Long Walks & Anarcho-Primitivism –
‘Radical References’, No.3, Mabon 2022:
Aldous Huxley’s ‘Ultimate Revolution’ (1962)
In 1962, Aldous Huxley, author of ‘Brave New World’, gave a speech to mark thirty years since its publication. Sixty years after that speech, and Huxley’s prognostication of the populous learning to ‘love their servitude’ continues to evolve.
© 2022 Paul Mobbs; released under the Creative Commons Public Domain license.
Created: 11th September 2022.
Length: ~1,700 words
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Generally I ‘don’t do’ fiction. I find that non-fiction provides far more than enough to deal with without worrying about story-telling and escapism. It was rather a shock, then, to find that both the ninetieth anniversary of ‘Brave New World’, and the sixtieth anniversary of Huxley’s speech about it, passed without seemingly any major comment.
In this blog post I summarise the main points of his speech, reducing the 40 minute/4,000 words down to around 900 words and five minutes (note that I’ve also edited Huxley’s rather ponderous Victorian speech mannerism to remove the long pauses within sentences, making it flow more freely). If this wets your appetite for more, then you can find the original audio recording here.
Huxley’s general argument is that what he foresaw in the 1930s was, in the ‘White Heat’ of the technological revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s, beginning to come true. Fast forward to today, and even the seemingly more outrageous aspects of the speech relating to electrodes in the brain is now part of an Elon Musk-funded research project. More importantly, at the core of Huxley’s viewpoint is an analysis which can be characterised as ‘Neo-Luddite’, because it puts emphasis on the effect of new technology upon human commonality.
If you want to understand the contemporary crisis in politics, the mass media, and recent panics over ideas like ‘The Great Reset’, then the work of Huxley, ‘Brave New World’, and his non-fiction follow-up ‘Brave New World Revisited’, offer a far more clear and concise view of what is happening today than much of the contemporary comment on these issues.
What’s especially nice about creating this review is that I don’t have to read the words of the original author. We have his actual words, which of course convey far more of what he meant in the writing of them than their literal meaning. I urge you to listen to the entire speech, and to read both books if possible; but for now, here are the edited highlight of Huxley’s arguments about the slowly developing, ‘Brave New World’ of modern technology.
Aldous Huxley’s ‘Ultimate Revolution’(edited from original Berkeley Archive recording, 1962)
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, in the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there’s been the political revolution, the economic revolution, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where a man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. This has generally been of a violent nature. But, if you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent.
Well, it seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed, and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude. This is, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me for many years and about which I wrote, ‘Brave New World’.
Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay that a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true, or seem in process of coming true.
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 from existing realities in ‘Brave New World’.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucin- atory way; the television and radio.
This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course with the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed advances in technology which have profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise. It seems to me that it was during the late 18th and early 19th Century when the new machines were making possible the factory system.
It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and most of this country for fifty or sixty years, the horrible abuses of the factory system; and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time.
If people had first of all found out what was happening then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques should not take place, then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which was imposed upon the poor at that time.
And similarly with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation, and more profoundly the problems which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances shall be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their ultimate degradation.
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