. . . which I would now term the penultimate revolution, since we are now freeing ourselves from the conditioning that Huxley describes by occupying our bodies fully and obeying their organic urge to join together to free ourselves and the earthly commons for full-throated, open-hearted, deeply ensouled, inclusive individual, tribal and, indeed, noospheric expression.
I haven’t listened to the entire audio yet, but I will. Here’s a loose transcript from the first few minutes of his talk:
In the past, revolutions aimed not directly at the human being, but at the surroundings, which then had an effect on the human being. Today, we are approached by the final revolution, acting directly on the mind/bodies of human beings. This has been going on from time immemorial, but usually violently, sometimes crudely, and sometimes with a great deal of skill, with torture of various kinds.
If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. Sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion. The nature of the ultimate revolution: we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which enable the controlling oligarchy to get people to actually love their servitude. This is the ultimate malevolent revolution. The parable of Brave New World is essentially the account of a society making use of all the devices available at that time and some imagined, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create mass-produced models of human beings. . . Since then I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem, and I have noticed that a number of predictions that I made 30 years ago (in the book) are now coming true. And there seems to be a general movement in this direction, by which a human population can be made to enjoy what they should not enjoy, the condition of servitude.
Comparing Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 (written before 1945 and 1948) — his book, which I admire greatly, shows a projection into the future of the immediate past, of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind/body of individuals. My own book, which was written in 1932, when there was only a mild dictatorship (Mousselini), was not overshadowed by terrorism the way Orwell was when he wrote his book.
I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in the future that will be a good deal nearer to the Brave New World pattern, because it is a good deal more efficient to get people to consent to the state of mass production methods on a social level, then you are likely to have a much more stable, lasting society than you would if you were relying solely on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps.
Needless to say, we shall never get rid of terrorism, but in so far as dictators become more concerned with a perfectly running society, they will be more interested in the kinds of techniques described in Brave New World. It seems to me that this ultimate revolution is not that far away. Already a number of these techniques for final control are already here.
Next: Huxley begins to talk about mind-control techniques that are very efficient, what we now call “trauma-based conditioning” (see, for example, articles in mind control section of wanttoknow.info). . .
