itsthepathocrats
12-30-2008, 12:53 PM
Speech audio at: http://matterik.podbean.com/2008/11/22/aldous_huxley-the_ultimate_revolution-speech/
Make sure you also listen to Q&A: http://matterik.podbean.com/2008/11/22/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate-revolution-questions-and-answers/
Transcript of speech follows...
The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962
Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring
semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr
Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of
Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the
development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior.
Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application
of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's
physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder
techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr.
Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral
controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is
the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who
are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been
concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of
approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two
panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly
concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of
them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year
which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion
on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the
effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological
transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well
summed up by the moderator. 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.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques
of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic
techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I
don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I
mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on
recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight
suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of
course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word
'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much
greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge
in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the
things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has
always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their
suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a
population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the
findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering
placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light
sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of
people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps),
just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the
scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a
large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can
gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same
way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration
of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston
on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable
kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever
they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time
were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went
through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled
waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in-
between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in
BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who
manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I
mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for
confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are
records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20%
of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the
money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write
enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter)
etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records.
And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters
written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and
they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations
can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly
that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not
be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely
suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy
the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible
organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely
suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate
that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore
preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once
given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite
clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue
who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to
organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country. (continued in next post)
Make sure you also listen to Q&A: http://matterik.podbean.com/2008/11/22/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate-revolution-questions-and-answers/
Transcript of speech follows...
The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962
Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring
semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr
Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of
Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the
development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior.
Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application
of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's
physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder
techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr.
Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral
controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is
the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who
are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been
concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of
approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two
panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly
concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of
them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year
which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion
on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the
effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological
transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well
summed up by the moderator. 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.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques
of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic
techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I
don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I
mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on
recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight
suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of
course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word
'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much
greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge
in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the
things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has
always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their
suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a
population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the
findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering
placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light
sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of
people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps),
just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the
scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a
large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can
gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same
way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration
of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston
on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable
kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever
they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time
were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went
through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled
waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in-
between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in
BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who
manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I
mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for
confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are
records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20%
of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the
money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write
enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter)
etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records.
And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters
written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and
they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations
can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly
that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not
be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely
suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy
the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible
organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely
suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate
that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore
preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once
given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite
clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue
who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to
organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country. (continued in next post)