In this lecture, Huxley develops an ”ideal of the open society of open individuals.“ To reach this ideal, he points out, contrary to what ”many of the older eugenicists“ believed, ”[i]t’s not enough just to sterilize the unfit or try to breed deferentially from the more fit. It is necessary to have the best possible environment so that we may be able to see what are the full genetic possibilities of individual men and women, boys and girls.“
In this lecture, Huxley elaborates on the changes he believes are necessary to “remedy the damage we’ve done and prevent further damage being accomplished” to “the world, the home, in which [man] makes his travels through the universe.” In this connection he proposes three areas of interest: Ethics, philosophy and aesthetics.
His conclusion is “that practically we are in a position to patch up the damage we’ve done and to prevent more damage being done. In practice, it’s going to be exceedingly difficult to do this because there are many factors which militate against it.”
This lecture from January 26, 1959 is very well know for the paragraph
“And it seems to me perfectly on the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and of producing a kind of—producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will actually rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel—by the fact of propaganda, brainwashing, and brainwashing enhanced, possibly, by pharmacological methods. And this seems to me to be precisely The Final Revolution.”
Huxley is insisting, throughout the lecture, on a dichotomy between scientific and technological development on the one site and human nature on the other, between liberty and spontaneity on the one site and technique on the other, at the same time linking the “enormously rapid increase” of population to the necessity of a “technicization” of government. He is calling on the scientific community of The University of California to unite with other disciplines in a series of conferences which should result in “some kind of educational policy, some kind of governmental policy, some kind of legal policy”.
This is the first lecture in a series of 18 lectures that Aldous Huxley gave at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the fall semester of 1959 The Human Situation. Huxley became an honorary professor of literature and a professor-at-large at that university that same year. In Huxleys own words he will “take various features of the human situation” and for example consider “man in relation to the planet”, the “biological problem of the human individual”, “man and society”, the “technicization of every aspect of human life”, “the problems of human potentialities” and “art and problems of creation and insight”.
In this groundbreaking series of four lectures given by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. in 1973 at Columbia University, the real nature of the human mind as a fundamental force of the universe is explored. In this first lecture, focus is on the nature of the “fundamental emotion” experienced by the human mind when in a mode of creative action of discovery.
This lecture by the late A. Huxley is best known for the following quote:
“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.
Well, 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 always will exist, to get people, actually, to love their servitude.”
Think about what it means for the way we will organize our society, if we assume that there will always be an “controlling oligarchy”. Why is Huxley later so exited about Vu Van Thai’s concept of “an adaptation of technique, which shall be suitable for these people” (that is, the people in the “backward countries”)?
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