Revisiting Huxley Revisiting Brave New World in 1958

I am currently reading an article written by Aldous Huxley entitled "A Brave New World Revisited" which was written in the year of my birth, 1958.

In it, he falsely assumes that the pressures of overpopulation will lead to the establishment of totalitarian governments "most likely Communist", and consequently spends some of his time outlining the evils of Communist regimes.

From what he writes, it appears that Capitalists have learned their lessons well from the old Communists. Now that communism has faded from the world stage, democracies can continue the old practises unabashedly.

I reproduce an interesting paragraph from Huxley's article here:

"We possess detailed descriptions of the methods used by the Communist police for dealing with polit­ical prisoners. From the moment he is taken into custody, the victim is subjected systematically to many kinds of physical and psychological stress. He is badly fed, he is made extremely uncomfortable, he is not allowed to sleep for more than a few hours each night. And all the time he is kept in a state of suspense, uncertainty and acute apprehension. Day after day -- or rather night after night, for these Pavlovian police­men understand the value of fatigue as an intensifier of suggestibility -- he is questioned, often for many hours at a stretch, by interrogators who do their best to frighten, confuse and bewilder him. After a few weeks or months of such treatment, his brain goes on strike and he confesses whatever it is that his captors want him to confess. Then, if he is to be converted rather than shot, he is offered the comfort of hope. If he will but accept the true faith, he can yet be saved -- not, of course, in the next life (for, officially, there is no next life), but in this."

Judging from this, we should expect to see the Guantanamo Bay residents organizing a new Christian Church with an evangelical flavour sometime in the near future.

Huxley goes on to write:

"In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country's working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feel­ings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few."

When we consider that the vast majority of media outlets are now owned or controlled by less than a handful of powerful conglomerates, Huxley's vision is now our reality.

"In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those coun­tries that have a tradition of democratic government, this 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."

Frighteningly, Huxley also writes:

"But liberty, as we all know, cannot flour­ish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable."

In the words of Immortal Pogo, "We have seen the Enemy and He is Us".

For those of you versed in Babylon 5, the Dark Power has left Zahadoom and has quietly taken up residence in the realm of the 'Good' forces. For you Tolkeinites, this is Saruman succumbing to Sauron's influence.

Reality cannot, however, be so easily rendered black and white. But to those capable of hearing, one has only to look to recognize 'them' by their fruits.