Word: huxleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...barely more than a quarter of a century since Huxley had a vile vision of mankind's 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...
With the strangled sincerity of a man who would like to tell himself "say it ain't so," Huxley says...
Singing Theologicals. In this verbally sparkling but essentially dismal exercise in self-vindication and world indictment, Huxley has assembled a mass of evidence to suggest that the human race is approaching his dread vision of total togetherness much more quickly than he estimated. (Huxley set the time of his soma-happy society in the 7th century A.F., or After Ford.) Institutes for Motivational Research, hidden persuaders and singing commercials make Huxley think man is being nudged closer to the dark side of the moonstruck world he once described...
...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...