Dystopian Author Aldous Huxley on This Day in History

 

Listen to: Brave New World

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."

This day in history: English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley was born on this day in 1894. 

He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems, but he is mainly known for writing _Brave New World_. 

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. 

Huxley died the same day that JFK was assassinated.

Download and Read Brave New World

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"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." --Aldous Huxley

"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them." ~ Aldous Huxley

“People will come to love their oppression. To adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”  — Aldous Huxley

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Good Guy Tyrant Leon Trotsky on This Day in History

 

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This day in history: Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union on this day in 1927. Many have wondered if Soviet Russia would have been better, and less violent under a Trotsky rule. 

Historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote this in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, "We are left weighing a multiple ­tragedy, of a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it; of an ideology that in one form or another killed ­millions; and of a 20th century in which political ­radicals world-wide called themselves Trotskyists and believed that Lenin was good and Stalin bad, that even if the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers' state, the real thing could be established elsewhere. Trotsky had people killed. But . . . [he] was not a bad man."

To this, Ilya Somin responded: "Well, let's see. Trotsky was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, helped mastermind the establishment of one history's worst totalitarian regimes, and broke with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in part because he thought that Stalin wasn't going far enough in extending Soviet totalitarianism at home and exporting it abroad. Other than that, he was a helluva guy. If that record isn't enough to qualify you as a "bad man," I don't know what is." Source

Trotsky believed that Socialism can only be instituted by brute force: “It is quite clear that if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of state power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of an extraordinary regime…Dictatorship is necessary because this is a case not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this basis. Only force can be the deciding factor…Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means.” [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press), p. 738.]

Trotsky also supported the dissolution of the family: “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.” [Revolution Betrayed]

Additionally, we have Trotsky to thank for the weaponized use of the term "Racism." "Trotsky did not ‘invent’ the word ‘racist or racism’. However, Trotsky certainly popularized the word(s) and made ‘liberal’ use of them in his two-volumed book ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. Perhaps more to the point here is that Trotsky was among the very first to ‘leverage’ the word ‘racist’ and his smearing definition or concept of it as useful means to his own political ends, which was not limited to but included fomenting dissent and sparking division amongst the populations. Trotsky was one of the first to ‘weaponize’ the word ‘racist’, using it (s) as propaganda; as tool of mass manipulation and as a way of smearing and silencing opposition. In doing so, Trotsky becomes a big reason why the definition of ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ is now so broad and so broadly applied—even ubiquitously—by today’s left, hence diluting it’s true power and meaning. By his cynical use of the word ‘racist’ and his opportunistic, amorphous over-application, we might even say Trotsky was the first to effectively denigrate the sad, ponderous depth and weight of the word’s true meaning as well as the tragedy of it’s consequences for history’s very real victims of actual racists."~Dan Kidd

Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940 by a fellow Communist. Perhaps his exile and his violent death should tell us all we need to know about the ideology he lived by and defended.

In 2005, the now-famous ice pick was slated to go to auction to be sold for the highest price. A proper Capitalist ending to a Socialistic disaster. 

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