JFK, Aldous Huxley, and the Age of Paranoid Distraction

In Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley said that mass media deals more in distraction than what is either true or false. This may seem obvious to us now, but back then, it was a very new notion. Huxley felt that propaganda, far from being just a brainwashing technique in the totalitarian toolbox, could be used for good if done in an individual or group’s “enlightened self-interest.” But as we know, very often propaganda is deployed to undermine self-interest.

As Huxley saw it, traditional fascist propaganda wasn’t as dangerous as the distractions offered by mass media. In fact, he reasoned, a dictator’s propaganda program would be entirely unnecessary in the face of an invisible force that could obscure the true and the false:

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

On the anniversary of the JFK assassination, which was also the day of Huxley’s death, invoking these words might help us better understand the impact of the Zapruder film and the endless conspiracy theories it helps create. Because the spectacle of Kennedy’s head exploding is not a visual document of truth or falsehood, but a hole into which people dump their infinite distractions. And, as it turns out, it has also become a magnet for our infinite sets of paranoia, something with which Huxley never reckoned.

When novelist Don DeLillo said the Zapruder film “could probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics,” he wasn’t being hyperbolic. He was essentially proving Huxley's theory. The film, and the assassination itself, has a prismatic quality where it can mean any number of things simultaneously, sometimes even to the same person. It creates a sort of information overload, or input clusterfuck, that has no definitive output or any real purpose other than an acute paranoia that suggests something menacing hides outside Zapruder’s frames, the Warren Commission report, and the Lee Harvey Oswald dossier.

To remix an Arthur Rimbaud phrase, the JFK assassination and its aftermath is a “derangement of all the senses.” A derangement created by the mass media blitz that has always attended it, enabled by the technology of Zapruder's camera, television broadcast, radio, newspapers, books, photographs, etc. In short, JFK’s assassination, riding the crest of the Red Scare, produced an age of paranoia; one whose adolescent years were the ‘60s, and which came to full bloom in the Nixon presidency. ABC’s March 6, 1975 broadcast of the Zapruder film, which triggered a public outcry, was only the icing on the cake of this country’s paranoid daydreams and nightmares.

Our infinite appetite for distractions, including paranoia, allows us to look at the Zapruder film and feel that it is not Kennedy in those frames being assassinated, but some cinematic double. Or to gaze in astonishment at Zapruder’s frames, which seem to capture something staged. (The same tendency would later find an output in the conspiracy theory suggesting the Apollo moon landing was faked.) This source of unreality, which renders notions of true and false irrelevant, might be one cause in a complex chain that prevents us from dealing with our own individual and collective realities. As Huxley said, the mass media spectacle can keep us from thinking about the things that really matter—the present in all its political, social, economic, and other varied forms.

Roughly a decade after Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, French theorist Guy Debord expressed similar thoughts in The Society of Spectacle. In it, he argued that reality has been so altered that it has become merely a rapid succession of carefully choreographed replacement images. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” wrote Debord in the opening chapter of the book. His aim, along with the Situationists, was “to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images.”

And doesn’t all this sound pretty similar to how we live our lives through the internet, or in the nostalgias and other scenarios triggered by advertisements?

With the JFK assassination, which we’ve relived again and again over the years, we fixate on this past event with a titillating narrative—one that’s swallowed in a swarm of noise that grows louder every year. Those poring over it may believe they're seeking out the truth, but they're succumbing to the temptations of the age of post-JFK paranoia and distraction—as part of a global mind made possible by the Internet. And, like the Internet itself, somewhere it's always on, never quite asleep, continually finding some new output in the information overload.

This odd sort of dystopia doesn’t need a dictator—not when it has a type self-regulating system of control with each and everyone one of us pulling the levers. Maybe when people begin to forget JFK, or stop looking for the truth behind his assassination, they will be able to deal with the critical realities of the present and future.