If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers” - and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited “The challenge of social engineering in our time,” writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, “is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. “The future dictator’s subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers. Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victim’s tendency to indulge in it.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited “In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension. ![]() “The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would… The nightmare of total organization…has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited Why Pleasure and Distraction are a More Effective Means of Control Than Fear and Punishment The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren…Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. “In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. Others, show that many of the ideas in Brave New World have alarmingly The following quotes by Aldus Huxley, and This novel depicts a dystopian society in which pleasureĪnd distraction, not fear and punishment, are used by those in power to maintain In 1932, Aldus Huxley published his most famous
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