"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.
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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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