Word: braved
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...Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley. One of the 20th century's brightest gloomologers decides that fact has already caught up with his 1932 horror fiction, what with subliminal commercials, wholesale tranquilization, and the threat of much too well-bred man crowding himself off his own planet...
...future, in which a scientific power elite of cads presided over a proletariat of test-tube-bred sub-morons kept happy on a tranquilizer called soma. The elite could dispose of heretics by sending them to exile in rockets. Huxley lived to see the title of his book, Brave New World, pass into common language as a wry cliche. Now he argues that his nightmare is becoming a waking reality. Looking about today, Utopiarist Huxley is appalled to find how obediently the world has grown to his fictional clippers. Why this is hell, he says with Marlowe's Mephistophilis...
...other examples range from brainwashing techniques of the Chinese Communists to the more beneficent therapies of a Californian penal system. In Brave New World Huxley had his director of Hatcheries and Conditioning use a technique called hypnopaedia, by which subjects got moral training during sleep. In 1957 the warden of the Woodland Road Camp of Tulare County, Calif, was doing just that. With pillow loudspeakers, the warden was able to reach certain delinquents in their sleep, and from a phonograph in his office counsel them to be good. The black arts of hypnosis, subliminal commercials and so on are becoming...
...earth, but that three will be a crowd. With the air of the fourth wise man, he says that "on the first Christmas Day" there were only 250 million. It took all the time since then until the Pilgrim Fathers to double the figure. When he was writing Brave New World, in 1931, world population stood at just under 2 billion. Today, "only 27 years later, there are 2,800,000,000 of us." People keep breeding, as it were, behind Huxley's back. Clean water, penicillin, DDT are also to blame, he says. Soon there will...
Huxley's revisitation nevertheless is a fascinating intellectual exercise for those who like to think about the shape of things that have or might come. And sometimes Huxley still sounds like the brave young worldling who wrote Crome Yellow. Most original Huxleyism is a suggested law on the lines of habeas corpus, which would be a habeas mentem for the human race. Roughly translated it would mean the right for all to say: keep your dirty hands off my mind...