This half hour interview from 1958 of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, is incredibly powerful and prophetic. He warns us all, so many decades ago, that the biggest threat to the West is a “soft dictatorship,” where as a result of increasingly sophisticated propaganda and drugs, people would actually learn to love their servitude. If you are pressed for time, skip to the seven minute mark where it really gets going. I would also suggest reading Brave New World Revisited, which was written 26 years after the original book was published and is available free online here. Knowledge is power, which is why they want you slurping down fluoride and sucking your thumbs.
Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
Wow. Wonderful stuff, Mike. Brave New World is a magnificent book. I’ll have to get a copy of Revisited. I’ve seen another interview Wallace did around the same time with Ayn Rand. Try and imagine anyone on a major network today doing these interviews.
Today the major networks are brave new world controlled, Corporate globalist would never allow today such comments. And if they allowed it they would say how wonderful this new world will be. Soft dictatorship ? For how long ? Dont kid yourself. When things will start getting out of control, you will eventually even see concentration camps in USA and other western ex-democracies., No doubt about the people behind Brave New World Inc.
For how long? — excellent point. And how soft?
Some seem to think we may be in for another McCarthy era, so best just to keep one’s head down ’til it blows over. What makes them so sure it won’t be a lot worse, and last a lot longer?
The circumstances are different today, and the elite will go to extreme lengths to maintain their priveleges.
But with crisis comes opportunity. If enough people wake up, and a viable alternative future can be envisioned, we might finally get off the express-way to hell and start moving in a positive direction. Interesting times.
Viable alternative: emphasis on non-violence; large-scale debt repudiation, by one means or another; a change in attitude about debt, and materialism; downsizing of governments, reining in of corporate power–decentralization of power in general; sound money; vibrant free enterprise and high index of self-employment; resurgence of small scale agriculture; greater emphasis on food quality, nutrition, and healthy living; stronger communities; clarity and consensus on environmental realities vs myths; …
XI.
Education for Freedom
“And even to¬day we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, “as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the indi¬vidual himself appears to approach zero. Man’s vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice — none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait.” In a word, Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare, nor even by Bacon or the Earl of Oxford; they were written by Elizabethan England.”
http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/#education
——————————————————————————————
taken from The Doors of Perception
“Gestalt psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised methods for widening the range and increasing the acuity of human perceptions. But do our educators apply them? The answer is, No.
Teachers in every field of psycho-physical skill, from seeing to tennis, from tightrope walking to prayer, have discovered, by trial and error, the conditions of optimum functioning within their special fields. But have any of the great Foundations financed a project for co-ordinating these empirical findings into a general theory and practice of heightened creativeness? Again, so far as I am aware, the answer is, No.
All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their hearers many of these techniques are demonstrably effective. But do we see respectable psychologists, philosophers and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No.”
——————————————————————————————
Foreword Heaven and Hell
This little book is a sequel to The Doors of Perception. For a person in whom ‘the candle of vision’ never burns spontaneously, the mescalin experience is doubly illuminating. It throws light on the hitherto unknown regions of his own mind; and at the same time it throws light, indirectly, on other minds, more richly gifted in respect to vision than his own. Reflecting on his experience, he comes to a new and better understanding of the ways in which those other minds perceive and feel and think, of the cosmological notions which seem to them self-evident, and of the works of art through which they feel impelled to express themselves. In what follows I have tried to set down, more or less systematically, the results of this new understanding.
A.H.