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Aldous Huxley on TV in 1958 perfectly describing the United States we are living in today. CHILLING.
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View Reddit by The_Patriot – View Source
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Aldous Huxley on TV in 1958 perfectly describing the United States we are living in today. CHILLING.
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View Reddit by The_Patriot – View Source
i mean sure why not. blackrock, vanguard, state street, even that smurf sam bankman fried fund both republicans and democrats and are wholy owned subsidiaries of the world economic forum. cult of millionaires worshiping billionares. esg scores and the woke movement are literally pushed and run by a hitler youth, klaus schwab.
This irony is that this comment section is just going to be flooded with people who think the culprit is the opposite side of wherever they stand.
He’s wrong that overpopulation will be a oroblem. Birth rates are declining globally.
That’s why they assassinated him in Dallas in 1963. Check the date.
George Orwell’s version of the future is one ruled by an iron fist.
Huxley’s view was that people would be ideologically suppressed and hand over their freedom’s willingly.
My perspective is that it’s both. Go against the social system of control, they’ll use force to make you compliant.
His views on individualism versus collectivism is relevant. Individuality was an extremely strong value in youth counterculture in the 60s to 80s but changed to collectivism in the 90s when Americans were told to use Political Correctness as a replacement for Colourblind ideology.
Colourblind ideology is pro individual. PC ideology forces people to be collectivized by stupid labels which makes it really easy to exploit and control people.
The world has changed so incredibly much since the time this footage was captured. We are dealing with a tertiary reaction to a primary function of Moore’s Law.
The next twenty years are going to be wild.
I only watched the first 10 minutes but it seemed like he gave incredibly vague nonanswers or was just straight up wrong a couple times. Hardly some kind of prophet.
His talk of overpopulation, for example, was wrong on multiple points. Ignoring the validity of Malthusian arguments (spoiler alert: they almost always are proven to be wrong), he conflates rapid population expansion in the developing world with other economic woes. This interview is pretty much right at the tail end of decolonization, and it should be obvious that many of the problems faced by these developing countries was a result of this and not high birth rates or overpopulation. These countries also did not go on to become centralized authoritarian governments but instead are plagued by civil unrest and governments unable to project authority within their own borders as they struggle with constant internal strife. They certainly didn’t all become Communist either.
“Technology will improve” and “things will change and maybe not for the better” are hardly earth shattering revelations, he doesn’t seem to actually make concrete predictions, and certainly nothing that perfectly describes the world today.
Describing which perception of America?
Yours? Mine? someone elses’?
It’s hard to make lasting societal progress while constantly battling with the inevitable weaknesses of human nature like the unquenchable thirst for power and the tendency to forget mistakes of the past.
The most worrying aspect of modern politics has been the increasing derision of the word “freedom”. I think it was the Canadian government which including “freedom” as a ‘far right buzzword’, which is a very ominous step in the wrong direction for any western society.
Freedom is the only fight we have against oppression. The idea that it should be resented, ridiculed, derided or insulted is problematic in itself because whilst the proponents of that may wish well, once freedom has been eroded it lost, there will always be more sinister people ready to capitalise on that.
For instance, I listened to an interview with a left wing advocate of censorship on the CosmicSkeptic channel last night. Even if people 100% agree with him, what he doesn’t take into account is that when you create rules of censorship, that can always be used against you. You can’t just always censor the right people, they will find ways to infringe your rights and when they do, you’ve rolled out the red carpet for every single thing they can imagine.
Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of thought…these are good things. Universally good.
In bed next to my sleeping wife so I can’t listen, but does he mention how no one will be able to publicly define what a woman is?
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No one has yet mentioned how Huxley’s views were deeply rooted in the fact that drug use was the way to a higher state of being or happiness. Yes, in Brave New World Soma is used to control people, but also the way they relaxed and felt better I their world. By his second book, Island, the drug is the savior. Huxley died of an OD.
Also Island is not very good. Don’t waste your time.
See that’s the thing. Every generation thinks that the next is spiraling towards dictatorship because the boogeyman is “bypassing the rational side of men and appealing directly to those unconscious forces below the surface”
I think we’ll all agree that just hasn’t been the case in a long enough time horizon. That’s not to say dictators don’t exist, but merely pointing out that progress isn’t a straight line. If you took a “moving average” line of amount of dictators as a % I think it’s been going down over the last millennia.
But yet, every generation thinks they are struggling with the same thing. In fact I would posit this is an excellent window into the minds of humans and can be summed up thusly – “everyone who disagrees with me is a imbecile led astray by the malicious”. Nowhere is it more apparent than today in the US. Somehow BOTH SIDES think that the other are imbeciles led astray by the malicious. Not to mention the anti-corporatists and libertarians (who somehow have exactly different viewpoints but come off as enantiomers rather than opposites) thinking that both mainstream political parties are imbeciles.
But of course, everyone is certain that they’re right. And I’m sure your side is right too
A lot of commenters didn’t comprehend this interview at all and it shows. xD
I bet SOMA is just short for SOcial MediA
See Apple’s modern enslavement of half the population
Modern civilizations need to have strong education systems that can keep up with the rapid development of social technologies. Students should be learning early on how to recognize the multitude of techniques used in bad faith arguments. They need to study how populism can grip a nation and lead it to ruins.
It’s interesting, because, on the one hand, his prediction of a slide toward authoritarianism is certainly happening around the world. The OP title talks about the US, but in reality, the slide has been much worse and much faster in some eastern European counties and parts of Asia and South America. Still, it’s happening here too (book bans, gerrymandering, bans in medical care, defunding institutions that express contrary opinions, the “cancel culture” movement, labeling independent media as enemies of the people, talk of “patriotism tests,” ect.)
However, he was largely wrong in his predictions of the driving forces. Over population has not been a major factor and advanced economies are actually experiencing population decline. China, the country with the most aggressive population control effort is also one of the most authoritarian. Likewise, the growth in technology has in very recent times has led to a concentration of wealth, but this has as much to do with current taxation methods and regulations as it does with technology in particular and hasn’t directly contributed to authoritarianism outside of making it easier for niche echo chambers to form in very recent years.
Despite the forces he mentions, liberal democracy has had a great run from the time of this video through the early 2000s.
In reality, the pivot toward authoritarianism in the past decade and a half can be tied closely to two major events. 9/11 and the 2008 Stock Crash. In the first case, security concerns led to people accepting draconian surveillance laws and restrictions to combat the possibility of falling victim to a terrorist attack. It also led the US and its allies into two highly destabilizing wars that weakened Western nations soft power and created power vacuums in the middle east and elsewhere.
The 2008 crash, by contrast, created a situation where people felt left out of economic umbrella. They saw decades of savings vanish, lost jobs, security, and their sense of dignity. They felt powerless as the bad actions of a few rich elites burned down the house they’d spent their lives building. This led to anger, resentment at the establishment, and a feeling that the various economic, political, and social trends of the last couple decades were leaving them out and behind in favor of “others.”
This has opened the door for inflammatory populists in the left and right across the world to tell a convincing story about who these others are (migrants, minorities, the educated elites, “experts,” religious groups, atheists, etc.) how they (not you) how they are to blame for all your problems and how I the great leader will make THEM pay for it and restore you to your former/deserved status in a moderately fictitious past or utopian future.
In reality, economic hardship and fear of personal security (powerlessness) seem to be the prevailing forces leading to populist authoritarianism more than what Huxley is describing here. He correctly identified the danger, but his vision of its origins and manifestations (in this video) don’t match the recent reality as much as OP’s title suggests.
Though, I will readily point out, both Animal Farm and Brave New World do an excellent job of digging into how such transitions can occur and how they often play out.
We are completely unaware of the subliminal suggestions that bombard us daily.