The Future is Now

[mbarrick]

In the United States... recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that the government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy"

--Aldous Huxley, 1958, Brave New World Revisited

by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. 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

--Aldous Huxley, 1958, Brave New World Revisited

In reading this follow-up essay for the first time on the tail of re-reading Brave New World I ended up marking a great number of similarly prophetic passages. Painfully brilliant.

Comments

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i read brave new world revisited years ago...i'll definitely have to pick it up again...neil postman said in his "amusing ourselves to death" that the scourge of the free world would not be like orwell's "1984" but much more like huxley's "brave new world"...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I've been saying the same thing for years. One of the striking things about the "Revisited" essay is that at that point Huxley has read Orwell and incorporated the pertinent elements of both models into his predictions.

[sovietnimrod.livejournal.com]

the scourge of the free world would not be like orwell's "1984" but much more like huxley's "brave new world"...

I'd agree with that - after all 1984 was written by a socialist to warn about the dark side of socialism, it wasn't so much intended as dystopian future for capitalist countries, but rather what could ultimately happen in the USSR.

Anyone familiar with Alexei Gastev? He was a proletkult theorist in early-1920s USSR; he was influenced by Ford and Taylorism methods and he experimented with trying to get his workers to be more like automotons

[sebastian6.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind, I'd like to post that 2nd quote in my journal.

Eerie. and Thanks.

-S6

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

By all means. What good either of us might be doing is questionable, though, "The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible".

[mediavictim.livejournal.com]

I read brave New World and 1984 Back to back - each for the first time