Here is an excerpt from that speech :
In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially
aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
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.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems
to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another
parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-
Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the
Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild
dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more
concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no
doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
http://www.libertythink.com/Huxleytranscript.txt
I see TV as a large part of the problem. It's very nature makes it's audience passive. In a way, it allows for an almost perfect opportunity to lull people into belief. It's not unlike an electronic pulpit, where one sits there and listens - and never speaks back to the "voice of authority."
That can be CNN or FOX , but the essential dynamic is the same.
Don't forget that when the first movies were shown, people reacted in a rather fascinating way. We've all seen those early black and white films, that were quite primitive.
I remember reading a story where people ran out of a theatre in fear , in those first days of movies, when they saw a train coming on the screen.
Now, for us, that seems impossible to have happened. A grainy black and white film, a theatre, and yet....terror ? That's how much we've changed as a visual society.
Occasionally today, when we are involved with certain video games or modern day films, we can be exposed to an almost "real" sensation of fear, in much the same way.
We sit there on our sofas and chairs, and we absorb messages that are delivered to us, and they are repeated and reinforced in waves upon us. It's very much like a hypnosis of sorts, where people sit in dark rooms, relaxed, and are "programmed" by what they hear.
A film that really should be reviewed is "Network", which was to me a visionary movie. It speaks of some of the things I am trying to argue here.
Now if you take people and constantly show them horrific visual images, and endlessly fabricate apocolyptic visions of the future, and you keep doing that over and over again - you have projected this fear almost into their DNA structure.
If at the same time you offer a vision of strength, visual icons of power, and direct ties to God - one cant start to increase the control over the population. It is a Pavlovian process of creating a deep programing by using a psychological base of stress to assist you.
The more fear you create (and that can be on many levels, including economic ones) , the more mistrust you generate amongst your believers about everyone else in the world - the more power you have over them.
In a very real sense, modern media can be manipulated almost in the same manner that a cult leader's pulpit can be.
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