Mind Guerilla

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom ~ the absence of physical constraint ~ is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free ~ to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

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.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensating to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco~hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty~Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. ~ Aldous Huxley .... ..