In a 1958 television interview, Aldous Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms to control the information we see.
Story at-a-glance:
- Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World,” a nightmarish vision of a future society known as the “World State,” ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
- When Huxley wrote the book, optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technology is taken to its extreme.
- Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to push certain kinds of information in front of us.
- Huxley’s ideas appear to have influenced the technocracy’s planning. The World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda includes the strangely ominous dictum that “you will own nothing and be happy.”
- Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization.
The video above features a 1958 interview of Aldous Huxley with Mike Wallace. It really is a great glimpse from the past. Wallace was smoking on the set, but that was natural back then, and Rod Serling, who produced the “Twilight Zone,” did the same. Interestingly, they both developed lung cancer.
You might recall that Huxley wrote the classic novel “Brave New World,” in which he presents a dystopian vision of a future society known as the “World State,” a society ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
Children are cloned and bred in “hatcheries,” where they are conditioned for their role in society from an early age. There are no mothers and fathers as natural procreation is outlawed. There are no family units.
Embryos are sorted and given hormonal treatments based on their destined societal classification, which from highest to lowest are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred and conditioned to be leaders while the Epsilons are designed for menial labor, free of higher intellectual capacities.
At the time Huxley wrote the book in 1931 (it was published the year after), optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technocracy is taken to its extreme.
Huxley believed his world of horror was right around the corner and, today, just shy of 60 years later, we’re starting to see Huxley’s “World State” closing in around us in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s transhumanist agenda and the Great Reset, designed to trap us inside a net of constant surveillance and external control.
Enemies of freedom
Huxley also penned a series of essays called “Enemies of Freedom,” which he discusses in the featured interview. The series outlines “impersonal forces” that are “pushing in the direction of progressively less freedom,” and “technological devices” that can be used to accelerate the process by imposing ever greater control of the population.
Huxley points out that as technology becomes more complex and complicated, it becomes increasingly necessary to form more elaborate hierarchical organizations to manage it all.
Technology also allows for more effective propaganda machines that can be managed through those same control hierarchies.
Huxley cites the success of Hitler, noting that aside from Hitler’s effective use of terror and brute force, “he also used a very efficient form of propaganda. He had the radio, which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people.”
With the advent of television, Huxley foresaw how an authoritarian leadership could become a source of “a one-pointed drumming” of a single idea, effectively brainwashing the public.
Beyond that, Huxley predicted the technological capability to “bypass the rational side of man” and manipulate behavior by influencing people on a subconscious level. This is precisely what we’re faced with today.
Google, but also to a large extent Facebook, has been collecting data on you for nearly two decades. They have created massive server farms that are capable of analyzing this data with deep learning and artificial intelligence software to mine information and generate incredibly precise details on just what type of propaganda and narrative is required to surreptitiously manipulate you into the behavior they are seeking.
Huxley also points out the dangers inherent in advertising, especially as it pertains to marketing of political ideas and ideologies:
“Democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance but …
“There are particular purposes for selling goods, and [what] the dictatorial propagandists are doing is to try to bypass the rational side of men and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surface so that you are in a way making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice or on rational ground …
“Children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grownup and, again, suppose that for one reason or another all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies, you would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children who are going to grow up and be adults …
“You can read in the trade journal the most critical accounts of how necessary it is to get hold of the children, because then they will be loyal brand buyers later on. Translate this into political terms, the dictator says they will be loyal ideology buyers when they’re grown up.”
Decentralization protects freedom. Centralization robs it.
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization. It’s surprising that even 60 years ago Huxley was wise enough to understand this profoundly important principle.
I believe that it is the decentralization of the internet that is required to prevent censorship and manipulation in the future. This means that websites and platforms are not stored in one central place that can easily be controlled and manipulated but, rather, widely distributed to thousands, if not millions, of computers all over the world. It would work because if there is no central storage it can’t be removed.
Decentralized platforms allow the majority of power to reside with the individual. Technologies that can be easily misused to control the public narrative must also remain largely decentralized, so that no one person or agency ends up with too much power to manipulate and influence the public. Our modern-day social media monopolies are a perfect example of what Huxley warned us about.
The same goes for economic institutions too. Today, we can see how the role of the central bank (in the U.S. known as the Federal Reserve) — a privately-owned entity with the power to break entire countries apart for profit — is forcing us toward a new global economic system that will impoverish and quite literally enslave everyone, with the exception of the technocratic social bankers themselves and their globalist allies.
Our Orwellian present
A contemporary and student of Huxley was George Orwell (real name Eric Blair), who wrote another dystopian classic — “1984” — published in 1949. The two books — “1984” and “Brave New World” — share the commonality that they both depict a future devoid of the very things that we associate with having a healthy, free, creative, purposeful and enjoyable life.
In “1984,” the context is a society where an all-knowing, all-seeing “Big Brother” rules with an iron fist. Citizens are under constant watch. Privacy is nonexistent, and language is twisted to justify and glorify oppression.
Some of the spectacles of 2020 could have easily been ripped straight out of the pages of “1984,” as riots were described by cheery news anchors as “mostly peaceful protests,” even as city blocks were engulfed in flames behind them and people were bleeding to death in the streets. For those familiar with the book, such scenes were difficult to watch without being reminded of 1984s “double-think.”
Orwell versus Huxley
There are differences between the two works, however. While Orwell foresees people being forcefully enslaved by an external agency, and kept in that state by the same, Huxley’s vision is one in which people have been so thoroughly conditioned that they come to love their servitude. At that point, no external authoritarian ruler is actually required.
If you think about it, I’m sure you will agree that this is clearly the most efficient strategy to take control of the population. Moore’s law and the exponential improvement in computer processing capacity has exponentially accelerated the global elites’ ability to precisely identify how to implement peaceful control that will have the majority virtually begging for tyranny.
In Huxley’s “Brave New World,” people have fallen in love with the very technologies that prevent them from thinking and acting of their free will, so the enslaved maintain their own control structure.
As noted by Neil Postman in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” in which he compares and contrasts the futures presented by Huxley and Orwell:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
“As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
“In ‘1984,’ Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In ‘Brave New World,’ they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
The promise of the Great Reset
One can argue about who predicted the future best, Orwell or Huxley, but in the final analysis, I think we’re looking at a mixture of both, although it seems obvious to me that Huxley was more prescient and he was actually Orwell’s mentor. Huxley’s concerns are far more serious as the programming is essentially silent, and it is patently evident that the technocrats have been highly successful in implementing this strategy in the past year.
That said, we’re facing both the threat of externally imposed authoritarianism and control predicted by Orwell, and the subversive, subliminal programming through mindless entertainment and the lure of convenience proposed by Huxley.
Undoubtedly, the combination is a powerful one, and likely far more effective than either control strategy by itself. I’ve already touched on how Orwell’s work is playing out in the real world through the “double-think” mental gymnastics we get from the controlled, tightly centralized mainstream media these days.
For an example of how Huxley’s ideas have influenced the technocracy’s planning, look no further than the globalists’ call to “build back better” and the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda (below), which includes the strangely ominous dictum that you will own nothing and be happy.
The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything. Nothing will actually belong to you. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class.
Just how will this imposed serfdom make you happy? Again, the unstated implication is that lack of ownership is a marvelous convenience. Rent a pot and then return it. You don’t need storage space! Imagine the freedom! They even promise the convenience of automatic drone delivery straight to your door.
Artificial intelligence — which is siphoning your data about every aspect of your existence through nearly every piece of technology and appliance you own — will run your life, predicting your every mood and desire, catering to your every whim. Ah, the luxury of not having to make any decisions!
This is the mindset they’re trying to program into you, and for most, it appears to be working. For others who can see the propaganda for what it is, these promises look and feel like proverbial mouse traps. Once you bite the cheese, you’ll be stuck, robbed of your freedom forevermore. And, as Huxley told Wallace, individual freedom is really a prerequisite for a genuinely productive society:
“Life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom. Initiative and creativity — all these things that we value, and I think value properly, are impossible without a large measure of freedom.”
When Wallace challenges Huxley on this by pointing out that the Soviet Union was successfully developing both militarily and artistically, despite being a tightly controlled regime, Huxley counters by saying that those doing that creative work, especially scientists, were also granted far greater personal freedom and prosperity than everyone else.
As long as they kept their noses out of politics, they were brought into the upper echelon and given a great deal of freedom, and without this freedom, they would not have been able to be as creative and inventive, Huxley says.
The threat of the new normal
This anti-human “new normal” that world leaders are now urging us to accept and embrace is the trap of all traps. Unless your most cherished dream is to lie in bed for the rest of your life, your body atrophying away, with a pair of VR goggles permanently strapped to your face, you must resist and oppose the “new normal” every day going forward.
As noted by Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill in his Feb. 5, 2021, article, while the first lockdown was marked by a sense of camaraderie and the promise of it being a temporary measure that we can get through if we just address the problem together, by the third round, all forms of social connection have vanished, as has the anticipation of a return to normality.
“In the first lockdown, the dream of normality was what kept people going; it was actively encouraged by some politicians and even some in the doom-laden media. This time, dreams of normality are treated as ‘dysfunction’, as a species of ‘denial,’” O’Neill writes.
Make no mistake. The media’s rebuke of a return to normalcy as a nonsensical pipedream is dangerous propaganda territory. The reality is we could easily open everything back up and go back to business as usual, and nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of sickness and death, would occur.
People die every year. It’s an inevitable reality of life and, up until the last two weeks of 2020, there actually were no greater number of deaths recorded than the year prior, and the year prior to that, and the one before that.
While new numbers released by the CDC indicate that 2020’s final two weeks may have pushed the total deaths beyond 2019’s (final data won’t be available for months), COVID-19 simply isn’t as lethal as initially suspected. It primarily kills the elderly and the chronically ill — what’s most interesting is that suicide deaths among teens went up dramatically as lockdowns and school closings dragged on.
What’s more, we now have effective prophylactics and treatments that ensure the loss of life due to COVID-19 can be radically minimized. Yet, our leaders don’t want you to think in those terms. They want you to remain fearful because they have a deep appreciation of the value of fear in catalyzing the precise type of capitulation and surrender they need in order to implement the Great Reset.
Tragically, many citizens have so embraced the fear culture, they don’t even need an authoritarian figure to tell them to comply with rules that have no medical benefit anymore. They’ll happily act as the designated COVID police, making sure everyone around them complies.
Hell hath no fury like one caught in the unsound belief that they will die if you don’t wear a mask. This is no way to live. It’s not sane and it’s not healthy, and the prophetic works of Huxley and Orwell illustrate where it will all end if we don’t push back.
Never surrender to the new normal
In closing, I’d like you to ponder some portions from O’Neill’s article, in which he warns us about the threat posed by the culture of fear itself, which is just as dangerous and damaging as any virus:
“[Spiked] argued that COVID-19 … would be refracted through the culture of fear, potentially harming our ability to understand and deal with this novel danger. This has come to pass. The shift from paying lip service to social solidarity to encouraging the populace to think of itself as diseased represents a victory for the degraded view of humanity gifted to us by the culture of fear.
“The government’s early move from encouraging people to take responsibility for limiting their social interactions to using older methods of terror to ensure compliance with lockdown measures confirmed the culture of fear’s reduction of people from citizens to be engaged with problems to be managed.
“The failure to sustain the education of the next generation spoke to the exhaustion of bourgeois confidence, of the state itself, that underpins the culture of fear.
“And the current threat of a New Normal — of a forever post-pandemic dystopia of distanced, masked pseudo-interaction — demonstrates that our future will be shaped at least in part by the ideologies and forces of the culture of fear …
“Yes, the New Normal being talked up by the political and cultural elites will partially be informed by the experience of Covid-19 and the necessity of being prepared for a future virus. But it will also be shaped by … the culture of fear and its attendant anti-human, anti-progress ideologies …
“Soon the practical task of minimizing and managing the impact of Covid-19 will have been largely completed, leaving us with the far larger humanist task of combating this culture and making the case for a freer, more dynamic, dazzling future of growth, knowledge and engagement.
“Those who underestimate the culture of fear will be ill-prepared for these future battles. They will have a tendency to surrender to the New Normal. The rest of us should stand firm, even in the face of smears and willful misrepresentations, and continue to recognize and confront the real and debilitating consequences that fear has on everyday life and on humanity’s future.”
Originally published by Mercola.