Commentary on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited – Part 9
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Revisited
Huxley makes a key point about the individual, claiming that “his contributions appear to approach zero; in practice they are all-important” (105).
An individual does the work. An individual perceives, thinks, has feelings, motivations and the will to overcome.
A “group is not an organism, but only a blind unconscious organization.”
Huxley tells us some truth, and we follow him down the garden path. That’s how this works.
In the plot of BNW (Brave New World), the only hint of rebellion (besides the “Savage” John) came from two individuals (one Alpha and one Beta).
Huxley’s “Community” Systems
Both “over-organization” and “over-population” are Trojan horses for scientific dictatorship.
With “over-organization”, Huxley spins the “solution” as new types of “communities.”
He writes that we should “break up” the “functional collectives” into “self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government” (118).
He’s saying what we want to hear. There’s a problem with the system. We can do better. It comes across as sounding very reasonable but he isn’t specific. He just lists some Utopian systems and lets the reader assume these are wonderful ideas for “freedom”.
I’m sure he’s in favor of new systems of organizing communities, but I don’t believe he wants these to be independent of a global government. His brother Julian was involved with the United Nations. In all his talk about population, conservation and education, Huxley is implying–without being explicit–a detailed level of control over the world by a central institution.
Cities
Huxley writes about getting away from the city where a normal life is impossible, where there are no real interactions and relationships. And then he says that we should revive “the small country community”. Sounds like a good plan. But . . .
Then he seems to contradict himself and says we should “humanize the metropolis” to create the equivalent in the city, a familiar idea (http://liveablecities.org.uk) by now.
Since Agenda 21, the agenda is for everyone to live in more densely-populated areas. We have “Smart Growth” or “Places to Grow” implemented all over (e.g. Ontario and California). It looks like Huxley prepared the marketing campaign decades ago for “humanizing the metropolis.”
Decentralizing or Centralizing
Huxley mentions the advocacy by some people of the “decentralization of economic power and the widespread distribution of property.” Whatever he means by this, what we’ve seen in reality is more “planning”.
Instead of encouraging private ownership and property rights for everyone, we’ve seen centralization of power through legislation, and less and less protection for individual private owners from the seizure of land and resources by governments and corporations.
Huxley writes about the “dispersal of production, for a return to small-scale “village industry”.”
All of this talk about “villages” sounds very feudal, but it’s romanticized.
Some of us live in actual “villages” or “hamlets”, but there are also densely-populated neighbourhoods called “villages.” So you can call anything a “village” and it makes you feel better about your situation. Because of Tolkien, the word “village” also makes me think of hobbits drinking beer in a pub.
Remember the terms global village and it takes a village?
This is propaganda and is an example of artificial associations being made between pleasant images and not-so-pleasant realities you’re supposed to adapt to (reduced status or crowded conditions).
Huxley mentions different theories about “communities” such as that of the Syndicalists who had plans for a “stateless society.” He mentions Dubreuil also. And then he mentions Arthur Morgan and Baker Bromwell who wrote about “the practice of a new kind of community living on the village and small-town level.” He mentions Marcel Barbu in France and his communities, and also the Peckham Experiment in London which was about creating a “true community” even in a city (119).
Another concept Huxley suggests is that described in the novel Walden Two by B. F. Skinner (same scientist he criticized), a Utopian novel about a “self-sustaining and autonomous community, so scientifically organized that nobody is ever led into anti-social temptation . . .” Supposedly there is no coercion and everyone’s happily doing whatever they “ought” to do. It still sounds like “over-organization” to me and a case of How can a dictatorship best disguise itself as something pleasant? Huxley has the same idea with his novel, so he has some nerve bringing up Walden Two as an antidote.
He states that it’s dangerous to let power be “concentrated in the hands of a ruling oligarchy; nevertheless power is in fact being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands” (119).
My conclusions about his experimental communities as a “solution” to the concentration of power:
First, he doesn’t provide details, so the “buyers” don’t really know what he’s “selling” to “fix” the problem.
Second, these kinds of systems have been implemented over the decades via Agenda 21 policies: regionalization, amalgamation, “Smart Growth”, “Places to Grow”, “Vision X”, “Sustainable Y”. These involve breaking down the structures of traditional and constitutional communities so that “better” “planning” can be done. Doesn’t everybody want a “better” “community”? Just let some unaccountable private NGO group which is following plans from higher up tell you what’s “better.”
Third, at least some of these systems are meant to exert detailed invasive control over our lives. The dictatorship comes down to the local level. You have your friendly local surveillance cameras installed and it’s always for a “good reason.” The local politician probably doesn’t even think of resisting it when the policy plops on his desk–from higher levels of government, the UN, or private associations of police chiefs or whatever–backed by funding or other pressures. And he or she certainly doesn’t ask you about what you think or how it’s funded. The world is increasingly planned, and what the politicians do is planned by some other agency.
Fourth, there is no way these pacified well-behaved pill-popping “communities” would be independent of a global dictatorship of meddling social engineers backed by military power. Huxley doesn’t mention anything about who is going to distribute all the brochures to train the “community leaders” in how they are supposed to boss people around.
Local communities would be in a weaker position than medieval feudal villages, or the planets in the Star Wars movies. Instead of just Darth Vader picking on a planet when he got enraged, it would be swarms of white-coated brainwashed technocrat “managers” and “scientists” backed by security forces just setting down wherever they pleased, bringing their needles, pills, indoctrination, new devices and new upgrades. Actually, I don’t know if this is much different than what is already happening.
Creating these new systems of experimental communities takes a lot of money (from taxpayers and tax-free foundations, towards universities for example). Are these projects only motivated by idealism?
Regardless of what we think of the nation-state, the old walls so-to-speak of national sovereignty and claims about representation, democracy, legitimacy and recognition of natural rights tend to give us some protection–because natural moral laws can find a foothold here and there, even in the symbolism and the pretenses of respect for independence and free will. Despite the confusion of invented laws, the words of real principles still have a power over us: “freedom of conscience”, “truth”, “don’t steal”, etc. These principles prevent what we’re discussing to the extent that our minds are still functioning the way they’re supposed to.
It takes a lot of work to demolish everything that still could stand in the way of a standardized and uniform world ruled by a global government that has the power to hold the population steady at under two billion people!
But the cultural sand-blasters of media are out in full force working away at our minds, justifying millions of pages of legislation that nobody reads or consults us about, providing half-truths, marketing toxic chemicals, toxic culture, invasive technologies and toxic beliefs to us that we adopt without question, with no proof, just emotional manipulation, just false arguments to “authority”. That’s it. That’s all the mainstream media amounts to. Scratch the surface and the illusion of legitimacy vanishes under all the contradictions–facts you can find in documents that come with the drugs, facts that you can find even on UN websites that nobody reads, etc.
So I’m afraid that new “solutions” are just a way to bulldoze the crumbling walls and expose us to the “ultimate revolution” against the individual. And when Huxley talked about the “ultimate revolution” in his letter to Orwell or in his Foreword to BNW, he wasn’t talking about something good.
Impersonal Force: Over-Population
Huxley describes population as supposedly growing out of control, and as a threat to freedom and democracy (5).
Repetition is a propaganda technique, and Huxley repeats this mantra of “over-population” constantly, portraying this concept as a supposed danger that needs to be addressed in order to prevent a scientific dictatorship.
He even refers to his novel and to the “success” of his fictional dictatorship in imposing an “optimum” number of two billion people (7). Population control is a given in BNW because nobody was allowed to reproduce naturally.
So the implication is that Huxley wants population control measures. And that’s what has been happening for decades.
Birth control. Sterilization. Abortion. Propaganda of many kinds that targets the family.
People think of “left-wing” and “right-wing”. That’s all made up. “Left” and “right” are just tools and they’re interchangeable anyway. The right hand plans the “fracking” while the left hand shuts down the coal plants with “environmental” lobbies (the big one being Julian Huxley’s World Wildlife Fund right there in your country). The right hand promotes the wars while the left hand runs the tax-funded international abortion clinics. Currently there is no effective mass opposition to a single agenda.
We know that some of the depopulation has not been voluntary in any way (google “forced sterilization” and search this site). We know that the rest of it has been funded by unwitting tax-payers, many of whom would disagree with all of it–or at least some of it–if they were told the full truth without the marketing terminology. And we know that a lot of it involves constant propaganda. And that’s not voluntary either if people are forced to pay for it, and if people are forced to submit to the anti-family indoctrination in public schools or anywhere else.
So that is dictatorial. You can label it “education”. You can call it “humanitarian”. But it’s not legitimate. It’s coerced. It’s the engineering of society. It’s done under the cover of propaganda to hide what it really is. It’s interference. It’s domination.
We’re supposed to allow a dictatorship–over reproduction, resources and our minds–in order to prevent a dictatorship! That’s what it amounts to. And people like Huxley will tack on “to prevent hunger”, “to prevent suffering”, “to prevent ignorance”, “to save wildlife.” The recent one is “for maternal health.” Whatever message works. And it all works. Most people swallow the whole lot, because most of the news media are just mouthpieces and I guess they love being that way.
Huxley reinforces the idea, or what I would call the accusation against us of “over-population” which we have heard all of our lives. We stand accused of being too numerous, so when are we going to surrender our rights! This allegation is based on unproven assumptions and fear-mongering, and is used in order to justify what the dictatorship would do as one of its first priorities in order to take power. Power is the main thing. Resources also. Having a “perfect” world with perfectly subdued citizens. They love that too. That’s “idealism.”
“Optimum” population is what Fabians like H.G. Wells always obsessed about–and still do. We’ve even heard talk about “optimum” temperature for the planet, which was a crazy surprise. And in the future, I guess we’ll hear about “optimum” happiness and “optimum” free speech.
Huxley discusses how preventing death is so cheap using simple measures by governments, but he complains that they don’t balance the numbers by providing birth control, which depends on everyone’s cooperation (5).
The other aspect of population control in his novel, which he doesn’t mention in this book, is about putting everyone around the age of sixty in a special hospital to die. The citizens of BNW are basically engineered to expect to die at sixty. No old age is allowed. Euthanasia is built in to the system. Also the dead in his novel are used as resources, e.g. to make fertilizer. He doesn’t mention that.
Are there people who would actually do that sort of thing in real life? The more degrading the entertainment and the more materialistic the dogmas, the less we care about policy proposals that raise up inanimate objects and lower the value of human life. People should act fast to build up what they think are the good beliefs and traditions they have before they’re lost.
He complains about religions traditions that favor “unrestricted reproduction” (6). This has been the dialectic cartoon now for decades, portrayed to us like it’s all about religious dogmas. We’re supposed to take sides between institutions without even knowing the full story about what’s at stake.
Elites tend to see more and more people as a threat to their power and their control over resources. It’s a competition over resources. Who says there is “over-population”? What are their arguments? And if there is “over-population”, who has the right to impose “solutions”? Another question is, would the “solutions” impose more suffering than “over-population”? Of course they would and they do, because population control policies are already in place. There’s not going to be any “over-population.”
All of these international policies that push chemicals and doctrines about culture, family and reproduction are by their nature tyrannical and are designed to impose Brave New World controls directly on human biology.
Whatever has happened to us already, we should be more aware of what we’re putting into our bodies and what ideas are entering our minds. And maybe we shouldn’t be putting up with any of it.
1.5 is way below the replacement rate.
For more than thirty years, the total fertility rate has been below the replacement level (which is currently approximately 2.1 children per woman). This means that on average, couples are no longer having enough children to replace them.
Other than to shake people up who may be unwittingly part of the propaganda system, the point here is not to lay guilt trips on anyone, and not to make a blanket statement about what anyone should do personally with respect to having children. There are things we can do something about and there are things we can’t, and that includes lacking motivation. It’s a good time to be deliberate and careful about the consequences of our decisions. We have to free our minds and think things through for ourselves.
With my mostly secular and Protestant upbringing, I never heard any concern about replacement rate. Having children was taken for granted. So if something is taken for granted, look what happens to us! Some have very strong family traditions, but there are lots of others, who for one reason or another, have absorbed very strong feelings about not wanting to have families. You may be able to come up with a list of reasons, but I’m suggesting that a decades-long intensive propaganda campaign is one of them. Did our parents and grandparents make a mistake by having children? Is it a mistake to have children? Do we want children around to help us when we’re old? If we want a future for families in general, if not for ourselves, we need to re-think the whole situation.
The fictional Brave New World has no families. Huxley thinks that is someone’s idea of the pinnacle of civilization. And we’re heading there at full speed because most people aren’t even aware of it..
Aldous Huxley didn’t just try to scare people about “over-population” with no effect in Brave New World Revisited. Governments and the UN, including Julian Huxley, have been very active in this area ever since the 1950s. It’s clear to me that Aldous Huxley was promoting and justifying efforts to control population that have been put into effect gradually since his time.
Updated: Jul. 31, 2014
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