Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, Part 2

This book, as I explained before was written in 1958. However, certain things that Huxley was concerned about at that time are more true than ever. Although he over-estimated the likelihood of people being swayed by propaganda, he was perceptive about the growth of the entertainment industry playing a role in eradicating political dissent.

In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities : the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.

Then Huxley is also interested in Hitler's methods of crowd-manipulation. He notes the size of the rallies, the difference between a huge gathering and a fairly small one, and the enhancing effect of holding them at nighttime. "assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice."

From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collectives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerating overpopulation, of accelerating over-organisation and every more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual?

Many a man, said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realised in Hitler's totalitarian system."

Since Hitler's day the armoury of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. .... Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

Huxley imagined that these devices would be used by the dictator for control rather than by the people to communicate privately. But he was wrong. As we can see from the Arab Spring, social networks allowed by the Internet empower the individual rather than the dictator.