Cross posted at Peace is Active
I just read Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited from Aldous Huxley.
His basic idea was to show that political control can be achieved through rewards and distraction just as it can be achieved through fear and punishment.
After reading the books, I had to ask myself, are we living in a Brave New World?
Brave New World is a book that describes a society where everything is engineered. People are bred for specific purposes while being conditioned to be completely happy with their lives. They are given rewards and the drug soma so everyone remains happy. Social control is planned and achieved without the use of fear and punishment.
In order to extend his argument, almost thirty years later, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited.
Here are a few quotes from the book:
"The society described in 1984 is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable, punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization."
"...democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized."
"We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life."
"In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions."
"The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice, to the powerful "hidden forces," as Hitler called them, present in the unconscious depths of every human mind."
"In his speeches Hitler kept repeating such words as "hatred," "force," "ruthless," "crush," "smash"; and he would accompany these violent words with even more violent gestures. He would yell, he would scream, his veins would swell, his face would turn purple. Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist knows) is in the highest degree contagious. Infected by the malignant frenzy of the orator, the audience would groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion. And these orgies were so enjoyable that most of those who had experienced them eagerly came back for more. Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom. Conversely almost nobody wants war or tyranny; but a great many people find an intense pleasure in the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for war and tyranny."
"The demagogic propagandist must . . . be consistently dogmatic. All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white. In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt 'a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with.' He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or of they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated."
"But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everything and everybody by the agencies of the central government."
I don't know if these quotes hit you like they hit me, but it seems obvious that the Bush Administration has studied non-violent forms of dictatorship. It also seems obvious that if leaders are willing to distract, lie, and reward people to get their way at home, they will be willing to kill, torture, and punish people to get their way in places where the cameras are less intrusive.
So do we live in a Brave New World? Are we being controlled through rewards and distractions?