Ep. #417: My Top 3 Takeaways from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Okay. So let’s get to the featured book here, which is brave new world by Aldous Huxley. Now I realize that this is a kind of curious recommendation based on the books that I normally suggest, but I am including it in the book club series because I do think it is an important and a timely read. And to understand why consider the following.

From a speech the author gave in 1961, Huxley said, quote, there will be in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without discipline. tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire society 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 pharmacological methods.

And this seems to be the final revolution. And that’s the end of the quote. So now let’s take a look at the world around us. Here in the west, for example, according to a number of studies and surveys, people watch an average of 38 hours of video content per week, spend an average of 1. 5 hours on social media per day, Play an average of 6.

4 hours of video games per week, spend on average over 90 percent of their income, are abandoning marriage and religion, collectively watch billions of hours of porn per year, collectively eat over 84 million fast food meals per day, collectively spend over 230 billion on alcoholic beverages per year, collectively spend over 1.

5 billion on alcoholic beverages per year, Collectively spend over 10 billion dollars on marijuana per year, and collectively smoke over 250 billion cigarettes per year, while also spending just 17 minutes reading a book. per day and mostly fiction and novels, just under two and a half hours productively working per day and less than 30 minutes exercising per day.

But hey, the optimists say at least Infant mortality and carbon monoxide emissions are down and renewable energy consumption is up a little bit and the internet’s getting faster and more people are recycling. Yeah, that’s neat. And it’s also completely Unsatisfying like a picture of oxygen to someone who is drowning.

And anyway, my point with all that is that Huxley was remarkably prescient in his predictions, or maybe it wasn’t so remarkable given the circles, his brother, Julian, check him out. He was a diehard eugenicist with very elite friends. And in Huxley’s book, Brave New World, he paints the whole picture for you.

And it is unnervingly familiar. So much so that by my lights, the recipe for the world unfolding around us is something like three parts Brave New World, two parts Atlas Shrugged, and one part 1984 with a dash of, I don’t know, Alice in Wonderland. In other words, technocratic totalitarianism and transparent topsy turviedom disguised as enlightenment, enrichment, and empowerment.

Don’t believe me? Read. The books that I just mentioned and see for yourself now, why bother reading those books? If we’re doomed anyway, says who humanity has seen much darker days than these. And we have rebounded. For example, take the black plague of the middle ages that killed at least a third of the people in Europe, if not more, and if we can make it through that, we can certainly make it through our.

First, however, we need enough people to see the world as it is and not as they wish it were. And that is why I’m recommending Brave New World. It represents the logical conclusion of this late stage world. of our current civilization, and that is the complete and scientific subjugation of the human spirit.

Okay, so let’s get to the takeaways. And I usually have five, but this time I only have three, because everything I had to say was really encapsulated in the three and there were no others that really mattered. Tickled my fancy. So let’s do three. Here’s number one quote. People are happy. They get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.

They’re well off. They’re safe. They’re never ill. They’re not afraid of death. They’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age. They’re plagued with no mothers or fathers. They’ve got no wives or children or Lovers to feel strongly about. They’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.

And if anything should go wrong, there’s Soma. So my note here is this is. Why people are willing slaves in brave new world in exchange for their individuality. They’re given a life of unchallenging work, euphoric drugs, recreational sport, meaningless sex and stimulating entertainment. And in case you’re wondering in the book, Soma was a drug that distracts you from a Unpleasantness of any kind with delightful hallucinations and a sense of timelessness.

Now what’s scary about that quote from the book is there is a voice in all of us that says, that sounds pretty good because the alternative, the voice fears is the freedom to be. Confused, alone, and miserable, which is the moral justification for the dictatorship in the book. Freedom, it is argued by the social controllers, the freedom to intensify and refine our consciousness, to expand our knowledge and strain our abilities is a liability that just lures us to our dooms like a mythical.

Siren. In short, the social controllers explain, the more freedom people have to think and act independently, the more likely they are to simply destroy themselves and society at large, so only by abandoning our obsession with liberty and autonomy can we finally achieve it. Inner and outer harmony and stability and in brave new world that has been accomplished and to great effect war, disease, social strife, and even aging have been eliminated and there’s a place for everyone and everyone is in their place.

Now, this is the type of world that the elite class has been dreaming of since the times of Plato, at least, who considered most of his fellow Athenians, hopelessly corrupt, irrational, and self indulgent and brave new world. Portrays this fantasy in a positive utopian light. Now, where do you stand on the matter?

Read the book and reflect. Alright, my second takeaway is, quote, Adults intellectually and during working hours, he went on, I’m quoting some dialogue here, Infants where feeling and desire are concerned. And my note here is, in the book, men and women are carefully engineered to be perpetual children who have no need for religion, reading, thinking, or evolving because they’ve got youth and entertainment and sensuality and prosperity right up to the end.

And in Clown World, reality basically the same thing is happening. IQ is dropping, anxiety, depression, and mental illness are rising. Fertility rates are plummeting and more and more young people are postponing marriage and moving back in with mom and dad and relying on them for financial support.

And nowhere is this cultural infantilization more apparent than in the realms of culture and politics, which have degenerated into an ideological food fight fueled by feelings and not facts. Did someone say or do something that made you feel bad? Slam a pie in their fascist face, honk.

Okay, the third and final takeaway quote, consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, again, this is dialogue, and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior, murder kills only the individual, and after all, what is an individual? With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test tubes, the incubators.

We can make a new one with the greatest ease, as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual. It strikes at society with a capital S. itself. And my note here is this is yet another striking similarity between Brave New World and our world. Thoughts and opinions that do not conform with those approved by the hive mind are becoming more and more unacceptable.

And the message is very clear. You can either tow the line or walk the plank. And I suppose this is what happens when you turn over Society’s most important and influential institutions like academia, media, art, government, finance to cadres of its most morally confused and depraved actors and let them run amok for a century or so.

Okay. So that’s it for the takeaways and my commentary, except for this final note. And that is, I really do hope that I’m wrong about Basically, everything I just said, I really do. I hope our king makers, lawmakers and tastemakers are not hurting us to our collective dooms. But the evidence, which extends far beyond everything I’ve mentioned in this podcast is overwhelming.

Now, these people believe they are working to save humanity from destroying itself, of course, and while I’m not convinced their plan will work out, I guess time will tell. Now, if I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more about such things, start by reading a book called The Anglo American Establishment by Carol Quigley.

And then if you have the fortitude, read his magnum opus tragedy and hope by the end of those two books, you are going to view history and the world around you very differently.