Nov 19, 2023
In 1961, President Eisenhower gave his famous "Military-Industrial Complex" Farewell Address in which he warned about "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power." During this same year and in the following year, Aldous Huxley gave a talks at different institutions in California, including the UC Medical Center of San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley, in which proposed that in the future, tyrants would no longer use terror and concentration camps, but far more refined methods of inducing the servitude of the citizenry. Tapping into the understandable desire for comfort, security, and pleasure, the new dictators will obtain the consent of the governed by inducing them to ENJOY their servitude. At his talk at UC Berkeley in 1962, he explicitly contrasted his vision with that of Orwell's in the book 1984. And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently i