Word: huxley
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...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...
...advantages of man's mastery of space, Huxley has this to say: "All our exuberant post-Sputnik talk is irrelevant and even nonsensical. So far as the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming time will not be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Over-population." In a parody of the old song, Huxley asks...
Psycho Somo-Tic. Huxley is prepared to concede that 2 billion may be company on 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...
Unfortunately, there are passages when Huxley becomes as blurred as a soma drunkard. There must be a good drug, he argues-something to make man happy and yet not bad, and he has hopes for an amino-alcohol called Deaner, which "sounds almost too good to be true" (no hangover; one just feels lovely...
Prophylactic for the East. Always a compulsive shoplifter of ideas and religious systems, Huxley wants mankind to find the ideas and beliefs most useful for a good and happy life, but forgets that men do not necessarily believe what is useful. Huxley's plan, apart from his perfect pill, seems to involve cooperative communities, birth control and freedom. Sound as some of this may be, the depraved old world is unlikely to heed. And the thought of aging (64) Aldous-an intellectual well past average breeding age-proffering a prophylactic to the teeming East is downright funny. Reactionaries will...