks the appeal of
technological novelty. Yet much of the analysis provided in Balzac's
Illusions Perdues
is as pertinent today as it was hundred years ago, as
any copywriter from Hollywood who happens to know the book will
testify. Other, more recent branches of the industry still remain largely
unexplored: fashion and industrial design, the propagation of estab–
lished religions and of esoteric cults, opinion polls, simulation and,
last but not least, tourism, which can
be
considered as a mass medium.
in its own right.
Above all, however, we are not sufficiently aware of the fact that
the full deployment of the mind industry still lies ahead. Up to now
it has not managed to seize control of its most essential sphere, which is
education. The industrialization of instruction, on all levels, has barely
begun. While we still indulge in controversies over curricula, school sys–
tems, college and university reforms and shortages in the teaching
professions, technological systems are being perfected which will make
nonsense of all the adjustments we are now considering. The language
laboratory and the short-circuit TV are only the forerunners of a fully
industrialized educational system which will make use of increasingly
centralized programming and of recent advances in the study of learn–
ing. In tht process, education will become a mass media, the most
powerful of all, and a billion-dollar business.
Whether we realize it or not, the mind industry is growing faster
than any other, not excluding armament. It has become the key in–
dustry of the twentieth century. Those who are concerned in the power
game of today, political leaders, intelligence men and revolutionaries,
have very well grasped this crucial fact. Whenever an industrially
developed country is occupied or liberated today, whenever there is a
coup d'etat, a revolution, or a counterrevolution, the crack police units,
the paratroopers, the guerrilla fighters do not any longer descend on
the main squares of the city or seize the centers of heavy industry, as
in the nineteenth century, or symbolic sites like the royal palace: the
new regime will instead take over, first of all, the radio and television
