The great twentieth century literary figure and thinker Aldous Huxley should need no introduction. He is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), in which he imagines a society, prophetically when we consider the contemporary world and where it is going, under a form of 'soft' dictatorship, in which suffering has been 'banished' through medication, and types of people are conceived and brought up artificially to fulfull ideologically defined roles. It is a 'comfortable' world, in which individual freedom has been confiscated, and responsibility abdicated. Sound familiar?
In this recording, made in front of an audience on March 20th 1962 at Berkeley Language Center in the United States, he goes back over his dystopian work, comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which he admires greatly. However, he feels that the future forms of dictatorship will not be Orwell's 'terroristic' ones, a vision influenced by the recent context of its composition, world war, Nazism, and Stalinism, but a 'soft' one something in line with his own prediction. This will be enabled by the advances of technology combined with the modern media, biotechnology and pharmacological methods, making people, as he says, 'love their servitude':
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Click on the link below to acces the 44 minute recording. He also considers the future influence of automation, and transhumanism. All in 1960!
