Aldous Huxley on modern democracy

By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms... elections, parliaments, supreme courts and all the rest... will remain. 

The underlying substance will be a new kind of Totalitarianism.  All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly like they were in the good old days.  Democracy & freedom will be the theme of every broadcast & editorial.  Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite will quietly run the show as they see fit.

~ Aldous Huxley, 1962

Aldous Huxley on propaganda

The purpose of propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.

~ Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley on ignoring reality

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

~ Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley on dehumanization

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. 

~ Aldous Huxley

Karen DeCoster Campbell on how Aldous Huxley anticipated the 2020 loss of liberty 59 years ago

Aldous Huxley, who authored "Brave New World" in 1931, said this in a 1961 speech: 

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

(Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961) 

Huxley referred to the tyrants of the future as "social engineers" and he warned that advanced technology would be used for social conditioning and controlling human behavior. He also warned us about the kind of people who would eagerly adopt the mentality of "Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty."

That precisely describes what we are witnessing today, especially under the pretense of so-called "unselfish, responsible, adult-in-the-room" Democrats.  Nothing is less "adult in the room" than these spineless people who willingly turn themselves over to their Overlords and completely trash 250 years of liberty in the process.

~ Karen DeCoster Campbell, Facebook post, December 15, 2020

Aldous Huxley on totalitarianism and propaganda

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.  To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.

~ Aldous Huxley, forward from 1946 edition of Brave New World

Aldous Huxley on travel

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

~ Aldous Huxley