Commentary on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – Part 6
Continuing with Aldous Huxley’s 1946 Foreword to his novel Brave New World, Huxley predicts:
vast government-sponsored inquires into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call ‘the problem of happiness’—in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. . . .” (p. 8)
Now in 2013, we have the United Nations talking about measuring “well-being” and declaring “Happiness” days. See UN media release: Marking First International Day of Happiness, United Nations Academic Impact to Co-host Event on ‘Happiness, Well-being’ with Permanent Mission of Bhutan and my comments in this post UN declares “International Day of Happiness” – to measure “well-being” as “sustainable development” kicks in.
Huxley refers to a
“foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers” (p. 9 of Foreword)
Regarding “sexual freedom”, drugs and entertainment:
“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends . . . to increase. And the dictator . . . will do well to encourage that . . . In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude (p. 10 of Foreword).
Huxley continues on how the Brave New World may arrive sooner than expected:
. . . I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. . . . unless we choose to decentralize [a throw-away line] . . . we have only two alternatives to choose from: [one of them being combat among national entities ending in nuclear war] . . . or else one supra-national totalitarianism . . . developing . . . into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia . . . (p. 10 of Foreword).
The same old binary “world government or mass death” propaganda formula is used by other Fabians like H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. In reality, their bosses create wars and other problems (or hype imaginary ones) and offer world government as the “necessary” “solution” for “misbehaving” humanity. Russell is one of the Cold War intellectuals mentioned in the earlier referenced book: The Cultural Cold War.
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