Huxley's 'Enemies of Freedom' - revisited

It seems we really are going "back to the future," to quote the title of a popular movie. As a matter of fact, you could make a pretty good case that the future is an open book that was read (or written) in the last century.

I'm talking about the uncanny ability of literary writers in the middle of the 20th century to foretell the downward spiral of the current era. That includes George Orwell's "1984" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" - both of which this column has recently examined, as well as "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.

Huxley's dystopian novel is arguably the most relevant of the novels that predict the downfall of Western civilization because it is based for the most part on an understanding of the human temperament and its weaknesses, rather than on an understanding of a particular political principle, as you might say of "1984," for example.

That is not to say that "Brave New World" is an accurate summation of where we have arrived in 2009, but it is certainly frightening in its portrayal of mankind as so easily malleable with diversions, feel-good slogans, sex, drugs and what Huxley would later call "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Nonetheless, being itself a form of literary diversion, "Brave New World" may not be the best conduit for Huxley's ideas to make themselves heard through the din of self-indulgence that surrounds us today. Instead, a less well-known follow-up work, "Brave New World Revisited," which is a collection of brief essays, is much more accessible and unavoidable in its analysis of the threats to freedom.

In fact, the book was first written under the title of "Enemies of Freedom." Mike Wallace, later famous for his role on "60 Minutes," interviewed Huxley about this book in 1958, and from that interview it is easy to be scared to death about where we have gone in the last 50 years.

Huxley had the advantage of speaking about his fears in the future tense, so he did not have to worry about being called a fear-monger. You can say whatever you want about the future, but Huxley knew that once the future arrived it would be too late to prevent it.

"That's why I feel it so extremely important, here and now, to start thinking about these problems. Not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the … new advances in technology," Huxley told Wallace.

So what were the "problems' that worried Huxley about the future of America and the world?

1) Overpopulation. Now this may not concern you in itself. America, after all, has plenty of land to go around, but Huxley points out that it is the effect of overpopulation that is to be feared, not the overpopulation itself.

Using one example, he says, "The people have less to eat and less goods per capita than they had 50 years ago; and as the position … the economic position becomes more and more precarious, obviously the central government has to take over more and more responsibility for keeping the ship-of-state on an even keel, and then of course you are likely to get social unrest under such conditions, with again an intervention of the central government…. One sees here a pattern which seems to be pushing very strongly toward a totalitarian regime."

This very neatly sums up the increasing pressure on the federal government to take care of all our daily needs - whether they be for day care, health care, jobs or TV converter boxes. Orwell worried about Big Brother; Huxley worried about Aunt Matilda. Can anyone say "nanny state"?

2) Propaganda. "Hitler used terror… brute force on the one hand, but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda… He didn't have TV, but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people. I mean, the Germans were a highly educated people."

Which is Huxley's way of saying that propaganda doesn't just work on poor bumpkins and rubes. It works on city folk, too. It works on the college educated and on the highly paid. As a matter of fact, it works better than ever on people who think they don't have to worry about it because they are too sophisticated and educated.

Mike Wallace was skeptical that "it could happen here." He asks Huxley whether there could possibly be any parallel between Hitler's Germany and the United States in the use of propaganda, and Huxley does not falter in his response:

"Needless to say it is not being used this way now, but … the point is … there are methods at present available, methods superior in some respects to Hitler's methods, which could be used… I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology's advance… Suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn't foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn't want to do."

It comes as no surprise to anyone, I hope, that television is a hugely powerful influence in our society. The question which must be answered is whether it is a force for good or a force for evil. Huxley said in 1958 that television was being used "quite harmlessly" to "distract everybody all the time." But could he still say the same thing today? Is distracting everybody all the time really harmless?

As for the true dangers, Huxley posits a time when "television … is always saying the same things the whole time; it's always driving along. It's not creating a wide front of distraction. It's creating a one-pointed 'drumming in' of a single idea all the time." He calls this an "immensely powerful" tool of propaganda.

But what we have today is even more powerful, because it takes the worst of both of Huxley's proposals and puts them together - television, newspapers and what is collectively called "the mainstream media" working in sync to both "distract" everybody all the time and to "drum in" a single idea all the time. The single idea does change - from "Bush is bad" to "Obama is good," for instance - but the mechanism to persuade through use of repetition, shame and sincerity does not. Now that is powerful propaganda. If Hitler had that at his disposal, he might not have ever been stopped.

3) Dictatorship. "I think this … dictatorship of the future … will be very unlike the dictatorships which we've been familiar with in the immediate past," Huxley warned Mike Wallace.

"I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled."

Huxley imagined this would be done partly by drugs and partly by propaganda. He was partly right and partly wrong. Yes, drugs are responsible for a certain amount of deadening of the American consciousness, but nowhere near as significantly as video games, the Internet and the entertainment industry in general. These sources of distraction along with the steady blare of propaganda have turned modern man into as willing a slave as ever existed.

Huxley said the modern dictatorship would gain power "by bypassing the …rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. This is the danger: That actually people may be… happy under the new regime, but… they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but can anyone say "$11 trillion national debt"?

In "Brave New World Revisited," Huxley went so far as to suggest that the American public could easily be duped into voting against their own self-interest:

"All that is needed … is money and a candidate who can be coached to look 'sincere.' Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. "

The remarkable thing about these words is that they were written before John F. Kennedy was even a candidate for president. The scary thing is that they fit our current president so well.

But don't make the mistake of thinking this is a partisan issue. If Huxley is right, if the kind of "centralized government" dictatorship he fears could come to pass, then it has to be with the "consent of the governed." Essentially, what he is talking about is a serial dictatorship, a series of supreme rulers "elected" under the trappings of whatever political party is convenient in order to continue the "happy slavery" of the masses.

George W. Bush? Barack Hussein Obama? Are they really doing what you want? Or what they are "coached" to do? Dictatorship may not come to America with jackboots on, but if it has the "consent of the governed," it doesn't need to.

Everyone who cares about freedom owes it to him or herself to read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited." The entire book is posted online at www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html, and Wallace's 1958 interview with Huxley is available at www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous.html with subtitles.

-Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com