Aldous Huxley's

BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED

 

Digital Electronic Transcription by John O’Loughlin

 

Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media

 

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CONTENTS

 

  Foreword

1.                 Overpopulation

2.                 Quantity, Quality, Morality

3.                 Over-organization

4.                 Propaganda in a Democratic Society

5.                 Propaganda under a Dictatorship

6.                 The Arts of Selling

7.                 Brainwashing

8.                 Chemical Persuasion

9.                 Subconscious Persuasion

10.               Hypnopaedia

11.               Education for Freedom

12.               What can be Done?

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Foreword

 

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.  However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation.  On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification.  Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

      But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything.  In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all.  Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing.  He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.  He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side-issues.  In this way he may be able to tell not indeed the whole truth whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.

      The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem.  Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in the expositions; but these successive over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of the original.

      Omitted from the picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for convenience and because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical and military enemies of freedom - the weapons and gadgets which have so powerfully strengthened the hands of the world's rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars.  The chapters that follow should be read against a background of thoughts about the Hungarian uprising and its repression, about the H-bombs, about the cost of what every nation refers to as 'defence', about those endless columns of uniformed boys, while, black, brown, yellow, marching obediently towards the common grave.