In 1932 Aldous Huxley introduced the world to “the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.” I remember first reading about it in high school and thinking “This is so far out; never happen in my lifetime. But interesting nevertheless, if only philosophically.” This was during the 1960s in the midst of the Vietnam War, experimentation with hallucinogenics, the “sex revolution,” and the Counter-culture in general. Huxley, as many know, was a leading proponent of the drug culture and Counter-culture of the time. We thought of it as rebellion against the Establishment. Back then all the "cool" people were thoroughly rebellious and didn’t believe anything the government, churches or news media were saying. “Never trust anyone over thirty,” we liked to say.
I was not alone in thinking that the Brave New World was still far off; we seemed to have so much freedom. We were nothing like the thoroughly programmed Alphas and Betas Huxley invented, so we thought. Huxley himself thought so too — up until 1958, when he began to change his mind. In Brave New World Revisited he revised his forecast. The Brave New World, it now seemed to Huxley, would be upon us much sooner than he originally expected, taking us by surprise. “…freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner,” wrote Huxley. Keep in mind, this was way back in 1958.
The situation today is incalculably more desperate. Both Huxley’s forecast in 1932 and his revision in 1958 were made long before the onset of the Information Revolution, long before genetically modified GloFish became publicly available as pets, long before three billion instructions per second became available on your desktop in the form of a PC…or anything else. The technologies Huxley had envisioned for the World Controllers — his term for the global elite of Brave New World — were scant, even primitive, by comparison to what is now unfolding in our world today. And yet, even with such primitive technologies at hand Huxley was already concerned back in 1958! What would he have to say today, I wonder, had he not died on November 22, 1963, the same day President John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas?
Have a good long look at Brave New World Revisited. It’s well worth your time and effort. Check it out and ask yourself: Is the Brave New World at hand, or was Huxley “just on drugs” when he wrote it?
huxley.net Brave New World Revisited By Aldous Huxley
Foreword
…Omitted from the picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for convenience and because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical and military enemies of freedom -- the weapons and "hardware" which have so powerfully strengthened the hands of the world's rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars. The chapters that follow should be read |read full article|
The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner." — Aldous Huxley, 1958
