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There are many roads to Brave New World; but perhaps the straightest and the broadest of them is the road we are traveling today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers and accelerating increases.
But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. “Lead us not into temptation,” we pray—and with good reason; for when human beings are tempted too enticingly or too long, they generally yield.
In the absence of a constitutional tradition, this increased power will probably be exercised in a dictatorial fashion.
It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world’s over-populated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule—probably by the Communist party.
Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.
the physical health of the general population will show no improvement, and may even deteriorate. And along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence.
For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.
Quick death by malaria has been abolished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.
But the Nature of Things is such that nobody in this world ever gets anything for nothing.
Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State—that
To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government.
The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
To the question quis custodiet custodes?—Who will mount guard over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers?—the answer is a bland denial that they need any supervision.
a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” said Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be….
Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill.
In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite.
A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization—the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in ther interests of the Party or the State.
The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why.
Reading is a private, not a collective activity.
The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd-poison.
A generation from now it may be too late to find an answer and perhaps impossible, in the stifling collective climate of that future time, even to ask the question.
Can a campaign in favor of rationality be successful in the teeth of another and even more vigorous campaign in favor of irrationality?
through verbal and physical violence. In the long run, anger and hatred are self-defeating emotions. But in the short run they pay high dividends in the form of psychological and even (since they release large quantities of adrenalin and noradrenalin) physiological satisfaction.
Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist knows) is in the highest degree contagious.
There are no masterpieces; for masterpieces appeal only to a limited audience, and the commercial propagandist is out to captivate the majority.
As it stands nobody will pay attention to it. But now set the words to a catchy and easily remembered tune. Immediately they become words of power.
The shotgun has its place, but so has the hypodermic syringe.
Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
Among the classical stimulants, tea, coffee and maté are, thank goodness, almost completely harmless.
Today alcohol and tobacco are available, and people spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the education of their children.
More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.
Our epoch has been given many nicknames—the Age of Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age. It might, with equally good reason, be called the Age of Television Addiction, the Age of Soap Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey.
The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.
political meeting of tomorrow will be like. The candidate (if there is still a question of candidates), or the appointed representative of the ruling oligarchy,
Ten or twenty years from now, it will probably seem a good deal less amusing. For what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact.
A democratic society is a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused and should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts and for limited periods of time.
The reactors were more co-operative than the non-reactors, less critical and suspicious. They gave the nurses no trouble and thought that the care they were receiving in the hospital was simply “wonderful.” But though less unfriendly toward others than the non-reactors, the reactors were generally much more anxious about themselves. Under stress, this anxiety tended to translate itself into various psychosomatic symptoms, such as stomach upsets, diarrhea and headaches. In spite of or because of their anxiety, most of the reactors were more uninhibited in the display of emotion than were the
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Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.
meaning can possibly be attached. What our philosopher is saying is that we must know everything before we can fully understand anything. No doubt. But in fact we shall never know everything. We must therefore be content with partial understanding and proximate causes—including the influence of great men.
In Russell’s view the causes of historical change are of three kinds—economic change, political theory and important individuals.
These individuals are, of course, profoundly influenced by the local culture, the taboos and moralities, the information and misinformation handed down from the past and preserved in a body of spoken traditions or written literature; but whatever each individual takes from society (or, to be more accurate, whatever he takes from other individuals associated in groups, or from the symbolic records compiled by other individuals, living or dead) will be used by him in his own unique way—with his special senses, his biochemical make-up, his physique and temperament, and nobody else’s.
and chemically induced euphoria as a substitute for the satisfaction of feeling oneself free and creative.
but Big Government and Big Business already possess, or will very soon possess, all the techniques for mind-manipulation described in Brave New World, along with others of which I was too unimaginative to dream. Lacking the ability to impose genetic uniformity upon embryos, the rulers of tomorrow’s over-populated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children. To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of
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The propaganda that is found to be both nonsensical and immoral may be rejected out of hand. That which is merely irrational, but compatible with love and freedom, and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be provisionally accepted for what it is worth.
Nothing short of everything is ever really enough.
to bring, be it noted, not the person’s written complaint, nor his legal representatives, but his corpus, his body, the too too solid flesh which has been made to sleep on boards, to smell the fetid prison air, to eat the revolting prison food.
There will never be such a thing as a writ of habeas mentem;
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.
