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March 20, 1962, "Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution," Berkeley Language Center, pulsemedia.org
"Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World,...discusses influence, controlling the public mind and government." Transcript:
"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 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...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....
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And
there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of
ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made
to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not
to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I
say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more
interested in what is happening....
I’m inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the
future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in
many parts of the world....
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in
which they’re living. The state of servitude the state of being, having
their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production
methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are
likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more
easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on
clubs and firing squads and concentration camps....
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more
scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect,
perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the
kind of techniques which I imagined and described...in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate
revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of
techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it
remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied
in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the...improvement
in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements.
Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on
animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that
conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either
of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into
the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid
of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of
conditioning....
And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both
as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the
communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been
applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I
think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a
very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The
conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological
iontophoresis into the very depths of the people’s being, and has got so
deep that it’s very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods,
I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because
they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the
person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the
purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary acceptance of the state
the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of
affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the,
even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the
consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for
inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude....
I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be
categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect
very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases,
and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize...out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who
are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the
intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely
unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if
everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be
absolutely inevitable. I mean it’s very fortunate that we have people
who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore
preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be
formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly
suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of
enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to
get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to
organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any
country."...
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