View Full Version : Aldous Huxley: a rare interview, 1958
Here is a rare interview in which Aldous Huxley talks about many interesting topics including our freedom and a global dictatorship controlling the world's population.
Many who read L. Sid's " Eric Arthur Blair", may want to see this interview.
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Seko.
Flash
25th May 2011, 04:17
Extremely interesting vid.
Huxley speaks about the television repeating always the same thing (Russia at the time but now here), he speaks of drugs to make one happy (isn'it here today) and the brave new world and the dictatorship of the future, naming 1984, will be different from the terrors methods of communism. It will be based on consent through bypassing the rational side of man through different methods of propaganda and going to deeper emotions, so that man actually likes its slavery.
He says we can foresee and forestall it, saying US is the enemy of freedom, with presidents being powerfully advertised and elections being only based on personalities, with subliminal projections and psychological manipulations, will be much more effective in 1962 than in 1858 (LOL what about now :() persuading us to vote for candidate we do not know we have been persuaded to vote for.
Democracy depends on the individual voter making intelligent rational votes. Dicatorial propaganda bypass the rational and appeal to unconscious choices, making non sense of democracy.
He says that propaganda that is in the hands of one or few agencies, threatens democracy and that it is a threat that children are trained already and will be loyal to ideology biaises when growing up.
Brainwashing uses in US, unlike China or Russia, propaganda method applying to the individual, its physiology and psychology, differently from the methods apply in communism which are harsher.
Why would the wrong people use various devices for wrong motives (nuclear, propaganda, etc): for power, democracy is based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and we should not let one man/group have to much power. These devices are very efficient to let power into few people's hands.
He says education and insisting on individual values is terribly important, with group values not more important. Teach people to be on guard for language booby traps. To decentralise in order to give back to the voter direct power.
Is freedom important for a society: he says yes, in Russia, creators are given lots of freedom and money, but not people on the whole, down below they have very little. The more creators the better for the top as well, freedom is important.
this was in 1958 - sounds like now..It seems that nobody heard at that time. May be we are the brainwashed children being ideologically biaised and not seeing.
Erik_dc
25th May 2011, 08:27
Thanks a lot, Great interview, absolutely worth watching!!
Oh, I loved his reply on the question at 16minutes into the video...
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.
Ilie Pandia
25th May 2011, 10:48
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.
Wow... that's such an important distinction!
Love your jailors... I mean.. your caretakers!
Thanks for this great find Seko!
http://www.wanderer4.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Huxley-Orwell-09.jpg
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us...What about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right ?
Erik_dc
25th May 2011, 11:34
What about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right ?
I think that is quite right. Do I dare to say that the situation at the moment is even a tiny bit worse than Orwell's idea?
this was in 1958 - sounds like now..It seems that nobody heard at that time. May be we are the brainwashed children being ideologically biaised and not seeing.
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I guess a lot of people heard it at the time, but like most of the time.... no one believes in it at the moment. It sounds more like future talk, nothing to pay attention now. 50 years later, now we know what he was telling our families back then. Because it does matter today.
T.V. been used as a way a manipulation worked perfectly for them. Having hundreds of channels to choose from. That's for people who use their vision as a main conductor of information and like me, I like music...the gave us the Top 40's and listening to the same song over and over again until the wrong drum bit sounds right! I don't know you avalon friends but I sold my T.V. 2 years ago and I found you guys and I'm very grateful. I am learning more here about useful topics of all sorts than I did before.
Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written.
An exaggeration?
Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.
In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". The exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste.
In BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.
This is from www.huxley.net
http://www.wanderer4.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Huxley-Orwell-09.jpg
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us...What about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right ?
If you really see the world today Gaia, it seems that Huxley was right, the truth has drowned big time, and if you get it out you might get in trouble.
mondaze
26th May 2011, 19:25
in reality they were both right.
Positive Vibe Merchant
27th May 2011, 06:18
Brave New World freaked me out when I first read it when I realised it is alost modern day society.
Thanks for the find Seko, great work
PVM
seko
17th December 2011, 17:25
Here is Brave New World for those who haven't read it.
http://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html
norman
17th December 2011, 17:33
And here's the original TV/film version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek5vse2_Aq0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek5vse2_Aq0
seko
9th March 2012, 18:01
Here is a letter from Aldous Huxley to Erick Arthur Blair alias George Orwell.
Wrightwood. California.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book.
It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is.
May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution?
The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf.
The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.
Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.
My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers
and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government.
Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations.
Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism.
This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years.
But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.
The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.
Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111440/Aldous-Huxley-letter-George-Orwell-1984-sheds-light-different-ideas.html#ixzz1oe2Vaye6
Valerie Villars
29th July 2019, 19:14
:bump:
I ran across this rare interview and found it here on Avalon. It's a good thread to bump. Mike Wallace smoking cigarettes on camera is interesting.
shaberon
30th July 2019, 16:46
The letter to Orwell is very interesting since he notes the work of Mesmer, etc., was largely ignored, and hypnosis had not really caught on as a practice. But now it will be, in a mix of child brainwashing and narco stupor.
Huxley had much to do with the uniting of the historically separate Catholic Fascism and Venetian--British Party.
British intelligence was busy since the revolution attempting all sorts of takeovers of France.
With the Synarchist Jean Coutrot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Coutrot), Huxley founded Center for Studies of Human Problems in 1936. Huxley's grandfather (https://logosmedia.com/2012/08/how-darwin-huxley-and-the-esalen-institute-launched-the-2012-and-psychedelic-revolutions-and-began-one-of-the-largest-mind-control-operations-in-history/) had much to do with spreading Darwin-based eugenics. According to Larouche (https://larouchepub.com/other/2006/3301what%27s_rohatyn.html), "This "Plan of July 9, 1934," written by Jules Romain, led to the creation, in 1936, of the Centre d'Études des Problèmes Humains (Center for the Study of Human Problems), created by Jean Coutrot and run by the infamous Dr. Alexis Carrel and Dr. Serge Tchakhotine, and, in 1938, of the Institute for Applied Psychology (IPSA). These French institutions were run by the British Fabian Society, and personally managed by Aldous Huxley on location in France."
It is said they induced the French military to stand down and basically let Germany take over.
So in the Orwell letter, the Jesuit method has largely succeeded, i. e. voluntary surrender or passive ignorance. British Fabians were heavily involved in setting everything up, then largely faded away as a named entity.
European authorities missed out on the educational opportunities of Mesmer and Eastern occultism, and then later, grabbed it to use for Synarchist ventures. That is what I mean by "something has been taken and used against you", with the caveat that these people are semi-ignorant and not that good at it. Huxley mentioned something about it being more powerful in large numbers; i. e., statistically, they can do crowd control, but nothing to individuals who are basically immune.
The educational opportunities of Mesmer and Eastern occultism are given as a weapon that is the middle way between Religious Fascism and Dead Souls Materialism. Those are made of imitations.
All one has to do is look at the footings and definitions of Synarchy, and they say the same thing, we ignored these primitive pseudo-sciences until we decided they could be useful for domination. The authentic way opposes this.
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