Huxley and Orwell debate

by **terryintacoma** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 8:33 am

Here is part of a letter from Ralph Nader at DemocracyRising.US.: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is the name of Neil Postman's 1985 classic that weighed in on the debate between Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Here's Postman: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in "Brave New World Revisited", the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In "1984", Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In "Brave New World", they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Postman's book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. Is there any doubt? And as we amuse ourselves to death, our elected leaders lead us into unforgivable wars. And most of us look the other way. But war is real. War is nasty. War is ugly. Chris Hedges is the courageous former New York Times war correspondent who has covered wars from Central America, to the Balkans, to the Middle East. He is the author of the book "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning". In it, he portrays war is a deadly addiction, and a unifying force that gives us meaning. But strip it of all its mythical power and war, Hedges says, is simply "organized murder." Once war begins, the morality of the universe collapses around it. _____________________________________ I read "War is a Force..." Five stars About 5 years ago I reread "1984". First time I had read it it was taking place in the future. lol Not a book to take to the beach with you. Haven't read any Huxley.

by **Gouda** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:03 am

Speaking of debates and DemocracyRising, here is a Rare Creature in american politics: a 3-way Senate debate whereby an anti-war, progressive, 3rd party candidate, Kevin Zeese (progressive left, running on a unified ticket: green, populist, libertarian) is allowed to participate and pretty much shames the democrat (Cardin, center-right) and the republican (Steele, right) even while the Duopoly candidates consistently ignore Zeese (refering to each other as "my opponent," singular.) Here is the full, very interesting, unedited Maryland Senate Debate between Cardin, Steele and Zeese. <a href="http://kevinzeese.com/content/view/238/70/">kevinzeese.com/content/view/238/70/</a> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=gouda@rigorousintuition>Gouda</A> at: 10/10/06 7:11 am

by **DireStrike** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 10:07 am

I read Postman's book. It was fascinating. I couldn't help but wonder what he would say about our media today. Cable news pretty much proves his thesis, but I'm more interested in what his take on the internet and its forms of communication would be. Cynical, I suppose, but they do seem to fostor some things that were lacking before. This forum is a case in point.

by **1 tal** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:24 pm

<a href="http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2006/04/learning-to-be-stupid-in-culture-of.html">link</a> Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash By Luciana Bohne 08/12/03 You might think that reading about a Podunk University's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we've embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance. "I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than philosophy -she thinks. The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende. Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny. Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions. Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses. This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our youth. But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects. Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations. Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state - including education. Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:56 pm

Great post, terryintacoma. I know lots of academics and cultural creatives who spend their brains on entertainment and pedantry that does nothing to combat fascism. Throwing lots of amusing haystack around the needle of fascism prevents getting to the point. Huxley was right. TV, movies, and fiction collectively are the control drug he called Soma, a combination of stimulant, hallucinagen, and tranquilizer. I read Chris Hedges' book, too, and the most important thing he wrote was that humans need a coherent narrative to cope and function well. Creating that coherent narrative and institutionalizing it is the task of peace and justive workers. And that means getting history and other facts right to counter myths. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=hughmanateewins>Hugh Manatee Wins</A> at: 10/10/06 11:04 am

by **isachar** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:20 pm

Excellent post, 1tal. Only too true. So goes the great American experiment, down the toilet of lassitude, irrelevancy and self-aggragandizement. I who will continue or take up the banner of freedom? The French? The Venezuelans, Spanish or Chileans? Will there be another free society - or at least one that aspires to be - in the post-modern era?

by **Wolfmoon Lady** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 3:47 pm

Hey, there, Terryintacoma. I saw your intro to RI a few weeks back and wanted to post a response and a "heya" but I've been insanely busy -- and distracted, as well. Glad to see ya, pleased to meetcha, hope you stay around awhile. (I'm a former hippy chick, too. Former, meaning, I was once naive enough to believe that peace, love, and understanding would change the world.) Anyroad... I read 1984 and Brave New World in high school. Musta been around 16, or so. I feared Huxley's vision far more than Orwell's because I always knew people would get more pissed off if you tried to regulate access to television and sex. Read Huxley. You'll likely end up agreeing with Post on some level. I'd say society has evolved into a combination of both world views - totalitarianism and rampant hedonism. What better way to control people than to keep them fat, stupid, and intoxicated, while you quietly trash the Bill of Rights. People are too busy pleasuring themselves to notice what the hell is going on, let alone muster the energy to fight back. Who worries about the 1st Amendment when they're having so much fun? This is an aside, but might be taken as a case in point: Last night, I engaged in a major distraction by going to see a James Blunt concert. When he sang "No Bravery" there was very little applause. He performs the song while self-filmed images from his stint in Kosovo as a British army captain are projected behind him on a screen. Before he begins, he talks about the images and puts them into historical context. Last night, he said, 'We see the news and then the news is gone. But it's not really gone. It's still there. It's still happening.' No response -- just silence. By the end of the song, which Blunt rendered passionately, in his ragged beautiful voice, the energy level of the room had dropped so far, it was nearly a vacuum. (I was one of the few who stood and cheered.) The silence lasted from the moment it took him to walk from his piano to pick up his guitar and launch into "High." Then, everybody was groovy again. The ugly images of war, death, and sorrow that he had filmed, and thought important to share, and the song he wrote about his personal experience with war, were just one big downer for the crowd. Once they were gone, it was like someone had changed the channel.

by **Wolfmoon Lady** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 4:15 pm

I had forgotten about my Morgan's Musings blogpost on this very topic. FWIW, here it is:<hr /> Sunday, August 14, 2005 <a href="http://morganwolf.blogspot.com/2005/08/was-huxley-right-rather-than-orwell.html" target="top">Was Huxley right, rather than Orwell?</a> I've been seeing the word "totalitarianism" a lot these days. It's not new for me. But when I see Jeff Wells <a href="http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/08/theres-law.html" target="top">writing about it</a>, with utter seriousness, and with compelling evidence, as in yesterday's post, I pay closer attention. I wonder how many others of us are thinking the same things. But. I confess that there is something about Orwell's vision that doesn't quite synch with what I see going on in the culture at large. I'm not talking about language repression, widespread disinfo campaigns, or militarism. There's plenty of that, to be sure. What I don't see is deprivation; what I don't sense is widespread despair -- and both are critical elements of Orwell's dystopian vision. I've been mulling this "un-synch" or "synch minus" (to employ a kind of Newspeak) problem over for a long time. At least, since the 2004 Presidential Election. At the time, I was working as a teaching assistant in a college writing class. The subject was Political Rhetoric and the Media, and Orwell's 1984 was the first book on the reading list. I was eager to hear what younger people had to say about George Orwell's work, and of the grim scenario he presents in the book. As part of their homework, students were required to watch the film version, the one starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, and then compare the two, always with a mind to the politics of language. It was a good class - interesting discussion. But. It's important to disclose that most of these students were incredibly jaded by wealth. Certainly, many were quite privileged. A couple had even met George Bush, and had attended school with his brother Neil's children. Others in the class were self-identified "military brats." One young man said his parents worked in the higher echelons of Enron. He had grown up in the Middle East, a rich white American boy. Early in the semester, I asked him if his family had suffered economic losses when Enron stock collapsed. I'll never forget the incredulous look on his face. He obviously thought I must be slightly retarded for even thinking it. With a careless shrug, he said: "No, my dad heard about it way before it happened and took care of it." I didn't press him for details. I never spoke to him again, either. Subsequent discussions on Orwell were revealing. The students were very interested in the concept of "Newspeak", and marveled at the time and effort Orwell invested in creating an entire language. They wanted to know what made him write such a book. What had happened to him, they wondered, that caused him to imagine a world where Big Brother was watching everyone. We talked about Orwell's deep fear of socialism, although, paradoxically, he was a socialist. We talked the reality of a surveillance society, which they had already accepted as "the way things are." Did they think 1984 would ever come to pass? No. Clearly, these young adults thought that Orwell's vision was impossible. It could never happen. Mostly, they acted as though 1984 was a quaint book, useful for understanding political language and its perversions, but the scenario was hardly pertinent to their lives, or to their future. That gave me pause. And I've been pausing there ever since: Why? Why doesn't this vision frighten the leaders of tomorrow? So here I am, months later, and, like I said, still thinking about it. Now, Jeff Wells has decided that America is already a totalitarian state - we just don't know it. Okay. I think he's probably right. I know exactly what he means, and I agree with him. But there is still a problem - an "unsynch" - with what I'm seeing/not seeing, in the culture at large. That is, the lack of deprivation and despair. Sure, people are griping about gas prices and the way Bush keeps sneaking his agenda past impotent Democrats. Sure, there's talk about impeachment. And down in Crawford, Texas, Cindy Sheehan is camping out, in hopes her protests over the Iraq War will bring the Bush Administration to its knees. Meanwhile the MSM talking heads speak derisively about Sheehan; Brian Williams, in particular, called her "that woman." So what's going on here? The other night, I decided to watch 1984, and as I did, I tried to imagine the future landscape of the United States looking anything like the mise-en-scene of the film. It suddenly struck me that Orwell's vision isn't the one that will come to pass. Aspects of it will, yes, and already have done. The perversion of language, the disinfo, the surveillance, the militarism - the things that are easy to perpetrate on the unsuspecting populace - have already been done. But where are the squalorous living conditions? The bleak, blasted buildings? The chocolate rationing? The government imposed celibacy? The complete loss of individual will? I have to say I agree with my former students that Orwell's dystopia is utterly unfathomable. I will go further: the level of suffering depicted in George Orwell's 1984 will not manifest in The United States of America anytime soon, perhaps never. Realistically, I must qualify this statement by also agreeing that an apocalyptic level of domestic catastrophe, or a series of catastrophes of the magnitude of 9/11, will bring us close. I do not hold such a level of scholarly hubris that I speak in absolutes, particularly about totalitarianism. However, in my heart of hearts, I think it highly unlikely. Instead, I believe that, as long as people have ways to earn money and commodities to spend it on, we will somehow manage to keep living conditions pretty close to the status quo. Indeed, I will argue that the totalitarian vision presented in Orwell's 1984 could only happen in the complete absence of capitalism and conspicuous consumption. Thus, it is Alduous Huxley's vision of totalitarianism, with sanctioned drug use, open sexuality (without consequence of childbearing), and rigid, genetically determined social status, as depicted in Brave New World, that makes far more sense, particularly in terms of American culture. It goes without saying that we live in a global culture, where everything is for sale and everything has a price. However, Americans are highly trained consumers - and they will do anything to preserve that right, that 'entitlement,' even going so far as to allow their president to engage in pre-emptive war. Anything to keep the suffering of war far away from American soil. Ideology and partisan politics aside, what other reason could there be for the average Joe or Jane to allow the Iraq War to continue? After all, war itself is so unreal! Our kids aren't fighting. It's the other guy's kids. It's those people on the other side of town. Never us. War is easy as long as it is happening someplace else and with someone else's kids. We have no problem with this cognitive dissonance. We can easily accept that war is a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world. Other than that, few of us are touched by war. Rather, war is an action movie plot, or a Game Boy program. No real blood. No real dead bodies. In fact, I've often considered that many Americans were initially undisturbed by George Bush's jump-suited, "Mission Accomplished," antics precisely because they fit so perfectly into the bizarre, larger than life, video game culture that defines our lives. The MSM delivers images that we have become conditioned to anticipate, and even welcome, in a media-mediated society. We have accepted the delusion that, if we keep working and spending, life will go on. So what if there are troops in the streets - they're keeping us safe! So what if we have to show our papers in order to travel to another state? It'll keep out the terrorists. We have nothing to hide. We just want to get on with our lives. Aye - there's the rub. It's the "getting on with out lives" thing that makes us so vulnerable to totalitarian-style persuasion. But like I said, it won't be the kind of persuasion that Orwell's Ministry of Peace exerts on the unfortunate characters of Julia, Winston, and all the other thought-criminals of Oceania. It will be quite painless, really. At least, for most of us. If culture can be simply defined as a shared set of values, it is fair to say that what Americans most value is our right to the good life. With that in mind, I think we should consider how easy it is to control people if you keep them fat and happy. If we accept that people are mostly concerned with maintaining the status quo, so they can continue to earn money, and spend it on luxuries, we should also accept the fact that the government will aid and abet them in their pursuits. Why? Because nobody is going to revolt against a government that gives tax breaks to the rich in times of war. That doesn't, in fact, even ask for citizens to sacrifice anything for the war. Except for the poor, that is. And they don't really count, do they? Second, as my Red State Sister is fond of pointing out - Americans have it better than anyone else in the world. And we don't we want to keep it that way? That is why the PNAC multi-theater war vision of the future will be so easy to implement. Not through deprivation and force, a la Orwell, but through the satisfaction of desire, a la Huxley. Here's something I read that is worth bringing to this discussion. A while back, I read a fascinating book by Anthropologist Stephen Fjellman:Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (1992), which presents multiple theses about the dizzying, disorienting, impact of Walt Disney World on American culture. His years of participant-observation style research at Disney World supports much of what I've already said about our consumer-driven culture and our problems with reality. In the chapter, "Consumption and Culture Theory", Fjellman visits the Orwell/Huxley dichotomy I've just put forth: "Postmodern culture is anchored in the breakdown of the signifying chain. The referential functions of normal, everyday language have been shattered and the signifier disconnected from the signified. Orwell wrote about one type of referential dismemberment, a relatively straightforward kind based on naked repression and lexical control. But the postmodern world is not Orwellian. It is Huxleyan - and the fortunes of signs, symbols, and human meaning have taken a different form" (299). In seeking examples of symbols and meaning pertinent to a Huxleyan world, Fjellman cites writer Joel Achenbach, who analyzed the text on a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies to prove that people will accept any lie that feeds their perception of what is normal. Believing that a corporation as large as Pepperidge Farm (which is owned by Campbell's Soup) would individually craft cookies is ridiculous. So why did the company design a machine that makes the cookies look like a human made them, and then confess to the fakery on the wrapper? Why doesn't this bother us? Achenbach refers to this phenomenon as "creeping surrealism" - the general fear, brought about by manipulation of the narrative and public discourse, that "nothing is real anymore" [so why care?]. To wit: "Americans ... no longer think the distinction matters... lies have been raised to an art form in this country, information manipulated so delicately, so craftily, with such unparalleled virtuosity, that you can no longer tell the genuine from the fake, the virtuous from the profane" (Achenbach, in Fjellman 1992). Fjellman takes the notion of unreality a step further: "Human beings have been and are being decentered and fractionated, especially in the United States. Furthermore, the hyperreal is being forcibly exported around the world as the U.S. way of life and death. Living in a rich country, trained to expect an ever-increasing set of entitlements, and led to embody those entitlements not in any civic notions of the social good but in private accumulations of what George Carlin calls 'stuff,' Americans insistently implicate themselves in this process." Satisfying our desire by acquiring things has become an American raison d'etre. We want fast cars, nice houses, cool clothes, exotic travel destinations, and the chance to become American Idols. Furthermore, it is precisely because we are conspicuous consumers, who believe themselves entitled to the 'good life,' that makes the continuation of the Iraq War and the Big Lie of 9/11 self-perpetuating. As Fjellman argues, "As long as we act in terms of our shared symbolic universe, life - even if difficult - is explainable. Further, we will not threaten those who control the goodies." He's right! If you have a good job, a roof over your head, a car in driveway, food on the table, and can afford your medicine, why would you complain? Why would anybody want to rock the proverbial boat? Why care about people on the other side of the world, anyway? Their suffering is simply not real. Which is one reason why Cindy Sheehan's protest is causing such a stir. It's unpleasant. It's disruptive. It's a rude attempt to awaken people from their Soma-induced dream state and realize that war is not fun, not hip, not pain-free. As long as possible, Americans will resist the onslaught of reality. Perhaps it will never come - at least in the version that hurts and deprives. As I see it, then, the problem with accepting a strict Orwellian future for America is that such a view ignores the American culture's lust for ownership, and the need to carefully maintain the illusion of individual freedom of choice. The Huxleyan future, on the other hand, allows Americans to hold on to their illusions, along with their hard-earned collections of things. Remember that bumper sticker from the 1980s: "Whoever dies with the most toys wins"? It still applies. We've simply replaced it with a more appropriately virtuous, "Support Our Troops" - or "God Bless America." Indeed, one might argue that the bumper sticker is just another commodity that helps to create, and to sustain, the prevailing cultural pastiche. Finally, in support of my Huxleyan rather than Orwellian thesis, I'll leave you with a quote by Neil Postman, from the foreword to his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions'. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." -- Neil Postman, 1986. ------------- Edited, 8/16/05: It troubles me to imagine just how much we, as a nation, will put up with to sustain our lifestyles. I think that's the ultimate answer to why the Germans let Dolphy take over, and certainly, why they let him go so far. It was just easier to go with the flow. Did history teach us anything? Does it ever? As intellectuals, we like to believe we're smart enough to learn from the past. If that were true, however, George Bush would never have been installed. I don't for one minute think the conditions that allowed him to steal the 2000 election would have been in place had we leftists been paying close enough attention, and had done the hard work necessary to keep Bush, and his ilk, out of government. We had the chance to vote him out in 2004, but it didn't happen. Not enough of us got involved. Not enough of us put it all on the line. Too many people didn't bother to vote, for godssake. It goes back to the 1980s "culture of greed" and Ronald Reagan. That is when the Big Chill descended on the anti-war movement's Flower Children. When the Boomers became part of the Establishment they once despised, it was all over. There's no going back now, not without the requisite suffering and deprivation. Are we willing to do it?<hr />

by **xsic bastardx** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 7:11 pm

Huxley changed my life. I read "A Brave New World" in a jail cell. The feeling I had after I read it still has not left me. The man is brillant, the forward he wrote in Revisted stands alone as some of his truest words ever written. Personally, I tend to reflect on the Savage. The Savage can be taken as the from of bare bones truth interjected into a society that can not even begin to fathom the impact or reality of what has just happend to them. They are confronted with the truth of who they are and where they come from. We are being confronted with who we are right now. everyday we come closer to that point where we finally see our reflection in the mirror. Huxley saw this. The Coke Bottles that the Children were born from could be reflective of the narrow midned view of parents this day in age. We can already change the aspects of unborn children. Hair color, Eyes. What diseases they will/won't be predispositione too. His Brave New World is right out our doorstep.The classes have differnet names....White, Black, Democrat, Republican....etc...etc.....but we follow the same lines and divisions they only have different names and faces. Our TV's and disinformation we fee our chidren in schools brainwashes them into there predetermined routes in life. Fame, Fourtune, Money, Power....this is the Soma of our Culture. Millions of people hoping to get rich quick and win the Lottery. Get on Survivor and win a million dollars. 15 minutes of fame and try to ride it into rehab. Were an addicted culture on much more than drugs my friends. The brainwashing speakers that filled the childrens rooms with sounds of conditioning can be compared to the convuluted dreams and aspirations we subject our chidren to. Epsilon Minuses dont play with Alpha Betas........Come on Darling, those people are poor trash...... I think I am gonna go buy me another copy. It's been too long since I have read it. Thanks for this post. Really needed this.

Huxley and Orwell debate

Huxley and Orwell debate

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re: postman

I'll go with Huxley

Re: Huxley and Orwell debate

Re: I'll go with Huxley

Re: Huxley and Orwell debate

Re: Huxley and Orwell debate - Part Deux

Re: Huxley and Orwell debate - Part Deux

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