Huxley Revisited His Dystopian Novel— Feared We Were Moving There Fast
These passages written in 1958 seem prescient and are relevant today.
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BOOKS I READ: Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley (1958). In a series of essays, twelve altogether, Huxley examines how his dystopian novel fared twenty-seven years after he wrote it. He analyzes how advances in the sciences, social sciences, and other fields have either nullified or accelerated the future shock he envisioned in Brave New World.
Some of his essays on topics such as hypnopaedia and over population feel dated, and have not proven to be important issues of our era. Other essays read prescient, specifically those on propaganda, over-organization, and chemical persuasion (as compared to soma).
Huxley starts his book as follows,
“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can only be brief only by omission and simplification.”
With that warning, I note that Huxley’s essays are complex, and my highlights will not do justice to the depth of his arguments.
Over-Organization and the Power Elite
Over-organization is the need for governments and businesses to create order that is necessary to manage rapidly growing populations and the demand for goods. It’s a search for efficiency. This multi-faceted effort leaves the Little Man powerless:
“In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage.” (pg 23)
As the Little Man is gobbled up, power flows to the few. He calls the few that control capitalist democracies 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.” (pg 24)
Again, this was published in 1958, but his description of the Power Elite comes pretty close to describing today’s influence and role of multiple corporations and their leaderships, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and media, energy, and pharmaceutical companies, notwithstanding recent pushbacks against mergers that would have consolidated even more power.
Will to Order
Huxley describes the Will to Order as “a wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance…” and as “a kind of intellectual instinct.”
“The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.” (pg 28)
This last quote reminds me of a line I have heard too many times, “Mussolini… but, he made the trains run on time.” He sure did, as long as you remembered that Il Duce ha sempre ragione, otherwise you might join the hundreds of thousands he and his cronies disposed of during his reign.
Propaganda
Control of the media by the Power Elite has led to an unexpected outcome around propaganda, that it doesn’t just have to be true or false:
“Early advocates of literacy and the free press… did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communication industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” (pg 44)
It’s this point that Neil Postman took and ran with in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (see BOOKS I READ post). Today’s social media platforms are distraction driven, geared toward eliciting the continuous release of endorphins for its users using wonderful technical innovations such as targeted advertising and the ubiquitous doom scroll. Sensationalism is the click bait to the irrelevant, and sustains the perverse desire for outrage and schadenfreude—”look at that poor sucker; glad it’s not me.”
Propaganda and the wanna-be-dictator is the focus of one of the better essays. Huxley points out how Hitler used propaganda to exhort the “German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.” One key element was that Hitler understood the need for crowds and rallies.
“… a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant… The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.” (pg 53)
Hitler’s mass rallies were punctuated by emotional assertions. He held his rallies at night, because he knew that crowds are even more receptive to the intoxication in the dark. Then, he ordered the German people to march endlessly to nowhere because he knew that “marching is an indispensable magic stroke… Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.” Watch today’s totalitarian states during their day of military parades, look closely at the faces of the soldiers in those columns.
Huxley describes intellectuals as the hens in the poultry yard, running this way and that. They have a taste for rationality, and are therefore resistant to propaganda that works on the masses, and are likely the first to be targeted for removal.
“They [the intellectuals] regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for slogans…” (pg 54)
Future Demagogues
Hitler’s biographer called him the greatest demagogue in history. Huxley’s concern is that a future one, a scientific demagogue using the latest developments on human control might do even better. He describes how he might do that:
The demagogic propagandist must… be consistently dogmatic. There are no greys in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black of celestially white… He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated. The morally squeamish intellectual may be shocked by this kind of thing. But the masses are always convinced that “right is on the side of the active aggressor.” (pg 55)
This is a fairly close description of some of the dangers in America today. After narrowly avoiding a Constitutional crisis after the election of 2020, we have not moved to a safer place. Rather, it feels that too many citizens have taken the side of the “active aggressor.”
Huxley offers some tepid recommendations in the final essay. Simply he says that individuals need to be educated for freedom, to value freedom, to push for the ideals of self-government and against censorship, and to fight against convenience paid for with a loss of freedom.
The truth is that the fix is much more complex than that, and, perhaps, the first step for today’s citizens is becoming aware of how susceptible we are to manipulation, and how that manipulation can quickly lead to the loss of our freedoms.
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