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HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
stations, the telephone and telex exchanges and the printing presses.
And after having entrenched itself, it will, by and large, leave alone
those who manage the public services and the manufacturing industries,
at least
in
the beginning, while all the functionaries who run the mind
industry will be immediately replaced. In such extreme situations the
industry's key position becomes quite clear.
There are four conditions which are necessary to its existence;
briefly, they are as follows:
1.)
Enlightenment, in the broadest sense, is the philosophical pre–
requisite of the industrialization of the mind.
It
cannot get under way
until the rule of theocracy, and with it people's faith in revelation and
inspiration, in the Holy Book or the Holy Ghost as taught by the
priesthood, is broken. The mind industry presupposes independent
minds, even when it is out to deprive them of their independence; this
is another of its paradoxes. The last theocracy to vanish has been Tibet;
ever since, the philosophical condition is met with throughout the
world.
2.) Politically, the industrialization of the mind presupposes the
proclamation of human rights, of equality and liberty in particular. In
Europe, this threshold has been passed by the French Revolution; in
the Communist world , by the October Revolution; and in America,
Asia and Africa, by the wars of liberation from colonial rule. Obviously,
the industry does not depend on the realization of these rights; for
most people, they have never been more than a pretense, or at best, a
distant promise. On the contrary, it is just the margin between fiction
and reality which provides the mind industry with its theater of opera–
tions. Consciousness, both individual and social, has become a political
issue only from the moment when the conviction arose in people's minds
that everyone should have a say in his own destiny as well as in that
of society at large. From the same moment any authority had to justify
itself in the eyes of those it would govern; coercion alone would no
longer do the trick; he who ruled must persuade, lay claim to people's
minds and change them, in an industrial age, by every industrial means
at hand.
3.) Economically, the mind industry cannot come of age unless a
measure of primary accumulation has been achieved. A society which
cannot provide the necessary surplus capital neither needs
it,
nor can
afford it. During the first half of the nineteenth century in Western
Europe, and under similar conditions in other parts of the world, which
prevailed until fairly recently, peasants and workers lived at a level
of bare subsistence. During this stage of economic development the
