“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted by AZspot and cited by Daniel Holter (who are both great). I have never cared for this form of analysis, which establishes a perceiving elect -generally the very educated- as capable of distinguishing ‘authentic’ happiness from suggestible, hypnotized ersatz-happiness. Note the wording: the clever leaders can trick people into “loving” their servitude.
A feat of some skill: the total manipulation of the rebellious, recalcitrant, omnivorously demanding, inconsistent, fickle human species! What brilliance these leaders possess, mastering mass psychology as none ever have from their smoke-filled rooms and lulling us all into our “false” happiness!
And only the hero-savant to tell us: “No, you’re not really happy! You’re not really free! You don’t want what you think you want, love what you think you love! Read my books and learn of your secret slavery!”
It is parlor-game intellectualism; Huxley will always have the trump card: “You only think you’re happy!” But if you have any respect for the individual, for the moral agency of man, you see at once how ludicrously elitist and epistemologically unjustifiable it is. If the individual says he loves his life and is happy, how can we falsify this claim? With Huxley’s aesthetics! “No one could be happy with such a life!”
But democracy means we accept that people are not all pleased by the same things, and Huxley’s vision of profound conditioning is merely a very fancy form of condescension and snobbery: the ordinary man, what a lump of clay his mind is! So easily tricked! And television: what trash!
This is the first step towards tyranny, of course: reduce the individual to the status of a passive and malleable animal. Shall he be rescued from the capitalist democracy he thinks he favors? A revolution may be needed! A war is already underway, it’s just undetected by the sheep! Violence may be required to free humanity, whether they think they’re enslaved or not, whether they want liberating or not!
(See also: A New Nadir’s very good response about Huxley and social criticism in general).
