Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited was published in 1958 and is a non-fiction commentary by Huxley on his 1930’s novel Brave New World in which he predicts a totalitarian world government that dominates human beings through sex, drugs, conditioning, and propaganda, and also through the creation of a caste system in which the lower working classes are cloned and given very limited brain function. Citizens are engineered before their artificial birth–there is no family and no natural birth–and conditioned from infancy through sleep teaching.

Huxley Admits Some of the Truth

It’s clear that many of the points Huxley makes in Revisited would lay most people open to allegations of “conspiracy theorist!” by mainstream media and educators.

In Revisited, Huxley expects many of the predictions in his novel to come true unless drastic steps were taken. He wrote that they were coming true much sooner than he had expected considering the totalitarianism of the Nazis and Communist Russia (p. 2).

He describes the process of how “more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people” (p. 18), and how independent small businesses are conquered by Big Business.

Huxley explains that the U.S. (a “capitalist democracy”) is controlled by the “Power Elite” (p. 18), referencing Prof. C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite employs millions of workers. It lends money so that we can buy its products. It owns the media. And through all these means it influences the minds of almost everyone.

He argues that technology has led to a society which is controlled by “Big Business and Big Government” (p. 19).

He quotes Erich Fromm to explain how we have been affected by technological advances. Fromm is quoted saying that modern society has undermined our “mental health” and happiness, and turned us into machines with a “frantic drive” for work and pleasure (p. 19).

The most “hopeless victims” are the ones who appear to be “most normal” because they have adjusted the most successfully. Their “human voice has been silenced” “early in life”. They have the least symptoms because they have been successfully “deindividualized” (p. 20).

Huxley acknowledges that anyone who attempts to “standardize the human individual” “commits an outrage” (p. 20).

He says there is a natural instinct to want to “impose order” and unity as in art and science. But he acknowledges that in the world of “politics and economics”, the “Will to Order” becomes very dangerous (p. 21). And Huxley writes this even though he himself has a very strong “Will to Order”, as we’ll see.

He describes how “human diversity” is turned into “subhuman uniformity” (p. 21). The tyrants are the ones who just want to “tidy up” (p. 22).

Jacques Ellul had similar concerns. As we adapt to machines, we become like machines. In order to fit into modern organizations, we have to “deindividualize” ourselves (p. 22).

This is our life now.

Huxley writes that the future [put “future” in quotes–stop it instead of accepting this plan as inevitable] dictatorship will be managed by “social engineers” (p. 26). He predicted the 21st century would be the “era of World Controllers” (p. 26).

Huxley states that “impersonal forces” and social engineers are “pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system” (p. 28) (or a “new dark age” as described by Atwill and Irvin, #3 below).

But this new “medieval system”–still servitude for most–will be made easier by conditioning and drugs (p. 28).

Continued Part 2
Contents

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Related: Commentary on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Part 1

Credits for concepts and other original research:
1. Note: source edition Brave New World Revisited, Electronic editions published 2000, 2010 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York. ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795300165
2. Alan Watt, CuttingThroughtheMatrix.com
3. Jan Irvin & Joseph Atwill: Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering