Joyanna Adams

Aldous Huxley: Warning Continues…

Nobody Reads

I just finished Brave New World Revisited, and in the last chapter, What Can Be Done? Mr. Huxley continues to outline the problems of 1958 in the world as he saw it.

Very disturbingly, I found that everything in it describes the exact positions that we find ourselves today.

And to think. Huxley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He KNEW the elites of yesterday…and he would say they hadn’t change:

Here are some of his words from that chapter:

*************************

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature: the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States—and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now—recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television watches in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent is distressing, but not too surprising. “Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Ankh bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone—or at least by bread and circuses alone. “In the end,” says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s parable, “in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘make us your slaves, but feed us.”

The cry of “Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty,” may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Scary right?

And he wrote in 1958.

Get the book. Before it’s banned.

May 26, 2021 - Posted by Joyanna Adams | Uncategorized | Brave New World