Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, National Security Affairs, Foreign Economic Policy, Volume I

Policy Planning Staff Files

Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to Mr. Robert G. Hooker, Staff Member

confidential

[Washington,] October 17, 1949.

I have no objection to this and will be glad to implement it.¹ But I don’t think it will carry us very far along our way, for it seems to me the basic facts are fairly clear. I would point to the following:

1. Actually, in the western world, communism appeals to very few people. The average in advanced countries seems to hover between 5 and 15 per cent. The movement does not rely on popular appeal. This factor is therefore not of great importance.

2. Totalitarianism has a far wider appeal when it is combined with nationalism. The strong international discipline of the communists is probably the principal factor which holds down their membership.

3. With respect to that small percentage for whom communism does have an appeal, the following may be noted:

(a) A considerable portion of the group represent a natural mutation of the species: the born Quislingites, of whom there is a certain percentage in every people. This is a certain margin of human psychology, existent everywhere, and characterized by jealousy, sense of inadequacy and inferiority, bitterness, and above all escapism. This type turns on his own society largely because it is the only way he can call attention to himself. The doctrine is largely unimportant. People like this could rationalize a belief in anything, provided it were vague, pseudo-scientific, and uncompromisingly averse to their accustomed environment.

(b) Appeal is far stronger to “intelligentsia” than to workers. Intellectuals are generally more ambitious, more pretentious, vainer, more confused, more frustrated than workers. Communism addresses itself to the unsuccessful and untalented ones.

(c) Appeal is relatively strong to maladjusted groups: in our country—Jews, Negroes, immigrants—all those who feel handicapped in the framework of a national society.

(d) In general, the appeal is emotional rather than economic: i.e., it evokes responses which stem from emotional rather than economic causes. Desire to win appreciation, attention and power is a much more important component of communism than desire to better a material condition.

4. The insecurities of a complicated civilization, which are discussed in your memo, are important not so much for their influence on those who join totalitarian political movements as for their effect in softening up great masses of people for the acceptance of totalitarian rule. But even here, they stem not so much from fear of unemployment as such, or even from inability to understand the processes in which individual life revolves (something known to many generations before this one); they stem rather from the disintegration of basic social groups in which the individual found the illusion of security through the sense of belonging—namely, the family, the local community, the neighborhood, the recreational group. Millions of Americans are today bewildered and anxious because they are trying to solve as individuals problems which they could solve only by a collective approach. But what is causing these groups to disintegrate is the urbanization of life—that is, the revolution in living wrought by modern technology, rather than just complexity. As this urbanization fragmentizes social groups, it centralizes the media of psychological influence (press, radio, television, movies) and makes recreation passive and vicarious rather than active and immediate. At the same time that it breaks up the groups, it centralizes the media of psychological influence (press, radio, leadership, self respect and self development, it provides a vast fog of recreational stimuli which demand nothing of the individual, develop nothing in him, and tend to atrophy his capacity for self expression. The result of all this is a gradual paralysis of the sense of responsibility and initiative in people, the tendency to buck all problems to higher authority, the assumption that there is some higher authority, whether it be the Government or the voice on the radio or the management of great economic concerns, which is looking after things and that it is neither necessary nor useful nor right that the individual should be asked about them.

5. The changes being wrought in the living patterns of this country by technological developments are ones which we make no pretense of being willing to control by governmental action. We are prepared to let advancing technology do whatever it may to these living patterns, on the theory that anything else would be undemocratic and paternalistic. There is no chance that we can be brought to act otherwise. One of the peculiarities of such changes is that the great masses of people who are the victims of them are quite incapable of perceiving or comprehending the causal relationships involved. To try to combat what is taking place would require a firm strong government, capable of exerting extensive disciplinary power and of making people do things which they would not want to do and for which they cannot see the reason. In other words, the evils caused by a laissez-faire attitude toward technological advances have already produced illnesses which can only be cured by a high degree of paternalism. Only some form of a benevolent authoritarianism could manipulate living patterns in a manner adequate to restore a framework for healthy and vigorous citizenship.

6. The main relevance of all this to foreign policy is that which I stressed in my Dartmouth speech last winter. The things I have pointed to above mean that this country has not found means for controlling fully its own life and for assuring the maintenance of a climate favorable to the vitality of representative government. A chasm has grown up between the national myth and the current reality, and this chasm is deepening day by day. This means that our institutions have not yet met their final test; and the question raised by Lincoln as to whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure” has not yet been answered. In this case, not being the masters of our own soul, are we justified in regarding ourselves as fit for the leadership of others? All our ideas of “world leadership”, “the American century”, “aggressive democracy”, etc. stand or fall with the answer to this question.

But our job, as the planners of foreign policy, is only to assess correctly the implications of all this, not to try to find means for combatting the domestic trends to which I have referred.

George F. Kennan

1. Reference is to a memorandum toy Hooker on the nature of the appeal of Communism, not printed. Hooker transmitted the paper to Paul H. Nitze, Deputy Director of the Policy Planning Staff, on October 11, suggesting that consideration be given to possible State Department encouragement of the preparation of a detailed study of the subject by a foundation or university. (Policy Planning Staff Files)