by Franklin O’Kanu, The Pulse:
For Huxley’s reality to take place, two components needed to happen. One, there needed to be a collective ideology that united the population, and two, there needed to be a way to get people to “love their servitude.”
A hedonistic culture needed to be established for individuals to love their servitude. In the YouTube movie Brave New World, you see that society has those two components: the population all thinks alike, and two, they love and have easy access to pleasure, which is described as hedonism.
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From the Academy of Ideas, we read that:
“Hedonism is an ethical position that maintains that life’s ultimate goal should be the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain and discomfort. A hedonistic lifestyle…weakens people, it makes them feeble and incapable of mounting any resistance to fanatical ideologues who desire to rule over society.”
We’ve mentioned how unorthodox Huxley was in his studies of animal magnetism. Still, he was also well-versed in the latest scientific studies. This shows how Huxley firmly understood and knew nature and how it works.
Here at Unorthodoxy, we do something similar. We study unorthodox themes such as magical principles, e.g., the power of goal setting, and apply them with the latest studies on productivity to manifest the life we want to live.
Regarding those scientific studies Huxley was familiar with, we are now introduced to psychologist BF Skinner and his groundbreaking scientific studies on rats. Interestingly, there are a lot of rat studies out there because these rat studies can mimic what will happen to human populations with great accuracy. If you’ve seen a study done on a rat, just know that the study’s endpoint may have been intended for humans.
Skinner, who is another Machiavellian, was able to show how rats’ behaviors can be changed by positive or pleasurable reinforcement. In his book, Skinner dives deeper into this matter. From the Academy of Ideas, we read the following:
The following passage from Skinner’s book Walden Two, however, reveals that such mass-conditioning would in reality make possible a pernicious form of tyranny – one in which the masses would be enslaved, yet feel themselves to be free.
“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.” (B.F. Skinner, Walden Two)
At this time in American history, around the 1950s, we must remember that hedonism was not the norm in American culture. In the article, who are the bad guys, we see how the traditional values of a country must be broken down. We can see how agencies like Hollywood worked with the Government to instil in the population this sexually pleasurable society.
This “love for pleasure” has been in work for the last 50 years, and now that technology has caught up, we have the ultimate pleasure devices right at our fingertips. The Academy of Ideas has the following quote that describes Huxley’s pleasure-seeking perfectly:
What Huxley called “non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature” were used by the state as instruments of policy to drown the minds of its citizens in a “sea of irrelevance“.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, there was a medication known as “Soma.” Soma was set to provide the individual “a holiday from reality.” In today’s world, I would use my pharmacy background to explain that we have the same drug known as “PleasaurRant” which stands for “pleasurable irrelevance.” And it also does what Soma did: plugs us into a hedonistic mindset with endless distractions filled with dopamine for us to escape from reality.
