While some of Huxley’s views are extreme, especially some 60 years later in our age of tolerance and political correctness, they still make for an interesting point of view and counterpoint to modern culture. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most – and preferably (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat…. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience…. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous.
The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter. Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. On Increasing Bureaucracy and Centralization of Power The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals – this is now the central problem of mankind and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.
These are few of the more salient quotes that I took away from the book: Even though the essays were written 20 years after Brave New World, it shows you how Huxley’s views influenced the transformative novel. The topics covered range from the importance of population control to the effects of over organization to selling and persuasion techniques to the importance of education. I wanted to get more insight into Huxley’s point of view and how it influenced the writings and concepts in Brave New World.īrave New World Revisited is essentially a collection of a dozen short essays written by Huxley. It made enough of an impact, that I added Brave New World Revisited to my 2015 reading list. In fact, I was blown away by Aldous Huxley’s ability to foreshadow the homogenization of society due to the effects of mass media. Still, it felt like the right thing to do, and it was. I was a little concerned as I ventured in given what I heard others say, including my own kids. There were just too many references to it in Postman’s book to ignore. But after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I decided it was time to pick-up Aldous Huxley’s classic, almost 30 years after my high school graduation. For most people, Brave New World is required reading while in high school.
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