Victory Through Brain Power

THE MIRACLE AHEAD by George Gallup. 205 pages. Harper & Row. $3.95.

George Gallup is haunted by a pollstergeist. He is possessed by the notion that if enough people are polled on enough subjects, the truth about disease, happiness, longevity, poverty, politics and war will soon become obvious. Then, armed with facts, the population need only use its untapped brain power to usher in "a higher plane of civilization" that would make classical Greece or the Renaissance look like cultural wastelands by comparison. "All that is required," Gallup asserts with Panglossian optimism, "is a firm belief in man's great potentialities and a readiness to accept change."

Gallup's prediction of victory through brain power derives from scientists' estimate that the average Western man uses only 2% to 5% of his mental capacity. Gallup argues that exercising the intellect with weighty issues will toughen flabby thinking, nourish creativity, enlarge perception. Yet Gallup's own thinking is so vague, his theories so contradictory, that the result is simply a plea for mental uplift with very little to support it.

The assumption that increase in knowledge will enable society to better manage its affairs is not borne out by history. Gallup praises individualism but concludes that supersecret group thinking, such as the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb, is the intellectual wave of the future. As for the roseate vision that mental muscle building will enable man to "solve any problem that comes within his purview," even Gallup occasionally sobers up. "After a time," he concedes, "human beings run out of ideas."

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