Between the publication of Brave New World and 1958 the world had experienced the rise of the totalitarian state under Stalin and Hitler, and the second world war.
He first identifies the chief problem of the future as overpopulation. He foresees that this problem must lead to worsening economic conditions. These are likely to lead to political unrest, and he foresees that this is likely to be the precursor to anti-democratic forces.
More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their bureaucratic manager. But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. ... A democratic constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is concentrated in too few hands. Such a consitution works pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there is a traditional respect for constitutional procedures. Where the republican or limited monarchical tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of power.Huxley then points out that technology becomes ever more complex and expensive, so that the small manufacturer can no longer participate in the economy, which becomes completely dominated by big Business. The Power Elite employs the workforce in offices, factories and shops, also in the media, where it can influence the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.
Huxley believes in the value of the individual rather than the value of the mass. This is crucial. He quotes a philosopher -psychiatrist, Dr Erich Fromm:
Our comtemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual, it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.Fromm rather destroys his own argument by then saying that the sympoms of mental stress are signs of the individual fighting back; and that "normal" people are really the problem.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality", but in fact they have been to a great extent de-individualized. but "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too ..."Huxley enlarges on this argument.
Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity's increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health. --- City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.
Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal - a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant.I want to refer to a current film that I saw at the weekend that illustrates this mental health thing. It was American and mainstream, not arthouse, called "Silver Linings Playbook" (I think) and it was about a guy who was very definitely mentally ill, and needed medication and counselling to live at home with his parents rather than in a mental hospital. He had been diagnosed as bi-polar and that is a condition the cause of which may be nothing to do with the way we have arranged our society. Or..?
However, his father's disorder illustrates Huxley's and Fromm's arguments nicely. The father was a completely obsessive sport fan, whose team had become a religion for him, and because its wins and losses meant so much to him he believed he could influence the outcome of the game - by having his sons there watching the TV with him, and having the remotes lined up beside him in a certain way, and holding a green handkerchief. He had a legal restraining order which did not allow him to attend the games in person because he would so often get into fights with fans of opposing teams. This is a man in his 60s/70s. So a supposedly rational man who functioned reasonably well in society, at least to the point where he could run a book (gambling) that made enough money to keep his family, had also symptoms of an inability to rationalise, which everyone else recognised as a kind of insanity.
The interesting thing about this film was that everyone in it was familiar with mental symptoms, knew terms like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and the audience also participated by understanding these terms, and the reason why the best friend had his repeated feeling of being strangled, while his wife, with her cast -iron certainties and acceptance of societal norms, was seen as the least attractive character.
So I think Fromm's ideas about how we externalise all this stress has now become mainstream. Everyone knows that modern life drives them nuts. It is accepted. But how powerlessly and pathetically we accept all this and we do nothing at all to drive social change.
End of Part 1
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