April 15th, 2006 Alan Watt – Special Talk:
“MASS MIND CONTROL”
(WHY YOUR PARENTS ARE
REALLY SCREWED UP)
*********
INCLUDING ALDOUS HUXLEY SPEECH
WWW.CUTTINGTHROUGHTHEMATRIX.COM
www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
WITH ALAN WATT
Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt – April 15, 2006 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)
Hi, this is Alan. I’d just like to say a few words as to how our website has been received and how information has affected some people different types of people in different ways and I think it appropriate to give a few comments on this particular website of mine.
I put this up really not with the intention of going along with any mainstream popular movement. I don’t really like popular movements. Most popular movements as Plato said "are given from the top down for the people to follow."
Rather this particular website should be an example for people who are individuals who can see that the king has no clothes so to speak and they want to emulate this kind of website for themselves by informing themselves of what really is happening in their life. What’s behind it. The techniques that are used to motivate people into mass movements. Different kinds of mind control. We tend to think of mind control as being really a one-on-one thing from a kidnapped people by spies and so on, but in reality the easiest form of mind control is generated from basically governmental institutions, by a media and propaganda. It’s the most ancient technique that’s ever been used and why change it when it works so well ALWAYS.
If you have a million people taught that the earth is flat and you train them all to believe in this, then obviously the norm in that society would be to say that the earth is flat. If one person says wait a minute here, I’ve proven by my own investigations that it’s impossible to be flat, then all the rest of the people will think he’s crazy. That’s because it’s easier to influence the bulk of the population than it is to get to a thinking individual with his own inquiry.
This website has been received very, very well by listeners from all over and I’ve really been very, very busy on a one to one basis with many individuals giving them extra information as to books, research they can go into to try and pick up the trail of this ancient plan – an organized plan which can be followed all down through history. Even professors in universities talk about it in different terms. Some of them used to call it Manifest Destiny and it’s odd that they always knew where we were sort of going, even though they were rather vague about the techniques employed.
The Hindus may have a point when they say that man’s biggest problem really is his own intellect because we have the ability to sentient and aware. Most people don’t really use that. They’re quite happy to be downloaded by mass media and popular movements with this mass production print machine. But true enough, the very fact that we ask why that gives us the problem of trying to stumble through and find the solutions to a problem. We see through a glass darkly as they say and that’s never been any different in any era. The difference being perhaps that those at the top have access to archives of information, which is different from public libraries.
Archives are full of techniques of control which have been used over thousands of years.
INFORMATION IS NEVER DESTROYED. It’s simply removed to other quarters and then the old LIBRARIES are burned.
Master dictators and tyrants don’t destroy information. THEY STEAL IT AND HIDE IT FOR THEMSELVES because KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
When you want to retain power over people, you don’t share it with them. You give them false leads, ENDLESS leads and the people will sure enough pick up the paper trails and go in circles forever. That’s what you do.
You steal knowledge and hide it and that’s how ALL KNOWLEDGE is GIVEN OUT in PUBLIC LIBRARIES.
You can go through so many hundreds and hundreds of books. Dry, dreary books by ex-bureaucrats and ex-politicians and ex-bankers and so on, and to find one paragraph within every book that puts on the light switch, everything else in the book you throw away and those people KNOW THIS. This is the technique of scattering knowledge. It’s deliberate. You will never get a single book with all of the answers contained within and that’s deliberate too.
Now, the few people who have complained at all, really are not complaining about the knowledge I’m giving out. What they’re really saying by their complaints by the form that their complaints take is that I’m not touching on the space aliens or I’m not touching on the reptilians and that again is a form or they’ll say I’m not touching on the New Age. Their favorite addiction you might say and I do touch on these things if they really do listen and go through all the FREE STUFFI’ve given out for them to listen to if they have the patience.
Most New Agers want instant gratification and they simply jump from one teacher or guru to the next and they pay their money and they never complain. They never say they’ve been had. They simply devour what they’ve givenNEVER understanding IT generally anyway and then go on to the next help somewhere else, and that’s called shopping for religion and I’m sure there’s thousands of websites out there where they can go shopping for that.
In the Kabbalah of course they talk about the ensof, which is the endless, and that’s what you have for the New Age shoppers. It’s fine for a hobby, if nothing else to occupy themselves with, but while they’re shopping for the New Age in answer to their spiritual crisis they fail to realize that this is the world where spirit meets matter and what happens in the world of matter is since you wake up as you everyday presumably, except for the reptilians of course, then what you do here in the world of matter is important. The trick that’s been used in ancient civilizations was to convince the public that nothing was real at all, and once you convince them of that, you’ve dominated them because whatever you do to them doesn’t matter because NOTHING’S REAL and that’s the usual spiel of psychological warfare which is put out by certain individuals even today. By the power on behalf of the BIG BOYS.
It’s so easy to control vast civilizations and populations. Whenever you do anything them it doesn’t matter because nothing's real, IT’S ALL ILLUSION. An illusion by definition is really–it’s not a hallucination. A hallucination is not real at all. That’s what it means.
An ILLUSION is a DISTORTION OF REALITY. So you should be very clear on the terms that are used and people who are taught that this is not really happening and all the nasty things are not really happening, they can retreat into their ensof and go on forever or at least as long as the ones who control the physical will allow it, because that’s what it boils down to.
I’m never ceased to be amazed at the people who always ask the questions about the after life when they’re living in this one. They can’t even deal with this one and as Socrates says, they’re not content about putting laws on the physical world. Here they are putting laws on the spiritual world as well. That’s the folly of man and so they go on and on in their hunt, the endless, allowing monsters who formulate the future for a few very wealthy elite families who have this knowledge and have hundreds if not thousands of think tanks working for them. Since they conjure up the money and convince us all that they have an actual right to rule and run this system of money, THEY’VE GOT it ALL SEWN UP because IT’S THEIR SYSTEM you see and WHEN MONEY TALKS MORALITY WALKS.
For those who simply want to ask endless questions about something they can never prove to their own satisfaction, I would suggest they go on, and follow the movement that was revived or resuscitated from Theosophy, a MASONICALLY RUN ORGANIZATION charted BY THE BRITISH CROWN to alter the world to come to the 20th Century. It’s faltered off through the scandals that came out afterward on Madame Blavatsky and the various frauds that she committed.
It was revived again in the 1960's by a big movement called pop – pop is father of course, that was followed by rock, and that’s Masonry, and I don’t know where burst this new pop music. That’s the general view and in reality it didn’t burst out by itself. It was simply unleashed at the right time and the charge took back into the New Age, which again is the name of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry magazine, their journal, and they prophesized they’d do this back in the 1950's in their journals. OUT came the BEATLES and the Beatles of course came out with what was going to be given to the public and that which was given to the public was a diffusion of the mind. A diffusion of reason. Was the land that was used successfully in India for thousands of years. A basic form of theosophy blended with a Christianity and other religions, this is contained in the following song:
Song: Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour
Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour
Roll up (And that's an invitation), roll up for the mystery tour
Roll up (To make a reservation), roll up for the mystery tour
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away
Waiting to take you away
Alan: In the 1960's all over countries in Europe especially, songs just burst out such as Roger Whittaker’s song "New World in the Morning," and that was rather typical of the New Age message. They always tell you that "something wonderful is going to happen." This is the same phrase that was used in Arthur C. Clarke in the movie "2001" and "2010" where the man who reaches godhood – actually that’s what it’s about. It has nothing to do with space at all if you understand high Masonry. In fact they tell people that something wonderful is going to happen and this is tied in with the Age of Aquarius, which really has NOTHING TO DO once again with popular New Age belief simply because they’ve never done their homework into what Aquarius is all about or the occult. They follow the standard books from the bookstores. They eat them up like a goat eats grass in the field clump by clump.
NEVER ASKING, HOW COME ALL THESE BOOKS JUST APPEAR ON THE SHELVES FOR THEM TO CONSUME?
They’ve never done any homework you see. THEY ARE THE CONSUMERS OF RELIGION.
The Illuminati, at least the branch that stuck its head up in history during Weishaupt’s era, and that was only one branch of what was already a European wide and American wide society and they had been on the go for hundreds and hundreds of years under different terms and names and so on. Under Weishaupt’s charge they found what they called reading societies throughout Europe and the goal of the reading societies was under the guise of helping the working people to read. They then formed discussion groups and then when you have discussions groups the material which you are GIVEN to read becomes very important because when you STANDARDIZE THE READING MATERIAL then you’re standardizing THOUGHTS and CONCLUSIONS and you’re creating a movement towards a particular direction; and out of those actual reading societies was they become publishing houses. And if you go back over the last two three hundred years up to the present time and just look at how many of the big mainstream publishing houses has an old lantern as it’s logo. THE ILLUMINED ONES you see are the ones who started off these reading societies because being a form of computer a human being can only PARROT WHAT IS DOWNLOADED WITH and you come to the conclusions which the programmer, the one who gives out the material knows that you must reach.
YOU SHAPE THE MIND. Masonry SHAPED society. IT SHAPED the MIND. It sculpts it basically in a direction and that is the whole method of controlling the public. You standardize things through mainstream. Mainstream comes from the underground. Stream which they called this current of teaching this thought process this underground movement from the Rosicrucian Era of the 1500's onward, the underground stream. They shape form and content of your thoughts and by limiting you or directing you along certain lines of thinking with limited access to knowledge you must come to conclusions which they know you must come to.
A computer programmer does the same thing. A good programmer who designs a computer and its program, its language that it runs on, will know a conclusion by feeding in the language the data that that computer much reach on any particular problem. HUMANS WORK EXACTLY THE SAME.
Well, out they came with the New Age revised. The people behind it jumping into reincarnation, which is a natural thing to jump into. It’s so ancient. It’s a wonderful idea that you can keep coming back and work off your bad deeds and perhaps evolve you see, and of course evolution is at the heart of very high occult Freemasonry. Only at the very high levels they are completely into the belief of physical regeneration through interbreeding in order to gain the perfect spirit to inhabit the body, whereas commoners who pick their mates at random; that’s why they’re called commoners. They’re not arranged marriages, then they end up with this what they call a hit-and-miss type of offspring. Once in a while you get someone who’s fairly bright. Maybe even a genius, but generally it’s the lesser types that they call commoners. Whereas the elite ones, including the scientific groups, have been going on down through the ages literally interbred their own offspring to be scientists. You’ll see the same thing in the acting communities where for multi generations the actors that one's generation sees are just the sons and daughters of the previous generations actors and that’s standard with most culture creation part of the control mechanism of society.
In the 1960's out came the New Age, just bang. Books from the shelves everywhere. Lucid you know, LSD if you speak it, lucid just happened to be thrown over by the sack full over university walls all over Europe generally out of big limos. It wasn’t until years later it was found out that the main societies that were dishing the stuff out over the walls were basically government MI5-MI6 type societies. Then, of course, many books came out much, much later telling us that Victor Rothschild, the one exception to the banking family, he did go into banking eventually, but he was a scientist and he was experimenting on various MI5 agents with LSD at Porton Down warfare facilities in England, and you can find that in Peter Wright’s book "Spy Catcher."
The big corporations, the big drug companies are behind the first manufacturing of LSD to get the tripping – the day tripper you see. It’s the Beatles song "The Day Tripper," you get the tripping going. A tripping is a movement that's devised to make a person stumble. You trip and that’s what it was. You break the stride of people who are going in a direction. You trip them up and you land where you may. They would day trip.
These societies that were dishing out the drugs all over the place also got their front men to propagandize the wonders of LSD and they got them and controlled BBC of England was the spearhead of this since they were the only station at the time in Britain. They had all these sudden teenage programs and rock music or pop music as they call it there and they had these older guys aging that would be the DJs and act like children and lots of go-go dancers to ensure that guys watched it of course. Then they interviewed an occasional supposed star that was hanging off a chair somewhere to trying to hang on to a chair and mumble some strange answers from very direct questions because they were generally stoned. They would look at the camera and they’d all laugh and giggle and aren’t we naughty, and that of course helped get all the youngsters who watch this to get an idea that my God this is some good stuff because these guys are approving it. That’s how they got the whole thing going and that was to destroy the old system.
The old system had been kept going up until World War II. You know God, King, Country, that type of stuff and it had served its purpose and now it was time to bring in the New Age. High Masonry, not the bottom stuff but High Masonry formed – as Mason forms things. They form. They shape society and it means that all the control mechanisms over society are reformed reshaped like building a new cathedral and once you build the new cathedral you dismantle the old. It has served its purpose.
The New Age saw massive changes. Promiscuity was pushed to the hilt. They worked fervently since 1920's to bring out a birth pill and of course penicillin to cope with the venereal disease that came out and abortion by making its appearance. So promiscuity was used to destroy the family unit. To destroy the possibility of long-term marriage. Everybody who grew up in those days had a big number done on their head and you can see the fallout today because society as far as relationships go is pretty well completely dysfunctional. No one escaped it. NO ONE.
So for those aren’t hearing what they want to hear, which is the praise of the New Age and explanations of mysteries, I don’t bother to teach because you don’t have the patience to learn. They can gobble up as many books as they wish. There’s an endless plethora dished out every year. Actually every month. It’s big business and like someone with a bottomless stomach their appetite is endless because there is no satisfaction in what they consume and the impatient can’t be taught anything.
I would advise them to do what the Beatles said to do: To join the tour, because that was the beginning of the magical mystery tour. That was the meaning of the magical mystery tour. So for all those aboard the magical mystery tour, consume as much as you want. Whatever you want and listen to the song of the Beatles who were put out there to promote it.
This magical mystery tour has been tried many times over and over again. It was tried in the 1920's and ‘30's during the Great Depression, the GREAT word when it’s put between a person’s name or before a person’s NAME or A WAR or A DEPRESSION is a MASONIC TERM.
They love the great – the Alexander the Great you see. The little pinpricks of light which shape history down through the darkness of time. You can see the connection between the drug culture being thrown out in the Great Depression along with prohibition to get the youth into the booze cans – the underground booze cans where it’s exciting and naughty you see and actually after the Great Depression they cut prohibition off. They had way more drinkers than they had before it because they made it popular to go into these little dives you see and when you’d hear the jazz and the mini-skirts that they tried in the 1920's was the Charleston Dance and so on. That was all part of the introduction of a system which failed because they didn’t have a system in place to take care of the aftermath, the fallout of too many children, unwanted pregnancies, venereal disease and of course even rehab clinics for drug addicts and alcoholics.
So they went back to the drawing board and worked steadily for years to get the pill and with the pill they introduced it the same time the drug culture that was revived again. That’s why the religion that runs all religions at the top is called THE PERENNIAL RELIGION. It keeps popping up down through time, it's the same one.
You can find in the 1960's for instance they came out with Timothy Leary who always wore a white coat showing that he was a scientist and gave stage appearances. He wrote books on the wonders of drugs and how it expanded the mind and this was pushed down the throats of the young people who just gobbled it up eagerly you see. He’s an older guy, a scientist no doubt, telling you that drugs were wonderful for you that they expand your brain and do wonderful things for you. Give you great experiences.
He wasn’t the only one put out there. It’s interesting to bring his name down to the MASONIC CODING because Tim, is time your see and he you also have Leary - Leary in Britain was the man who went around lighting the gas lamp in the street at night in the 1800's. So another little reference to the Illuminati. A little tongue and cheek HIGH MASONIC JOKE and he was one of many put out there to promote that.
Aldous Huxley was another one who conjured up long, long before to a long lineage of high, high Freemasonry going back to his ancestor Thomas Huxley who was a friend of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s theory was nothing more than basically the esoteric version of the religion of High Freemasonry put out there under the guise of a scientific theory because in the high, high religion evolution evolves species up to a – to man and the to next step of man is all part of the inner secret religion that’s been here forever.
All down through history since Babylon, we’ve seen the signs and symptoms of this DISEASE that CONTROLS SOCIETY and brings out the worst in humanity AS IT CONTROLS ALL OF HUMANITY and the MO [modus operandi] is always the same. You have a group that controls the banking and money, that’s essential for this system. It all rests on money. Everyone works for money not for food. It’s money that controls the whole system.
You have the largest cities - wherever they move the largest cities control empires like the world empire and the Empire State. The financial capitals of the world where the richest people live amidst the most squalor of poverty all around them. That’s part of their MO.
Mass prostitution. The illicit – the legal is run by them. The legal system above, the illegal below. "As above, so below." THEY RUN BOTH SIDES OF EVERYTHING. They keep the people in check by using a form of police forces in ancient times. It was the military. They would call them police and this keeps the people, the public under ALL OF THE RULES OF LAW. They’re enforced from the top under the guise of fighting crime and of course the Big Boys CONTROL BOTH SIDES OF IT.
THE MAFIA IS ONLY ONE BRANCH OF FREEMASONRY and you’ll find the man Albert Pike designated to take over from him was Giuseppe Mazzini. MAZZINI is just an ITALIAN NAME for MASON and he gave the authorization and charter for the mafia to startup so they're all interconnected. "As above, so below." Legal, illegal are one and part of the same system.
So prostitution, drugs, gambling, they also had the legal drug industry of pharmacology. They run that side too. The illegal drugs to keep the people spaced out is run by them. The same MOs as I say. The same symbols too, and also wherever they go they bring a mystery religion sold through symbols and talismans and magic writings, et cetera, wherever they go to intrigue the peoples around them that then are formed into groups or sects who end up serving a purpose which they don’t even understand really. But for most people it’s not really necessary they understand, they just want to believe they’re involved in some great mysterious cause.
Going back to Aldous Huxley, he gave a speech at Berkeley University to do with the wonders of drugs and electronic control of the brain through possible implants or wires in the brain. Anything which would take away, as he said, the incredible loneliness and anxiety that everyone feels. This apartness and this is again going back to the Masonic Doctrine of ONENESS. We’re all oneness, they teach you. They themselves at the top don’t believe that they’re all one, that they tell you down below that we’re all one, that way we act is like a school of fish, you know. A school of fish that all move at the same time, in the same direction, they are in a sense one. That’s not what human beings are all about but they will have us all move in the same direction and makes it easier to control.
Huxley who worked in Tavistock Institute and worked the propagandists for the New World Order promoting mind expansion drugs was put out there to go around encourage teenagers to try the drug. He’d talk at Ivy League universities and he’s talking more honestly there about the real purpose of his mission because at Berkeley the faculties were listening to him and the students were the ones who would be part of the controlling bureaucracies to come. So they were far, far more honest on the real mission and talks like the one he gave at the Berkeley University.
Huxley himself it should be remembered died in his wife’s arms after taking an overdose of mescaline and LSD. Whether he saw Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or the great god of America, who knows, but it didn’t do him a lot of good in the end. The sad tragedy of all of this is that so many people have died with the promotion of drugs by an occultic group at the top – very wealthy occultic group who finance all sides of every war, knowing who is chosen to be the victor before the wars even starts, ALWAYS is a PLAN towards a greater EMPIRE – a WORLD EMPIRE.
Those who struggle in the wars never figure that out. They’re caught up in the emotion and soon as one side loses some comrades in the war then the whole country’s up because they rely on TRIBAL INSTINCT to take over and yet Professor Anthony Sutton did some incredible investigations into all of this. He found the sources. He detailed the sources of who financed Hitler and he also put out Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution to show you that the same big boys, big corporations and people behind the corporations financed the Bolshevik’s or Soviet System and Germany could never have risen under Nazism without this aid. It wouldn’t have had the reason to rise up as it did and everyone knew that Germany had two ways out of its problems after World War I because it was paying all of its money out in reparations. The people were starving. It either fought its way out of it or it died, and millions would have died. They knew this when they signed "The Versailles Treaty" in World War I. Everyone knew it.
Communism had been agitating since 1917 in Germany for a revolution. Without communism or Bolshevism they would never have seen the rise of this Hegelian opposition to the Nazi Party and both sides were financed fully by the same corporations of the west who still run things today in the west.
Huxley and others never talk about the down side of drugs. To get new converts you don’t want to tell them about the side effects. What it does to you or the endless amount of people that ended up in mental hospitals in the ‘60's and ‘70's and still today are still classified as basically drug induced schizophrenics. They’re brains are so fried and this is a great experiment in mind control over the youth of the public and when you’re under drugs, which you think you can handle, of course, you’re taught you can handle. We have egos when we're young, you have no common sense, we’ve all been there.
When you’re under the influence you don’t make rational decisions. Not only don’t you make rational decisions you don’t notice the big changes that are happening in the world around you which will affect you later on and everyone else around you. These are the big movements – political movements. They’re busy signing laws and treaties and so on and that’s how they keeping you out of the loop. The drugs are very handy for once again doing what the Hindus did. Nothing's real, nothing matters except me and my spirit and you’re classified as disabled really. You’re not participating in the creation of destiny for yourself, for others. You’re out of the loop. You’re navel gazing or counting your toes over and over.
In the ‘20's when they brought out the drugs and the booze big time with the mini-skirts with the dancing and with the music to match it, they call it jazz. They had songs burst out to promote it as they always do, the glory of drugs you see. The big boys like the Bronfman’s with their whiskey trade and the Kennedy’s and many others that made their fortune for prohibition also were dealing with the smuggling of cocaine, drugs.
To get everyone hooked you see. Luke Jordan was probably the first who came out in 1927 with "Cocaine Blues" and that popularized once again, how naughty we are, as youngsters like to think. Try this naughty cocaine. He sang about it floating around in your brain. That was revised again when they had the same stuff under the revamped New Age in the 1960's.
Bob Dylan did a version of "Cocaine Blues." Others did it too. Nick Drake did it and of course we had Simon & Garfunkel who came out with one of the most beautiful songs that everybody sang and hummed along to and whistled to in the days when they used to whistle and it’s called "Bridge Over Troubled Waters."
Most people to songs on a subliminal conscious level. They’re downloaded with words and ideas and symbols which they never rationally or consciously think about but it works on them inside.
"Bridge Over Troubled Waters" has nothing to do with a woman or anything like that. IT WAS TO DO WITH THE NEEDLE OR HEROIN. The "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" was a SHOT OF HEROIN going into the arm.
Why would multimillion-dollar industries knowing that these entertainment industries as Plato said well over 2,300 years ago? These industries in his day he knew were used for the creation and alternation of culture. Why would multinational, multimillion dollar industries be promoting and be allowed to promote drugs for the youth?
Where was the other side of the story? The fallout from all of this? The burned out one. The dead one. People jumping out of buildings thinking they could fly or walking into lakes and drowning after rock concerts. THERE WAS NO OUTCRY BECAUSE THAT WAS THE AGENDA and that’s why the top gives culture. That’s why you’ll see the Beatles get knighted. That’s why the Rolling Stones get knighted.
WHY WOULD YOU KNIGHT PEOPLE WHO PROMOTED THE DRUG CULTURE?
The era of promiscuity with its massive fallout and families – disease, abortions. Why would you give the high awards of the country to these people? Well they get them because the ones at the top of the country wanted that. It was on the card. It was not spontaneous.
Huxley should be listened to in the upcoming speech he gave at Berkeley carefully because here’s a mover and shaker working for one of the most advanced mind control institutions on the planet. Talking and giving away what he is allowed to give away. Saying the most incredible things in the nicest possible way. In a captivating way, so you can think my God this man’s really nice and human and pleasant and even joke with them, but here he is talking about what’s the problem about introducing a new SOMA drug into society because it keeps them happy and quiet and peaceful.
"What’s the problem about putting wires in people’s brains to give them pleasure?" What he never touches on and what he is well aware of and the question he will not ask therefore are why are people so anxious and unhappy? Because he came from the ruling elite classes aristocracy. The man even speaks with a 19th Century accent of the upper elite. What he never mentions is the system they have created is not intended to give you peace. You control large masses of people by keeping them ill at ease. So here is the thesis again the Hegelian dialectic. The thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis.
Here’s a problem. Here’s what you do to fix the problem. Here’s the thing that comes out of it, the blending of the two together. So listen to his words carefully and you probably like the man because that’s his job is to make you like him while he tells you the most amazing things that he and others like to do to society. He talks about a scientific dictatorship and lists the reasons why he thinks it would succeed. Where the old Illuminati experts running everything would run your life and you’d never know and you’d be quite happy because you couldn’t think anymore as an individual.
Listen carefully to the upcoming talk beginning now.
(Alan continues after Huxley talk.)
ALDOUS HUXLEY SPEECH UNEDITED
The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962
Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr. Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior.
Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr. Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley.
Huxley: Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate
revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system.
Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Sergeant's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the Pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted
out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word 'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that, is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in-between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in BNW I called Hypnopaedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records.
And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, Bullock's "Life of Hitler", comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this Pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government. If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don't think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind-changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the CNS which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton's Paradise Lost, He Says "And beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man" (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the Theologians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they'd press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying "To be or not to be that is the question". (Laughter)
Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there's a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you're stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they're fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she's hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he's seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they'd feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country for sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation. Thank You.
ALDOUS HUXLEY SPEECH edited
The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962
Berkeley Language Center
Moderator: Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr. Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior.
Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom but through the application of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques of psychological conditioning.
The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr. Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls, which operate directly upon the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions.
As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley: Thank You. First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution and this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution. In the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, as I say not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was Thomas Hardy said many years ago, "you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them." If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this:
That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people actually to love their servitude.
This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me for many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, "Brave New World," which is essentially the account of a society making use of all the devices at that time available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create so to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some kind of a scientific caste system and since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay that a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And that there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, this method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude.
Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of "Brave New World" with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, "1984". Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the brave new world pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable a much more lasting society.
Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps.
So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not represent, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in Brave New World. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement even in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something which really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William Sergeants’ "Battle for the Mind" where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past have hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions by which essentially based upon the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no doubt at all that we can if we want to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the Pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I mean I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very
depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary "acceptance of the state the psychological state" in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement shall we say even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques of non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I mean I can mention a few of the more obvious methods, which can now be used and which are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word 'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was probably never able to make use of it.
For example, one of the things we now know for certain is that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now I think know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. It's very interesting when you look at the findings in different fields. I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility just like that is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the General Hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of distilled water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphine. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in-between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly with regard to what in Brave New World I called Hypnopaedia which is the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who complain they’re not getting much results and they have to have letters written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable.
I mean it's very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, Alan Bullock's Life of Hitler, comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this Pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kaumpf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government . I mean if there are 20% of the people who can really be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps to prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory
effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not been used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in Brave New World. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered even before the dawn of history. I don't think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals from these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic lake dwellings which have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and most dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind-changers, and these new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the central nervous system which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine as euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton's Paradise Lost, He Says "And beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man" (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the
Theologians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does.
And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator.
I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic as these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they'd press the bar 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center where evidently the result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying "To be or not to be that is the question". (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like frankly humanizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there's a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes in fractions of the what you're stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they're fitted with a miniaturized radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would suddenly get up and rush about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would suddenly start sitting as though it were hatching out an egg, or a rooster would start fighting and would suddenly go into a state of extreme depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drive is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, the effects are evidently very remarkable too. I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he's seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had the electrodes inserted into something resembling evidently the pleasure center in their brain. Anyhow, when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they'd feel I don’t know how long at the time very cheerful and happy. So here again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. I mean what might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority. What on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life we’ve allowed it to take us by surprise. I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18th century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory system.
It was not beyond the wit of man to look at what was happening and project into the future and maybe to forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and most of this country for about fifty or sixty years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the new techniques would not take place and then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to start think very, very hard about the problems with automation and again I think we have to think even more profoundly about the problems, which may arise in relation to these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to first of all to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imaginations to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances shall be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their ultimate degradation.
Thank You
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Alan: Well, you’ve listened to one of the men who were put out by the Tavistock Institute and the big universities of England to promote ideas of a "form of happiness" as they called it. The disguise of happiness for humanity by the use of drugs, chemical means, and even electronic brain stimulation.
When he talks about the poor suffering et cetera, the people, the masses, you’ve got to understand this man was brought up amongst elitist circles who see themselves as THE GOOD SHEPHERDS, the more EVOLVED creatures living over the lesser of all of the masses in a not too unfriendly fashion. That’s how it appears to them. That’s how they rationalize it basically.
When he’s talking about to end misery and suffering, it’s kind of like a farmer looking at his flock of sheep who are upset over something. It’s the same sort of way. He’s not really looking at individuals in personal distress over something that they really should perhaps be concerned about. He’s rather looking at ways to keep the placid and happy and that will solve everyone’s problems, the controllers or the shepherds and the masses if you can’t think and worry about something then you don’t have to do any worrying. You’re incapable of worrying in fact if you’re brain has been all fogged up with chemicals and you’re being CONTROLLED BY A SMALL ELITE.
He doesn’t see anything wrong with this. The big controllers and he was one of many of course who were put out there all from the SAME SOURCE all with the SAME VISION of a future which would end all war, all conflict by standardizing a mass mind set. The Borg mentality you might say. That was their solution to everything and I guess they’re right in that sense. They will have no more problems from the little boys at the bottom if each little boy and girl has no mind of their own to use.
It’s up to you to take this information. Analyze it. Study the time period it was written in by the institutions that it came from, by the big university programs funded again by the big foundations to do intense study and research into human behavior. Basically mass human behavior. Mass psychology and you’ll get some frightening answers as to what they dreamed up and then you’ll see that what they dreamed up has been implemented into your own life.
People are chasing all kinds of things today which are conjured up by communications industries and media and entertainment. They’re chasing phantoms you might say. Phantoms in the air, forms created purely out of imagination with cunningness of course, using archetypal type symbolism which everyone reacts to.
A good example is the reptilian agenda. It sold lots of books, started really with a series on television called "V," a well funded series about these creatures and UFOs of course coming down to Earth and under their partly human skin they’re actually reptile people who eat mice and rats and things.
That prepared the ground work. As Albert Pike said, "we always lay the foundation first and then build on it."
Out eventually comes another man with his own interpretation of the Sumerian tablets. A unique interpretation that’s kind of laughed at by politer circles who have done more research than he has and who have no spin to take and then it’s built upon by other authors put out from the same sources who then build on it.
But the foundation is faulty. It’s the "V" you see. If you understand what the "V" symbol actually means you start to understand why they call things these particular names. The "V" series came first, put the foundation there of possibility thinking. Out comes the unique interpretation to build on it, then come the authors with repetition, repetition, repetition. They call that a form of psychic driving as they used in MKUltra, and of course they seem to thing it’s real by the much speaking as they say. The more they say it the more they become real.
Huxley himself talks about the use of repetition to get things across, as did Lord Bertrand Russell on "The Impact of Science on Society." Repetition and repetition without basis you see gets the message across no matter how fantastic it is.
So ponder this. That is all for now. Good night and may your God go with you.
(Transcribed by Linda)