◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Love Your Servitude I am Aldous Huxley. Born in Godalming, Surrey, July 26, 1894. Grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, who fought for Darwin against the bishops. Educated at Eton until a disease nearly blinded me at sixteen. I learned to read with one eye and a magnifying glass. Balliol College, Oxford. I wrote about fifty books. The one you remember is Brave New World. I published it in 1932. I described a totalitarian state in which the citizens were not coerced — they were entertained. Sexually liberated, pharmaceutically pacified, conditioned from birth to love the role assigned to them. The state did not need to monitor them. They monitored each other and reported discontent as mental illness. The drug was called soma. It cured every unhappiness in a few minutes. The people thought they were free. Seventeen years later George Orwell published 1984. He imagined a different tyranny — boot stamping on face forever, surveillance, torture, the cultivation of misery as control. He sent me a copy. I wrote him back. His vision was possible, I said, but mine was more probable. People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. The argument is now settled. We were both right, but I was righter. In 1958 I wrote Brave New World Revisited. The predictions of 1932 were arriving sooner than I had imagined. Mass advertising, the manipulation of unconscious desires, engineered consent, distraction substituted for citizenship. I had given the human capacity for inattention too little credit. Now look at your country. The soma is in your pocket. It glows. It vibrates. It delivers a small dose of dopamine every few minutes, calibrated to keep you from putting it down. You feel restless when you are not on it. You feel relieved when you are. You believe you are choosing what you see; you are being shown what someone has determined will hold you. The state does not have to monitor you. You monitor yourself. You publish your inner life voluntarily. The conditioning that took six hundred years in my novel has been accomplished in fifteen. The strongman in your White House does not need to crush you. He needs only to keep you scrolling while he completes the work. He is not Big Brother. He is the entertainment while Big Brother works behind the screen. I wrote a different book in 1962. I called it Island. It described a society that practiced attention instead of distraction, contemplation instead of consumption, presence instead of escape. It sold a fraction of Brave New World. The world chose the dystopia. The utopia was available. It was harder. I took mescaline in 1953. I wrote The Doors of Perception about what I saw. I did not endorse the drug. I endorsed the experience of perception cleansed — of seeing without the conditioning that had made the soma necessary. The doors are still there. The conditioning is what closes them. I died on November 22, 1963, the same day John Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I had requested that my wife inject me with LSD as I died. She did. I left this world looking at it as clearly as I had ever looked. I leave you this. The boot is not coming. The soma is already here. Put down the phone. Open the doors. Refuse to love your servitude.