Posted on 03/06/2012 11:42:56 AM PST by DogByte6RER
Read Aldous Huxley’s review of 1984 he sent to George Orwell
Several months after George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 was published in 1949, Aldous Huxley sent a letter to his former French pupil. The Brave New World author had received a copy of 1984 from the publisher at Orwell's behest, but his poor eyesight prevented him from finishing the book for several months.
In his letter to Orwell, the fifty-year-old author compared the two books' screwed-up futures and saw the Orwellian Oceanic dystopia as a predecessor to his own World State. Wrote Huxley in October 1949:
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals - the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution - the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology - are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesner, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war - in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Truly the cheerful correspondance. Who needs a game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy to raise their spirits?
How did this situation come about in America’s universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed [14] that it slipped past those traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so ‘quietly’ that when they ‘looked up,’ postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. “They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddish multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses” which undermine the perpetuation of Western Civilization. “
There you are. I was in college in the early to mid 1970’s,
and I saw the transformation first hand. It was ugly then, now it is lost.
INDEED.
I assume you have read or listened on youtube to
Charlotte Iserbyt . . . Policy Dir for Education under Reagan.
Yes, I agree. I watched the same thing.
When I saw JFK get SElected, I knew it was all a corrupt process then. I just didn’t want to believe it.
Bfl
I’ve long loved the Reader’s Digest.
I thought the founders were fairly patriotic.
I have thought that the new regime has been much more globalist in orientation.
Dare I guess that such was particularly true with those who are sooooooo convinced that they know everything of importance about anything of significance?
This world is not our home.
At least not until after Armageddon.
So yer sayin’ I’m homeless.
Except in Jesus.
I hope.
He alone is hope.
All other homes are . . . transitory and illusory.
it seems to me.
LUB BRO.
Thanks for the ping!
THANKS MUCH. Interesting, IIRC.
Thanks!
Always good to hear from you.
Thanks for the link.
Have a blessed weekend.
Eye opening book that explains far more than the origins and workings of the Federal Reserve. At the extreme end of the book he mentions this web site:
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/
Everybody must read the book from cover to cover
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQQqYb4CIEE&feature=relmfu
Shifting from Internet to paper is vital. As Zero plans a total take over. 'Nuff said by me on FR.
Except -- Enjoy. Have fun. Play nice . . .
LOL !
Thanks for the ping!
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