If Aldous Huxley were still alive, I can’t help but think that he would say, “Told you so,” except with a longer, deeper explanation of how his vision of the future was coming to pass in ways he predicted and ways he couldn’t have foreseen … all in his quaint, British accent of course. The methods cited above, being employed by this administration to “educate” the public in this new postmodern version of collectivism, are striking, and in light of Huxley’s assessment kind of chilling and ominous concerning the precedent being set for the future.

We’re certainly not to the final end-point Huxley describes as the Final Revolution, but good grief. Some of the things being employed by this administration are some of the exact methods described by Huxley that are now being employed on a large scale, just as he warned. They are intertwining government messages to service (as they have described this themselves here and here) with television shows! It may be this is purely benign at the moment, though it is clear they want to funnel you to government sponsored websites. What if such a method continues 10, 20 years down the road? What will that look like by then?

(Disclaimer: in posting this quote from a speech Huxley gave at the Berkeley Language Center (mp3) on his vision of the future in 1962, I’m not in any way equating Pres. Obama’s actions in these matters to Hitler. Nor am I saying Obama is a dictator. But you don’t have to be a strict, authoritarian dictator to take on the methods employed in some third-world, socialistic nations, like Cuba or Venezuela to persuade populations in a manipulative manner. Huxley, making the statement below in the context of 1962, is simply using an extreme dictatorial example from the not-so-distant past that was still on their minds at the time to make his point. Please don’t infer anything from the Hitler statement Huxley made or think I’m inferring something I’m not. Hitler did in fact use radio, along with mass-produced propoganda posters around the country, to get his message out. However, I in no way believe Obama’s message is that of Hitler’s or equate it to that, though I do thoroughly disagree with his presuppositions of course and believe that in the long-run, they could lead to some form of tyranny, but do not of necessity have to.)

“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 hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the 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 by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.”

A qualifier I would like to add to the above quote is that the administration is not creating a hallucinatory or even hypnotic effect necessarily. But they certainly are getting their message out by embedding it in prime time television shows and using the power of suggestion to get the masses on their side. That much is certainly true.

As Huxley notes in different parts of his speech, in times past, leaders employed methods of terror and torture to force people into servitude and submission. Yet in modern times, just as Huxley predicted, if you are a leader, how is it that you gain control over the masses and get everyone on the same page? Well, I’ll let Huxley speak to this:

“Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.

But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.

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 will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass
produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay 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.”

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution, March 20, 1962, Berkeley Language Center (PDF) – Audio (MP3)

As a side note to this, I do also think it’s odd the Fox network would be on board with this as well. I find all of this to be setting a very disturbing precedent for the future, even if the short-term results from such a campaign are inherently benign. To be fair, even corrupt Republican’s (that is, bad apples from any group really) could eventually take advantage of such methods and produce some form of tyranny down the road. These methods are no respecter of party-lines.