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HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
priate manpower they have to expropriate the brain. What is being
abolished in today's affluent societies, from Moscow to Los Angeles, is
not exploitation, but our awareness of it.
It takes quite a lot of effort to maintain this state of affairs. There
are alternatives to it. But since all of them would inevitably overthrow
the prevailing powers, an entire industry is engaged
in
doing away with
them, eliminating possible futures and reinforcing the present pattern
of domination. There are several ways to achieve this end: on the one
hand we find downright censorship, bans and a state monopoly on all
the means of production of the mind industry; on the other hand, eco–
nomic pressures, systematic distribution of "punishment and reward"
and human engineering can do the job just as well and much more
smoothly. The material pauperization of the last century is followed and
replaced by the immaterial pauperization of today. Its most obvious
manifestation is the decline in political options available to the citizen
of the most advanced nations: a mass of political nobodies, over whose
heads even collective suicide can be decreed, is opposed by an ever
decreasing number of political moguls. That this state of affairs is readi–
ly accepted and voluntarily endured by the majority is the greatest
achievement of the mind industry.
To describe its effects on present-day society
is
not, however, to
describe its essence. The emergence of the textile industry has ruined
the craftsman of India and caused widespread child labor in England,
but these consequences do not necessarily follow from the existence of
the mechanical loom. There is no more reason to suppose that the
industrialization of the human mind must produce immaterial exploita–
tion. It would even be fair to say that it will eventually, by its own
logic, do away with the very results it has today. For this is the most
fundamental of all its contradictions: in order to obtain consent, you
have to grant a choice, no matter how marginal and deceptive; in order
to harness the faculties of the human mind, you have to develop them,
no matter how narrowly and how deformed. It may be a measure of
the overwhelming power of the mind industry that none of us can
escape its influence. Whether we like it or not,
it
enlists our participa–
tion in the system as a whole. But this participation may very well
veer, one day, from the passive to the active, and tum out to threaten
the very order it was supposed to uphold. The mind industry has a
dynamic of its own which it cannot arrest, and it is not by chance but
by necessity that in this movement there are currents which run con–
trary to its present mission of stabilizing the status quo. A corollary of
its dialectical progress is that the mind industry, however closely super-
