Great article
that shows us now what a genius Huxley was. People underestimated his
prescience in the shape of things to come. He was definitely " in the know
" about where the Elites want to take this Project. And don't forget H.G.
Wells and 'The Sleeper Awakes', written in 1910. It's a future where lives are
dominated by 'Babble Machines', known today as the MSM.
The biggest drug
today is not one of the legal or illegal drugs but the discharge of dopamine
one receives by "being accepted and liked" by some of those other
slaves in those social networks. Facebook is the worse drug in the planet right
and is destroying our world.
Dan Glazebrook
RT : 28 Sep,
2018
60 years ago
this year, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World Revisited, which concluded
that the real world was moving towards the future predicted in his classic
dystopian novel much more quickly than he had first imagined.
Brave New World,
published almost three decades earlier, foresaw a future in which social
control had been perfected through a mixture of cultural dumbing down, genetic
engineering and the prodigious use of recreational drugs and no-strings sex.
Unlike that other classic of dystopian fiction (George Orwell’s 1984), Brave
New World proved prophetic in its description of a world in which acquiescence
to authority would be purchased through mindless consumerism, rather than
imposed with bludgeon and baton. As he wrote in Revisited: “It has become clear
that control through the punishment of undesirable behaviour is less effective,
in the long run, that control through the reinforcement of desirable behaviour
by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than
government through the nonviolent manipulation of the environment and of the
thoughts and feelings of the individual men, women and children.” In the world
of his fable, he noted, “punishment is infrequent and generally mild,” adding
that “It now looks like the odds are more in favour of something like Brave New
World than of something like 1984” emerging.
The first
element of control in Brave New World was prenatal manipulation; that is to
say, the “systematic practice of eugenics and dysgenics.” All babies were test
tube babies, with “biologically superior” sperm and ova fused together to
produce Betas, Alphas and Alpha Pluses. These would become the adults destined
to inherit political and economic control: the future brains and leaders of the
Brave New World. At one point, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe
is asked the obvious question of why everyone is not made Alpha Plus. “Because
we don’t wish to have our throats slit,” comes the reply. To this end,
“biologically inferior” sperm and ova were treated to the Bokanovsky Process,
where they would be deliberately treated with alcohol and other protein poisons
to retard their development. These would grow into the “epsilon” workers used
for menial and monotonous labour.
Huxley said,
“The creatures finally decanted were almost subhuman; but they were capable of
performing unskilled work and, when properly conditioned, detensioned by free
and frequent access to the opposite sex, constantly distracted by gratuitous
entertainment and reinforced in their good behaviour patterns by daily doses of
soma, could be counted on to give no trouble to their superiors.” After all,
the Controller adds, Alpha Pluses would go mad with epsilon work.
In his 1958
study, Huxley seemed to go back on his forecast of such genetic manipulation,
writing that “Babies in bottles and the centralised control of reproduction are
not perhaps impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we
shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random. For practical purposes
genetic standardisation may be ruled out.”
Just 20 years
later, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, was born. Of
course, this was still a long way from the complete abolition of wombs and
state-controlled selective breeding of his fable; but the steady increase in
prenatal screenings underway today – pushing towards the potential elimination
of conditions like Down Syndrome – are leading to a level of genetic selection
which even Huxley had perhaps been too quick to rule out.
A second method
of social control was through the ubiquitous use of drugs; namely Soma, a
cure-all providing bliss, visions, or sleep depending on dosage; and all at “no
physiological or mental cost.”
“The Brave New
Worlders,” Huxley tells us, “could take holidays from their black moods, or
from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health
or permanently reducing their efficiency.” Furthermore, the use of Soma was
“not a private vice, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit
of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”
Updating Marx,
Huxley noted that in the Brave New World, Opium – or at least Soma – was the
religion of the people; for “like religion, the drug had power to console and
compensate, it called up visions of another, better world, it offered hope,
strengthened faith and promoted charity.”
Soma was an
essential weapon in the armoury of the World Controllers, pacifying and
distracting the citizenry from the meaninglessness inanity of their emotionally
numbed existence. “Chemically induced euphoria,” Huxley wrote, functioned as “a
substitute for the satisfaction of feeling oneself free and creative.”
Which brings us
to sex. The Brave New World is one in which thought and reading are frowned
upon, the quest for meaning replaced by a never-ending parade of no-strings
sex. Monogamy is seen as the “enemy of civilisation” whilst “promiscuity is the
rule,” its citizens remind each other, and “romance is degenerate.” Emotion,
intelligence, family – all are viewed as afflictions, brakes on individuality;
even the very word ‘mother’ is considered obscene. ‘Own-time’, as it’s called,
is frowned upon; the most damning indictment of the leading protagonist Bernard
– the clearest evidence of his weirdness – is that he “actually chooses to
spend time on his own.” Sex is completely detached from emotion, and instead
functions as both pleasurable distraction and indicator of status and success.
Ultimately it is
this – not a beating from the police – that leads to Bernard’s co-option.
Bernard is an Alpha Plus civil servant who finds fame and fortune following his
discovery of ‘John the Savage’, a rugged and unconditioned literate who
personifies the old world of Christian morality and knowledge-seeking, and gets
promptly paraded around like a circus animal. Bernard’s newfound adulation
following this ‘discovery’ provides him with a pass to ‘sessions’ with
high-status women. In contrast to 1984’s lead character Winston – who is
ultimately co-opted through fear and torture – Bernard’s co-option thus takes
place as the growing wealth, recognition and sex he receives following his
‘discovery’ naturally tend to blunt his critical outlook on society – raising
the question of whether his initial rebelliousness was anything more than
jealousy in the first place. In sum, control in the Brave New World is achieved
almost entirely by consent; its citizens cowed by what Huxley calls “the
infliction of pleasure.”
But, often
forgotten in the popular memory of the book, the Brave New World does not span
the globe. Parallel to the zone of consent, there is a zone of coercion.
Outside the lands of relentlessly vacuous hedonism lie the deprived
‘reservations’ in which the poor and indigenous are hemmed in by electric
fences. No serious conditioning takes place there, marriage and family occurs,
“monstrous superstitions” such as Christianity and ancestor worship are
practiced; it is a place, the tour guide explains, where “infectious diseases,
priests and venomous lizards” are rampant. Yet the savages are perfectly tame,
a result of their having been subjected to plenty of torture and starvation.
And there is no escape from the reservations: those born there are condemned
also to die there, adding, perhaps, to the piles of corpses at the boundary
left by the desperate souls who have attempted to scale the fence.
Our hedonist
wonderlands too are ringed by corpses: the corpses of those who would dare to
flee the rampaging militias, broken societies and mass dispossession bequeathed
the third world by NATO and the IMF. In the 10 years preceding the 2015 refugee
crisis in Europe, 23,000 had already perished making the desperate crossing
across the Mediterranean, whilst hundreds die each year on the US border with
Mexico. And, as climate terror, economic crisis, and war make ever larger
swathes of the world uninhabitable, these numbers are set to grow
exponentially. Far-right parties across the Western world are already coming to
power promising to make the fences impenetrable; to ensure, that is, that the
pile of corpses continues to grow. Following suit this month was Jean-Claude
Juncker, announcing a new army of 10,000 border guards to this end.
There was one
major aspect of the modern world, however, that Huxley missed. In the neofeudal
Brave New World, you are born into your allotted role, and conditioned to
accept it. “The secret of happiness,” its proponents explain, “is liking what
you have to do.” In our world, however, it is not the fatalistic comforts of
feudalism that prevail, but the lies of neoliberalism. People, by and large,
inherit their future position – class, status, income – from their parents. But
everywhere – by the most well-meaning of teachers as much as by the most
cynical of advertising executives – they are conditioned to believe that they
are responsible for their own condition. The corollary of ‘you can be whatever
you want’ is that ‘whatever you are is your own fault’. This basic myth of the
modern world has succeeded, not in making everyone happy with their lot in
life, but in ensuring they blame themselves for their predicament; if you find yourself
in a dangerous, dead-end, or underpaid job, it must be because you are too
stupid, lacking in talent or indolent to secure, or indeed deserve, anything
else. This systemic production and reproduction of self-loathing – such an
integral feature of contemporary life – was not a component of the Brave New
World. And for this reason, the refugee plays a different role. In Huxley’s
dystopia, the wretched inhabitants of the reservations – personified by ‘John
the Savage’ – were objects of amusement, absurd relics of a long-supplanted
life. For the overstimulated and under-fulfilled citizens of the West, however,
the refugee is a canvas on which to project the unwanted and uncomfortable
parts of our own psyche – a vessel to carry that part of ourselves we are
taught to loathe, the part that seeks emotional security, decent housing,
sustainable well-paid employment, but yet secretly believes we are really not
entitled to it. Splitting off this conflicted craving from ourselves, we need
to throw it at someone else, someone who can plausibly take on the role of the
undeserving seeker of security. Enter the refugee.
Unlike 1984,
Brave New World understood the splitting of the world into a zone of consent
and a zone of coercion, in which consent could be obtained in the one precisely
because coercion had been exported to the other. Yet the split in fact goes
much deeper than this – into the very center of our souls.
---
Dan Glazebrook
is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine,
the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle
East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial
Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October
2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining
the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and
Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of
sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern
Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa
today.
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