Huxley on Brave New World

[noschool]

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution, which was posted by Amy here is deserving of much wider circulation, especially in the light of this report about happy pills to banish bad memories (the new LSD?).

Huxley's speech (from 1962!) is a must listen.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, 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. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

[Amy Thomson]

A man ahead of his time. Or maybe we're behind?

Here is another interview, on creativity this time.

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 24

Here's a nice quote:

INTERVIEWER
What about creativeness in general?

HUXLEY
Yes, what about it? Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they’re fifty? It’s a problem in biochemistry and adult education.