The techniques of amusement and diversion are different from the other human techniques we have considered. Materially, these techniques are identical with those of propaganda: films, radio, newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, books and phonograph records. But the hierarchy of these means is not the same. For example, the cinema has first place and plays a more important role than the radio. By comparison, in the propaganda hierarchy radio is the instrument of choice. Here too we find the exploitation of techniques of the subconscious, but they are exerted with much less pressure. Moreover, the range and sphere of these subconscious techniques is different. Amusement seeks to distract, propaganda to lead. The principal difference, however, relates to spontaneity. Propaganda technique is calculated and deliberate, whereas amusement technique is spontaneous and nondeliberate. The former is the result of the organizer’s decision; the latter, of the mob’s need.

Consider the average man as he comes home from his job. Very likely he has spent the day in a completely hygienic environment, and everything has been done to balance his environment and lessen his fatigue. However, he has had to work without stopping and under constant pressure; nervous fatigue has replaced muscular fatigue. When he leaves his job, his joy in finishing his stint is mixed with dissatisfaction with a work as fruitless as it is incomprehensible and as far from really productive work. At home he “finds himself” again. But what does he find? He finds a phantom. If he ever thinks, his reflections terrify him. Personal destiny is fulfilled only by death; but reflection tells him that for him there has not been anything between his adolescent adventures and his death, no point at which he himself ever made a decision or initiated a change. Changes are the exclusive prerogative of organized technical society, which one day may have decked him out in khaki to defend it, and on another in stripes because he had sabotaged or betrayed it.

There was no difference from one day to the next. Yet life was never serene, for newspapers and news reports beset him at the end of the day and forced on him the image of an insecure world. If it was not hot or cold war, there were all sorts of accidents to drive home to him the precariousness of his life. Torn between this precariousness and the absolute, unalterable determinateness of work, he has no place, belongs nowhere. Whether something happens to him, or nothing happens, he is in neither case the author of his destiny. The man of the technological society does not want to encounter his phantom. He resents being tom between the extremes of accident and technical absolutism. He dreads the knowledge that everything ends “six feet under.” He could accept the six-feet-under of his life if, and only if, life had some meaning and he could choose, say, to die. But when nothing makes sense, when nothing is the result of free choice, the final six-feet-under is an abominable injustice. Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact.

Man is still capable of lucid moments about the future. Propaganda techniques have not been able wholly to convince him that life has any meaning left. But amusement techniques have jumped into the breach and taught him at least how to flee the presence of death. He no longer needs faith or some difficult asceticism to deaden himself to his condition. The movies and television lead him straight into an artificial paradise. Rather than face his own phantom, he seeks film phantoms into which he can project himself and which permit him to live as he might have willed. For an hour or two he can cease to be himself, as his personality dissolves and fades into the anonymous mass of spectators. The film makes him laugh, cry, wonder, and love. He goes to bed with the leading lady, kills the villain, and masters life’s absurdities. In short, he becomes a hero. Life suddenly has meaning.

The theater presupposed an intellectual mechanism and left the spectator in some sense intact and capable of judgment. The motion picture by means of its “reality” integrates the spectator so completely that an uncommon spiritual force or psychological education is necessary to resist its pressures. In any case, people go to the movies to escape and consequently yield to its pressures. They find forgetfulness, and in forgetfulness the honied freedom they do not find in their work or at home. They live on the screen a life they will never live in fact. It will be said that dreams and hope have been the traditional means of escape in times of famine and persecution. But today there is no hope, and the dream is no longer the personal act of an individual who freely chooses to flee some “reality” or other. It is a mass phenomenon of millions of men who desire to help themselves to a slice of life, freedom, and immortality. Separated from his essence, like a snail deprived of its shell, man is only a blob of plastic matter modeled after the moving images.

There is a vast difference between the dreams and hopes of the past and those of the present. Formerly, with the conviction that “things would change,” hope was a beacon illuminating the future. Dreams represented flight, but flight into one’s own self. In motion pictures, however, the future is not involved. On the strip of film, what ought to change has already changed. And the flight of cinematic dreams has nothing to do with the inner life; it concerns mere externals. When people leave the movie theater, they are full of the possibilities they experienced in the shadows; they have received their dose of the inner life. Their problems too have undergone a transformation. They are now problems posed by the film. And they have the blissful, if contradictory, impression that these cinematic problems, which occupy the whole field of their consciousness, are both strong enough to put all vexations to flight and unreal enough not to be troublesome. The modern passion for motion pictures is completely explained by the will to escape. Just as the tempo of work or the authority of the state presupposes spiritual adhesion and hence propaganda, so the human condition under the regime of technique supposes the escapism which diversional techniques offer. One cannot but marvel at an organization which provides the antidote as it distills the poison.

Man, emptied by the technical mechanism of all personal interests, sometimes finds himself at home. What shall he talk about? Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life’s vexations. Not fear, nor anguish, despair, or passion. All that has always been suppressed in his subconscious. But he has always been able to talk companionably about vexatious things, hail on his vines, mildew, machinery out of order, a troublesome prostate, and so forth. Now technique intervenes, repairs everything, and creates a world in which everything works well, or well enough. Even if some petty vexations persist, the individual feels no need to speak of them and turns toward the efficient silence-fillers, television and radio, prodigiously useful refuges for those who find that family life has become impossible.

Jean Laloup and Jean Nelis evince a curious optimism when they write that radio and television have reconstituted the family. Television doubtless facilitates material reunion. Because of it the children no longer go out in the evenings. The members of the family are indeed all present materially, but centered on the television set, they are unaware of one another. If they cannot stand or understand one another, if they have nothing to say, radio and television make this easy to bear by re-establishing external relations and avoiding friction. Thanks to these technical devices, it is no longer necessary for the members of a family to have anything at all to do with one another or even to be conscious of the fact that family relations are impossible. It is no longer necessary to make decisions. It is possible for a married couple to live together a long time without ever meeting each other in the resonant emptiness of television. This too is a curious means of escape, of hiding from others instead of from oneself. It is the modem mask man puts on every evening, which unfortunately, lacks the virtues of the ancient mask, demoniac and divine.

One of the best studies of the problem of the radio, that of Roger Veille, reminds us that the ear is the great “fault” in man. Through it he perceives the “silence of the infinite spaces”; it is the point of origin of his great disturbance. The ear, unlike the eye, evokes mystery and renunciation; it is the center of anguish and anxiety. And radio fills this opening, protecting man against the silence and the mystery by amusing him. The program makers know all this and create their programs as a function of this escapism, not for motives of crass commercialism or Machiavellianism (as some people seem to think), but because they themselves partake of the human condition and seek protection against its anguish. It follows, then, that the radio makes a clean break between everyday social reality and the dreams and narcotics which its duty is to dispense. To use the words of Veille, it must be one of the “liberating distractions.” It must deliver the individual from objective constraints. It is a public utility dealing in moral comfort, charged with offsetting the tragedies of family living, social pressures, and the vexations of modem life.

The radio must compensate for the inhumanities of life in today’s cities. In a milieu in which the human being is unable to make true friendships or to have profound experiences, the radio must furnish him with the appearances of reality, acquaintance, and human proximity; it must captivate and reassure him. But Veille rightly inquires whether “the radio may not gradually habituate to mere auditory images those to whom it gives the illusion of belonging; and, what is worse, condition them to the absence of interlocutors.” Unfortunately, the answer to Veille’s question is clear. There is no other comparable instrument of human isolation. The radio, and television even more than the radio, shuts up the individual in an echoing mechanical universe in which he is alone. He already knew little enough about his neighbors, and now the separation between him and his fellows is further widened. Men become accustomed to listening to machines and talking to machines, as, for example, with telephones and dictaphones. No more face-to-face encounters, no more dialogue.

In a perpetual monologue by means of which he escapes the anguish of silence and the inconvenience of neighbors, man finds refuge in the lap of technique, which envelops him in solitude and at the same time reassures him with all its hoaxes. Television, because of its power of fascination and its capacity of visual and auditory penetration, is probably the technical instrument which is most destructive of personality and of human relations. What man seeks is evidently an absolute distraction, a total obliviousness of himself and his problems, and the simultaneous fusion of his consciousness with an omnipresent technical diversion.

In diversion we are at a stage of development in which technique answers the needs of men in a technical society, but a society in which they are still free to use or not to use the available technical means. “If you wish to escape,” says technique, “you are welcome to try.” Modern men, however, are beginning to be aware of their need at all costs not to challenge the technical situation, and to recognize that technical means exist to meet this need. Take, for example, the extraordinary success of Butlin’s vacation camps in Great Britain. Butlin grasped the fact that in a world at once exacting and depersonalizing in the extreme, the vacation most men prefer must be a genuine vacuum, an ever greater depersonalization which gives the impression of freedom but which never allows the individual to come face to face with himself, even materially. To achieve this end, Butlin in 1938 organized his -“family vacation camps.” The vacationer lives in a crowd on a strict timetable judiciously arranged so that each day will be different, giving the impression of constant novelty and variety. Games, songs, theater, eating, “fun” succeed one another at a rapid tempo from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight. “The important thing,” says Butlin, “is that no one is ever left to himself even for a moment.” Evervthing takes place in a spirit of gaiety and liveliness and under the direction of game leaders who are “specialists.” All available means are employed to persuade the individual that he is happy. Since each camp can accommodate four thousand persons, there is little difficulty in arranging for the vacationer to pass his holiday, which lasts a fortnight, among a crowd of people.

The whole thing represents an elaborate and rigorous enterprise for becoming unconscious, carried out by a technique described in detail by Butlin himself. Butlin minces no words. The problem, as he sees it, is to make his customers systematically lose consciousness, not as before from political motives, but from motives of pure entertainment. Here is technique put to the service of a kind of Pascalian distraction. Not exactly the same kind, since it is not so much a matter of dodging the dilemma of man facing eternity as of dodging the conflict between man and his situation in this life; of forgetting to meditate not so much on the two infinitives (something most men are incapable of) as on the obvious crashing absurdity of life in a technical world. The average man is inevitably conscious of this. He must therefore becloud his consciousness at any cost, and in this, it seems, he is in essential accord with the needs of a technical society. Our thesis is verified by the prodigious success of Butlin’s camps, a success which is perhaps the most astonishing thing about them. In 1947, four hundred thousand persons vacationed in them, and the number has been growing steadily. And bear in mind that these figures represent Englishmen who by their very nature would seem the most hostile to this kind of thing.

This demonstrates the complete adaptation of technical amusements to technical society and to their sociological function. How illusory is the effort to make of the motion pictures an educative art and a means of instruction! Art films and films with philosophic or political intent simply do not correspond to the wishes of the movie-going public. It can, of course, be legitimately maintained that motion pictures are nonetheless a means of educating the public. But here we must guard against a certain confusion; education of the spectator’s taste and understanding takes place, but only incidentally. The clouding of his consciousness is paramount, and art and science can contribute to this end. The film can succeed only if it puts art to the service of a sociologically necessary and technically possible enterprise; only if art (and indoctrination disguised as science) becomes the new means of wrenching men from reality. If this were not the case, the public would not have patronized films like the first ones of Orson Welles.

Spontaneous or organized mechanisms of entertainment such as I have described are useful only to the degree that propaganda technique is undeveloped. Propaganda, as it develops, tends to assimilate amusement, which either makes its appearance as an efficient propaganda medium or, at a later stage, is exploited for purposes of human adaptation.

This last makes it impossible to agree with Veille’s suggestion that the Swedish or Russian radio is not concerned with “distractions,” with building up a social structure of lies and soporifics, because the citizens of these states have been “set free” and no longer “feel the wearisome continuity of daily obligations.” Veille, it may be noted, tends implicitly to see in this fact one of the beneficial effects of socialism. In reality, the condition he describes is due to the fact that the Swedes are the most “integrated” and adapted of all mankind. They have alienated themselves to the greatest possible degree in the organization, so that they are no longer conscious of any cleavage between personality and technique, and do not therefore need an artificial paradise. In the case of the Russians, propaganda has cleverly absorbed and replaced amusement. The Russian citizen subjected to his government’s daily propaganda (the most highly developed in the world) is unaware of anxiety. But, then, the same was true of Hitler’s Germany