The Ultimate Revolution

On a whim, I decided to do a little background research on Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. I found the text to a speech he gave in 1962 at The University of California, Berkley. I found that speech to be rather illuminating...as he references the differences between his vision of the future control of the masses by a technocratic elite versus Orwell's vision of an authoritarian regime stomping on a human face forever.

Huxley has been connected with the Fabian Socialists, which is generally referred to as the source of insights he gained to write his frighteningly accurate portrayal of the not-too-distant future...our current world.

While his book was written in 1931, he gave the speech at Berkley 30 years later, a lot of his prognostications had already come to pass. After hearing or reading the transcripts to this speech, can there be any doubt that Huxley was doing more than just writing science fiction?

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.

Seems like 9/11 and a few other manufactured incidence have introduced an element of persuasion to get we the sheeple to consent to the revocation of our basic rights supposedly guarded by the US constitution.

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.

That was in 1962. I think said techniques have been developed and deployed and that their efficacy is undeniable. Most people don't even realize that they are slaves in our Brave New World Order. In fact, when you try to explain to them how they are enslaved, they get angry and denounce a truth-teller as being crazy or worse yet, a "conspiracy theorist." Yes, many present day people certainly 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.

Huxley said that in 1962. He'd shit himself if he saw how much of his vision of dystopia had come to pass 70+ years later. Hell, one look at a typical TSA security checkpoint and the officially sanctioned sexual assaults our 21st century gestapo performs on the mostly compliant masses would certainly verify his theory about people consenting to being controlled.

But his next point was even more interesting regarding the percentage of humans that are "suggestible":

"You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.

A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in-between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.

So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in Brave New World I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying “Go persist my dear, go on” (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.

Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely un-suggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country."

Ah, but here in the 21st century, the demagogues of our mass media culture are owned and controlled by the ever-present oligarchy Huxley referred to earlier. They've already got a solid lock on the masses of suggestible people...both the 20% who are highly suggestible and the 60% who are moderately so.

The 20% who are un-suggestible to the modern day hypnotism of our mass media culture?

They're on the internet raging into the ether of cyberspace.