Aldous Huxley
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Brave new world is not just a simple novel. Huxley's following statements are enough to be convinced of this.
In 1961, Aldous Huxley made an eerie prediction at Tavistock Group, California Medical School.
In 1961, Aldous Huxley made an eerie prediction at Tavistock Group, California Medical School.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tear, 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.
In 1962, Huxley gave a follow-up speech, The Ultimate Revolution, at the Berkley Language Center, in which he expanded on his earlier talk:
". .we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed..
". .we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed..
and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World,
which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences,
to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system.
Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true."
The following is taken from an article by Huxley in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958.
DRUGS THAT SHAPE MEN'S MINDS
"In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions..
"In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions..
than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death proceeded by enslavement."
"There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?
To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds.
There are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism. Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence.
Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an "excellent adjustment to their group.
A process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes.
It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature."
"In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she "regards the center of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him,
so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.
Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance.
Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance.
It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols."
"We love ourselves to the point of idolatry; but we also intensely dislike ourselves--we find ourselves unutterably boring.
Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence.
It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga--to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction."
"In many societies at many levels of civilization attempts have been made to fuse drug intoxication with God intoxication. In ancient Greece, for example, ethyl alcohol had its place in the established religion. Dionysus, or Bacchus, as he was often called, was a true divinity.
His worshipers addressed him as Lusios, Liberator, or as Theoinos, "Godwine." The latter name telescopes fermented grape juice and the supernatural into a single pentecostal experience.
"Born a god," writes Euripides, "he is poured out as a libation to the gods, and through him men receive good." Unfortunately they also receive harm. The blissful experience of self-transcendence which alcohol makes possible has to be paid for, and the price is exorbitantly high.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. Even more unsatisfactory has been the policy of complete toleration and unrestricted availability.
Do we have to go on in this dismal way indefinitely? Up until a few years ago, the answer to such a question would have been a rueful "Yes, we do." Today, thanks to recent developments in biochemistry and pharmacology, we are offered a workable alternative.
We see that it may soon be possible for us to do something better in the way of chemical self-transcendence than what we have been doing so ineptly for the last seventy or eighty centuries.
Is it possible for a powerful drug to be completely harmless? Perhaps not. But the physiological cost can certainly be reduced to the point where it becomes negligible.
There are powerful mind changers which do their work without damaging the taker's psychophysical organism and without inciting him to behave like a criminal or a lunatic.
Now let us consider another kind of drug, a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers.
By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled.
Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill.
In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry.
The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced.
The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights--namely, liberty.
Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty; but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty's strongest bulwark.
Most of us function at about 15 of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?
Two methods are available--the educational and the biochemical.
Two methods are available--the educational and the biochemical.
We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals.
Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce "pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work."
Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins--nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example--sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy.
In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.
In the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual's psychic energy,
and its wide distribution throughout the USSR, would probably mean the end of Russia's present form of government.
From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers.
From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers.
We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States.
When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience.
Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as 'God is love," or "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications--fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture--inflicted upon themselves
by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and nervous system in particular.
In one way or another, the world's ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them.
In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the ether hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way--exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.
My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available.
That famous "revival of religion," about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen.
It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things."
In summary, for Huxley, let's get high..
Thanks to the bloody queen mother..
Thanks to the bloody queen mother..
Notice the connection between huxley and Tavistock
Full version of the 1958's article here
hofmann.org/papers/drugsts…
hofmann.org/papers/drugsts…
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