Mailer on Media

Yonatan Silverman sent mw this excerpt from Norman Mailer's, THE IDOL AND THE OCTOPUS

Pages 139-140

On Leaders and New Revolutionaries

Q. How do you sap the energy of bad leaders who are caught up in their own bad time?

A. In a modern state, the forces of propaganda control leaders as well as citizens, because the forces of propaganda are more complex than the leader. In a bad time, the war to be fought is in the mass media.

If anyone is a leftist, or a radical, if a man becomes a rebel, a wild reactionary, I don’t care what – if he’s somebody who’s got a sense that the world is wrong and he’s more or less right, then the thing to do, if he wants political action, is not to look for organizations which he can join, nor to look for long walks he can go on with other picketeers, but rather it is to devote his life to working subtly, silently, steelfully, against the state.

And there’s one best way he can do that. He can join the mass media. He can bore from within. He shouldn’t look to form a sect or a cell – he should do it alone. The moment he starts to form sects and cells, he’s beginning to create dissension and counterespionage agents.

The history of revolutionary movements is that they form cells, then defeat themselves. The worst and most paranoid kind of secret police – those split personalities who are half secret policemen and half revolutionaries (I’m talking of psychological types rather than of literal police agents) – enter these organizations and begin to manufacture them over and over again from within.

It’s better to work alone, trusting no one, just working, working, working not to sabotage so much as to shift and to turn and to confuse the mass media and hold the mirror to its guilt, keep the light in its eye, never, never, never oneself beginning to believe that the legitimate work one is doing in the mass media has some prior value to it; always knowing that the work no matter how well intentioned is likely to be subtly hideous work. The mass media does diabolically subtle things to the morale and life of the people who do their work; few of us are strong enough to live alone in enemy territory. But it’s work which must be done.

So long as the mass media are controlled completely by one’s enemies, the tender life of all of us is in danger. And the way to fight back is not to look to start a group or a cell or to write a program, but instead it is to look for a job in the heart of the enemy.