I had to spend most of yesterday away from civilization taking care of a maintenance problem for a relative; most of the "work" required me to sit on my ass. So I took a copy of Brave New World with me, a book I hadn't read in 30 years.

Amazon link

I remember thinking that Brave New World was very boring compared to 1984, with it's secret police, torture, and Winston Smith's desperate struggle to be free, at least in his own mind. In Brave New World, it was just a bunch of conformists who were also dopeheads against a freak who abandoned any sense of self-responsibility for his religious savagery...or so I remembered. B O R I N G!

However, this re-reading gave me a new appreciation for Brave New World. In particular, the introduction immediately got me thinking about the things I'll be talking about in this post...in fact, while I appreciate the book more than I did as a high school kid forced to read it, I was digesting everything in it in relation to the Introduction.

So what did this reading get me boiling my brains about?

• Liberty
• Decentralization
• The brand of anarchy that Huxley is selling

I want to thank this site for it's digital copy of the Introduction; that saved me so much typing!

So I'll run through the Introduction in order...

...this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.

Cynicism and nihilism tend to be found in the young, who are always so much smarter than their elders ;>

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible.

And here is where Huxley describes the basics of the sane society in his judgement.

In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle--the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"

• I consider George and Kropotkin to be loons. You can't tell me that we are "freely co-operating individuals", that "that people should own the value they produce themselves", that I can't buy the work of individuals who freely cooperate with me, and sell that work and my own at a profit, and expect me to believe that you are honest, or even sane, in your own position. So if I go out in the wilderness and clear land of predators and for agriculture, the ownership of that land is damn straight mine by the value I produced myself. Ditto with a company that I capitalize by taking risk with my accumulated work-value. Lazy-asses and dreamers that can't get moving and create value that I freely cooperate in trading for, deserve NO reward from my efforts. Maybe that is anarchy as a political concept, but it aint anarchy as the definition of the damn word. Pardon me if I don't take a political idea seriously that cant even abide by the definition of it's own name.

• Huxley hits the nail on the head with his vision for science. I'm going to push ahead to the idea of decentralization here. Science should work for humanity...not the opposite. Free exchange of ideas, methodology, and criticism, will be the new standard for advancing out knowledge, not hiding publicly funded research behind pay walls. That is just one example. I have to move this quote of his out of order and reference it now:

The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. The triumphs of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted. The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology. It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed

• In religion, I like the buffet table he sets before us. Again, I have to address something he discusses a bit later early; to change the religious culture of the majority of humanity requires massive government intervention in the form of totalitarianism. Perhaps it is better if we seek to reach this buffet table of religious understanding on our own terms, not in terms of conformity or as a societal goal.

• I agree once again with Huxley's philosophical basis. A oversimplified view of philosophy gives us two camps, Kant's Deontology and Bentham's Utilitarianism; I'll let you research these on you own ;> Maybe I don't fully agree with Huxley's end goals 100%, but I certainly understand the method by which he arrives at those ideas. Utilitarianism is the best matrix for making moral decisions, while Deontology is arbitrary and flawed in it's basic assumptions.

Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in this hypothetical new version of the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had an opportunity of learning something at first hand about the nature of a society composed of freely co-operating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity

The process of socialization or * how we train people to act* has to include the basic values we believe in. There is going to be violence and discord when basic values differ. See Muslim sexual assault in Europe, for example.

The really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

If we as humans can not use logic and an understanding of bias to make our decisions, then we are screwed. If we can not learn personal responsibility and self-reliance, we are screwed. That is not Huxley's intent, but it is certainly my take on this thought.

Sade was a lunatic and the more or less conscious goal of his revolution was universal chaos and destruction.

Not really in line with the rest of this essay, but worth a repeat.

The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern.

Hitler was a result of the Versailles Treaty and an attempt to annihilate the Germans from competing with the French and British.

On the other hand, I consider the annihilation of totalitarian ideology to be a worthy goal of humanity. You cannot make peace with a people who want to democide or enslave you. War must be pressed until the compromise includes the removal of those goals from that culture.

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowdays); it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. 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 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.

"ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." Hellooo, democrat party, and the Deep State to which it belongs. This is where Information War comes into play.

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an "iron curtain" between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable

Fast and Furious? What Fast and Furious? Benghazi? What Benghazi? Hillary's email servers, Comey's conflict of interest, Mueller's conflict of interest. murders committed by illegal aliens, Islamic terror? What, what, what, what, what, what?

Image Source

Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence; for the sake of brevity, I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers will succeed in solving the problem of permanent security. But security tends very quickly to be taken for granted. Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion--through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs, such as scopolamine. Second, a fully developed science of human differences, enabling government managers to assign any given individual to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy. (Round pegs in square holes tend to infect others with their discontents.) Third (since reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays), a substitute for alcohol and the other narcotics, something at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin. And fourth (but this would be a long-term project, which it would take generations of totalitarian control to bring to a successful conclusion) a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers

A TLDR of this paragraph:
For the totalitarians to create a love of servitude requires the following elements, in Huxley's opinion

• 1 a greatly improved technique of suggestion
• 2 a fully developed science of human differences
• 3 a substitute for alcohol and the other narcotics, something at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin -soma, or an FDA approved substitute
• 4 a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product

What I find interesting in the 2nd element is that if we are indeed seeking to create a decentralized and liberty based society, we must understand basic human difference, the primary being that some people enjoy being sheep naturally; efforts must be made in "designing" society that allow for communities of like-minded folks to live under THEIR OWN TERMS. Essentially, if so-called "synicate-anarchists" want to go form their own community, and not to bother me with it, they have my full blessings. If the majority of people want live as taxpayers and ticky-tacky HOA rules, let them do so...as long as they don't bother anyone else.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.

Cough, Cough Islam...

Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not a the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism

I was about to say that this sums thing up nicely, and thus needs no further comment, but a second thought on militarism. Create a world in which there is no threat of terror or invasion FIRST, and then I will disband my military. Change the world so that robbery, rape, and murder don't exist, and then I will disband my police. Create a world in which there is no threat to my life and property FIRST, then I will lay down my arms.

I'd also like to point out Huxley's focus on decentralization as key to his points.

Other than that nitpick of mine, Huxley gives us an excellent conclusion. I might not agree with all he says, but I know where he's going and why he is going there. The introduction (linked above) is well worth a read all by it's little self.

Themes in the novel that need a post of their own

• Social order versus chaos
• Conformity in social order
  All you zombies LOL