Book: Brave New World

Subject: Book: Brave New World Thu Feb 07, 2019 12:08 pm

The book I recently finished, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," mentioned in passing the famous 1932 dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, which made me realize I'd never actually read the whole thing.

So I've been STRUGGLING to get through it the past couple of weeks. Man, is it a struggle.

Not only is it terribly outdated, terribly provincial, not especially prescient, and hasn't aged well, it's also horribly written. Huxley uses the thinnest excuses for exposition, totally out of character with the story, and his expositions are nakedly partisan. The man apparently never had a subtle bone in his body.

Plus, from reading the accessory information in this edition - "Brave New World Revisited," contemporary literary reaction, subsequent literary placement, letters to and from George Orwell -- it seems Huxley was a bit of a blue-nosed Upper Class Twit (apologies to Monty Python).

Subject: Re: Book: Brave New World Tue Feb 12, 2019 3:07 pm

Aldous Huxley, in "Brave New World Revisted," wrote:: Since Hitler's day, the armory of [propaganda] at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera and the rotary press, the contemporary propagandist can make use of television and can record both image and voice on spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress Big Brother can now be almost as omniscient as God. Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why.

Let us see what Hitler thought of the masses he moved and how he did the moving. The first principle from which he started was a value judgement: the masses are utterly corruptible. They are incapable of abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside their circle of immediate experience. Their behavior is determined not by knowledge and reason, but by feelings and drives.

Hitler made his strongest appeal to those members of the lower middle classes who had been ruined by the inflation of 1923 and then ruined all over again by the depression of 1929. "The masses" were these bewildered, frustrated and chronically anxious millions. To make them more masslike, more subhuman, he assembled them by the thousands and tens of thousands in vast halls and arenas, where individuals lose their personal identity and [become] merged with the crowd. A crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden excesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic.

The aim of the demagogue is to create social coherence under his own leadership. The demagogic propagandist must therefore be consistently dogmatic. All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white. He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be partially right. Opponents must be atttacked and shouted down.

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