These experiments brought to light how “the powers that be” can condition humans to love their servitude. Skinner performed a famous set of experiments in which he tested different methods of introducing new behaviours in rats. In the 20th century, the Harvard psychologist B.F. How, one may ask, can pleasure be used to deprive people of their freedom? To answer this question, we must discuss operant conditioning, which is a method of modifying an organism’s behavior. “In 1984”, Huxley explains, “the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.” ( Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited) In the future, according to Huxley, ruling classes would learn that control of a populace could be achieved not only with the explicit use of force, but also with the more covert method of drowning the masses in an endless supply of pleasurable diversions. And this seems to be the final revolution.” (Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961) “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.
Thirty years later however, following the Second World War, the spread of totalitarianism, and the great strides made in science and technology, Huxley changed his opinion and in a speech given in 1961, he put forth the following warning: When Brave New World was first published in 1931 Huxley did not consider the dystopian world he depicted to be an imminent threat. Could it be that technology, drugs, pornography, and other pleasurable diversions have created a citizenry too distracted to notice the chains which bind them? But is this really the case? Or could we be living in a society analogous to the one depicted by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel Brave New World.
Tyranny, most people believe, would be overt in nature, it would be obvious, and all would recognize it. For many people assume we live in a free society simply because the West has not morphed into a dystopian hell like the one depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
These words were written by Goethe nearly 200 years ago, but are perhaps more relevant in our time than they were in his. “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” (Goethe) The following is a transcript of this video.
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