MASS-MINDEDNESS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 6, 2 October 1937, Page 10

MASS-MINDEDNESS

Signor Mussolini’s visit to Berlin has provided the occasion for an extraordinary demonstration of mass-mindedness both in Germany and in Italy. Vast crowds welcomed the Italian Dues to Germany, and a huge multitude welcomed him back to Rome again. One gets the impression of two entire nations mentally dazed and hypnotised by high-pressure propaganda over State-monopolised air and filling the columns of a State-supervised Press, submissive and obedient to the call to do public homage to two mortals who have been elevated by mass propaganda to the status of national deities. This extraordinary development of mass-control, mass-thinking, and mass-action contains a warning for democracies. Mass-minded-ness is essential to the purposes of dictatorial regimes. It involves the complete suppression of the individual, the curtailment of his liberties, and the control of his opinions. In the Fascist countries every individual is made subservient to the State, and this applies both to national Socialism in Germany and to the Corporative State in Italy. This subservience is the essence of Socialism, which regards the State’as supreme, and its individuals simply a mass of units reduced to the level of what Mr. Hamilton described in his address to the National Party conference on Thursday as “human averages.” It is necessary for the achievement of this aim that there should be control of the machinery of publicity and propaganda. In New Zealand the Socialist Government has assumed complete control of the national broadcasting service and is using it in a way that is arousing criticism. Its aim, of course, is to make the public massminded. People must be on their guard against this tendency, which, if not arrested, will in time atrophy the powers of individual thinking among a large section of the community. It is of extreme importance to the political health of a democracy like New Zealand that the people should retain their individuality, and resist in every possible way any attempt to reduce them to a state of mass-mindedness. The process is very subtle, and it may be that we have been led some distance in that direction already without realising the fact. This is largely as the result of our political apathy in the past. The moral should be plain to everybody who attaches any value to those rights of citizenship and individual liberty which British democracies have hitherto enjoyed, and which are the envy of other countries less favourably placed.