Aldous Huxley’s ‘Ultimate Revolution’ (1962) – ‘Radical References’ No.3
Channel: ramblinactivist
Date: 2022-09-12

Ramblinactivist 2022/27, 12th September 2022.

In 1962, Aldous Huxley, author of ‘Brave New World’, gave a speech to mark thirty years since its publication. Sixty years after that speech, and the Huxley’s prognostication of the populous learning to ‘love their servitude’ continues to evolve.

Generally I ‘don’t do’ fiction. I find that non-fiction provides far more than enough to deal with without worrying about story-telling and escapism. It was rather a shock, then, to find that both the ninetieth anniversary of ‘Brave New World’, and the sixtieth anniversary of Huxley’s speech about it, passed without seemingly any major comment.

In this short video I summarise the main points of his speech, reducing the 35 minute/4,000 words down to around 900 words and five minutes. If this wets your appetite for more, then you can find the original audio recording here:
https://archive.org/details/AldousHuxley-TheUltimateRevolution

Huxley’s general argument is that what he foresaw in the 1930s was, in the ‘White Heat’ of the technological revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s, beginning to come true. Fast forward to today, and even the seemingly more outrageous aspects of the speech relating to electrodes in the brain is now part of an Elon Musk-funded research project. More importantly, at the core of Huxley’s viewpoint is an analysis which can be characterised as ‘Neo-Luddism’, because it puts emphasis on the effect of new technology upon human commonality.

If you want to understand the contemporary crisis in politics, the mass media, and recent panics over ideas like ‘The Great Reset’, then the work of Huxley, ‘Brave New World’, and his non-fiction follow-up ‘Brave New World Revisited’, offer a far more clear and concise view of what is happening today than much of the contemporary comment on these issues.

For the extensively referenced text and an audio podcast of this post, goto:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/lwap/files/003/index.shtml

You can find more of these reviews in ‘Radical References’ here:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/lwap/files/index.shtml

Also, to access a copy of the background track, created for this video, goto:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/video/files/2022_27.shtml

Finally, it would really help to promote this work if you could follow, subscribe, or like my social media presence – which can be accessed from the link above. In today’s digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in this messed-up world.

#aldoushuxley #greatreset #revolution #bravenewworld #politicalscience #sociology