"...the dictatorship of the future will be very unlike the dictatorships...

[Cerridwen]

"...the dictatorship of the future will be very unlike the dictatorships which we've been familiar with in the immediate past.

...take another book...George Orwell's "1984"...written at the height the Stalinist regime, and just after the Hitler regime, and there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence...I think what's going to happen in the future is that the dictators will find, as the old saying goes, you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.

...{the new dictators will find} if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs.., partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the rational part of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and physiology even...making him actually love his slavery.

...this is the danger that actually people may be in some ways be happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations in which they oughtn't to be happy..."

Aldous Huxley, The Mike Wallace Interview, 5/18/1958


The interview includes a discussion about the new medium - television, propaganda, Madison Avenue, political elections and marketing candidates, the "pharmacological revolution", and much more.


edit: missing word

[Cerridwen]

1. Kick n/t

[Mojambo]

2. Recommended.

Thanks for posting this.

[Cerridwen]

3. Thank you for the recommend.

And you're welcome.

There are some great videos at that site. A lot of political commentary from days gone by. If only we'd listened.

Ah well, I hope you enjoy.

:D

[jeff30997]

4. Well that was an accurate prediction. n/t

[Cerridwen]

5. If you saw the interview...

I'm not sure if you watched it or just read my quick transcript, Wallace was a bit dismissive of Huxley. Guess he just slid Huxley's ideas under the conspiracy theory category.

All the same, an interesting interview. As are the others.

[jeff30997]

11. I just finished watching the video.

It's really a must see.If Huxley could watch TV today he would be horrified.I've been "TV free" for almost 4 years and when I go somewhere and watch it I'm amazed how aggressive and dumb it is.When you watch it everyday you don't realize that,at least not as strongly than if you're away from it for a while.

The part about drugs was amazing too.It's incredible all the stuff that we take now compared to 1958.

If I could I would recommend your thread...again.:)

[Cerridwen]

15. Good stuff in that interview. I'm glad you got something from it.

We were warned. We took the soma. Now we pay.

As to recommending the thread again, thank you - it IS the thought that counts. :D

[tavalon]

21. I've been tv free for most of the last decade

my partner for about 4 years. I'm so far from it now, I can't even tolerate when it's on in the breakroom. He still occasionally watches when he's around his mother who has hers on all the time "for company". He's amazed at how immune he was to it before and how much it bugs him now. He's said the commercials are especially striking and has said that "they insult my intelligence" (exact quote - the joys of typing away at a laptop in bed with sweetie).

[Swamp Rat]

6. Yet, our 'dictatership' is oddly familiar.

[Cerridwen]

8. Eh, maybe the soma wasn't working well enough so they had to

fall back to "1984" for tried and true tactics.

That started out as a joke and got uglier as I typed it.

Looks like they took the most effective strategies of the two and applied as needed.

[CrispyQ]

42. Nice.

The little monkey on the globe is a creative touch!

:hi:

[ananda]

7. That future is now.

nt

[Cerridwen]

19. I grew up reading Sci-Fi - a lot of utopian and a lot of dystopian

ideas about our future. I never thought I'd actually live in either but I hoped for the former rather than the later. I "misunderestimated" my "fellow Americans". Or rather, I over-estimated my fellow Americans.

Sad either way.

[TechBear_Seattle]

9. "Brave New World"

Huxley wrote about this very situation decades before "Nineteen eighty-four."

[Cerridwen]

18. When/if you watch the interview, notice he also talks about the

end of oil. Another interesting piece I inadvertently left out of my OP.

[Mind_your_head]

10. Kick

Want to read this in the morning.

[jeff30997]

12. Also...

You should watch the video.Amazing.(And seeing Mike Wallace smoke a cigarette on TV is pretty weird)

[Cerridwen]

16. Since you said that about smoking on TV, I have to direct you to

the interview with the KKK Imperial Wizard - there is a disclaimer preceding, then a brief blurb about the upcoming interview, then a commercial. Watch the commercial. I almost "died" laughing. I still haven't watched the whole interview because I couldn't get past the commercial.

:hi:

[Mind_your_head]

20. Smoking was very common then, it was encouraged even

is there something AMAZING other than that?.....b/c that wouldn't be 'amazing', only unto your own time/limited cultural understanding.

Peace,
M_Y_H

[Cerridwen]

22. Compare then to now.

It is in fact amazing. What was once considered "run of the mill" is now considered..."other"wise.

It is a contrast in "norms." Proof, of a sort, that "universal truths" are not nearly so universal as we have been LEAD to believe; and perhaps, not so "universal".

[Mind_your_head]

43. Oh, I agree with that completely. eom

[moriverrat]

46. I'd trade the drug advertisements of today

..for the cigarette ads of yesteryear.

Interesting that the drug ads were illegal back then, now it is the reverse.

[RainDog]

13. Huxley died the day JFK was assassinated

interesting little factoid.

[Cerridwen]

14. I wasn't aware of that.

I like little "trivial" facts like that. Thanks. :D (seriously, no snark intended.)

[seemslikeadream]

17. Watching now

Thanks

[mhatrw]

23. K&R. n/t

[Cerridwen]

24. Kick before "nighty night, DU" n/t

[Solly Mack]

25. K&R

[Ghost Dog]

26. Absolutely spot on. Notice at the end of the interview,

where Wallace suggests that in their next interview together they should "investigate the establishment (in the USA) of that kind of (oligarchic, soviet-style) society in which the drones work for the Queen Bees above." To which Huxley responds, after giving Wallace a sharp look, that he still believes in democracy and that it would be good to "make the best of the creative activity of the people on top as well as of the people at the bottom."

Well said. Good for him.

Personal note: I was soon to turn 4 years old at the time of this interview, and would soon come under "the influence" of above all (UK) TV. Fortunately, I began to see through it all some ten years later, and haven't been a TV watcher since around 1969. And marijuana/hashish is my drug of choice, working to control a tendency to drink too much red wine, taking nothing pharmaceutical beyond an occasional beta-blocker (for social phobia-anxiety) and paracetamol as a painkiller. And I must have read most of Huxley's novels although I'm sure there is much of his material, essays, interviews and such, that I've so far missed.

What's all this about "taking your meds" (as well as TV) in the USA?

Thanks very much for the OP. Archived.

[Cerridwen]

28. I did notice that at the end.

There were a couple of times Wallace gave the distinct impression he thought Huxley was absurd.

I especially liked one part during which Wallace seemed to just stop himself from going after Huxley's criticisms of television and marketing.

I was not yet a year old at the time of this interview. I remember the "debate" in the air during that time as people criticized television and worried what it would do to us. It went on for long enough that it's an "ingrained" memory from my childhood. You know, those things you pick up on as a child but can't really point to any one circumstance in which you've heard any one idea.

I put up another thread with a link to many interviews from that program; politicians, judges, entertainers, artists, writers and others, mostly from the US. It's an interesting look at a time in history. Here's the link to that archive to add to your collection. I think you might enjoy it.

:hi:

[Ghost Dog]

34. Thanks for the archive link, Cerridwen.

There's some surely very interesting material from those times there. I think I shall start with Margaret Singer.

Yes, there were a couple of times Wallace gave the distinct impression he thought Huxley was absurd, or perhaps that his deep thoughtfulness gave him pause.

I think it's clear that the US was taking the "Soviet Threat" very seriously in those days, and not in the sense, as we look back on it, of nuclear or other simply military threat, but in the way that Stalinist Communist organization was then seen to be producing great industrial and above all technological advances that the US was unsure it could compete with (there was "Sputnik Phobia (or Admiration)", for example. So I took the question as to whether the USA would need to adopt a similarly authoritarian or even draconian social order in order to, not remain itself but at least not to become 'sovietized' to have not been a trivial one at that time.

:hi: Hi to you. If I were ever to set foot in the USA, I think I'd choose to head down the coast there to Portland, first stop.

ed. I've had a 'thing' about Oregon since, I think, first reading Kerouac's "Sometimes A Great Notion". :-)

[conspirator]

27. "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth"

NEO: What truth?
MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison of your mind."

[Cerridwen]

29. Nice addition to the thread.

Thank you.

:D

[bluedawg12]

30. Co-opting people is an art- and it has worked very well

and does to this very day.

Look at N. Korea, Burma, look at any place in the world where people slaughter their own for a piece of the action.

The scum at the top could not last 1 second unless some portion of the polity consented and carried out the orders.

[Cerridwen]

31. Too true, unfortunately.

Zinn calls them "gatekeepers" if I remember correctly.

Were it not for gatekeepers and "bread and circuses" (yeah, "they" knew about crowd control in ancient Rome), this would be a different world. In my more cynical moments, as I look around at what people will tolerate for themselves and do to others, I wonder if perhaps "they" are correct and we are able to "govern" ourselves. Of course, then I remember some history and I realize we've been purposely conditioned to respond in the ways we do.

[bluedawg12]

33. We will lose our ability to govern ourselves when

we come to uncritically rely on sound bites, the media, and sloganeering.

We are close. it's hard work to sift through misinformation and people are busy just paying the bills.

Zinn? Could you tell us more?

[Cerridwen]

36. Howard Zinn in "People's History of the United States"

There's a fairly detailed description of it on wiki. I only scanned through it but it looks to be a fairly accurate summary of the book.

One of the points he made throughout the book is that those in power frequently - as you posted earlier - co-opted those within social and political movements, using them as "gatekeepers" (again, I'm not sure if I'm using the right term. I don't have the book in front of me) who in addition to subverting or destroying movements for change, also act as defenders of the status quo and of those in power. Think of the times you've read in history about people fighting against their own best interests; look at our own party and the in-fighting. Over and over we fight the very people who, were we to make common cause, could give us the numbers and the power to make changes to benefit us all. Some do it simply to protect their own standing and/or perceived power; some are resistant to change; there are a lot of reasons but they all hurt us while providing cover for those who are in power and keeping us diverted from who the real "enemy" of the "common good" is.

I hope this made sense. I'm feeling a bit unwell right now so my head isn't on as "straight" as it should be for this type of discussion. My apologies.

[Ghost Dog]

40. See also:

http://howardzinn.org/default/

[windoe]

32. Precisely pertinent to these times,

education, questioning everything, watching that the group does not become more important than the individual, and decentralization of power, given as the antidote.

Overpopulation, over-organization on larger scales, terror, propaganda, drugs, *consent of the ruled* (still working on that), cult of personality, subliminal advertising which overrides consent, manipulation of children to be used for future purposes, and the creation of fanatics by brainwashing (fundamentalist cults <-my words), and power consolidation. We have CHECK and CHECKMATE on all these.

Do we have the consent of the ruled?

[Greyhound]

35. Eerie, isn't it? Orwell writes "1984" in '48, Huxley's "Brave New World"

is written in '32. Heinlein follows with "Stranger in a Strange Land" in '61. It all comes to pass, and people are still denying that which is right in front of them.
:kick: & R

[Cerridwen]

39. As Huxley said, that is the danger...

"They will do it by bypassing the rational part of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and physiology even...making him actually love his slavery.

...this is the danger that actually people may be in some ways be happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations in which they oughtn't to be happy..."

There are still enough people who are "happy in situations in which they oughtn't to be happy..." who don't concern themselves with the unhappiness of others or don't even notice it. Many of them are in positions of gatekeeping power and are sure to remind us that everything is just fine.

[nadinbrzezinski]

44. and today none of them could publish

since the houses will not touch that distopia

[krispos42]

37. Somebody get him a knighthood!

k&r

[Echo In Light]

38. K&R

[bluesmail]

41. wow that was beaucoup interesting from both the historical

point of view and our present predicament, (which has scared the sh*t out of me). Prescient. Thanks for posting.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. Listening SOMA... =TV

[Karenina]

47. yup.

[madmusic]

48. Compare "China's All-Seeing Eye"

American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye