"In experiments on mice, scientists rewired the circuits of the
brain and changed the animals' bad memories into good ones...The
researchers said they were able to do the opposite as well---change a
pleasurable memory in mice into one associated with
fear." (Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, 8/27/14)
Aldous Huxley once wrote to George Orwell:
"[The world's rulers'] lust for power can be just as completely
satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by
flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that
the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate
into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I
imagined in Brave New World."
Brain researchers believe they have the future of the world in their
hands. For example, they assume that one day, they will be able to turn
on or turn off circuits that induce pleasure and pain in humans.
Easily, reliably, precisely.
If humans seek to find pleasure and avoid pain, or if they pursue goals
that deliver pleasure as a side effect...why wait? Why go through the
process of striving at all? Why not cut to the bottom line immediately
and experience pleasure?
In an age where instant reward, entitlement, flickering attention, and
entertainment are paramount, why not stimulate the brain and give people
what they want?
Work is the middle-man. Eliminate it. The interval between desire and fulfillment is long. Erase it.
In the process, simplify human aspirations. Reduce them to a lowest
common denominator. Assume that what a Tesla, a Rembrandt, a Beethoven
achieved was unnecessarily complicated---the "same result" could have
been handed to them on a silver platter.
Individual triumph? An outmoded concept. And why should one person
accomplish more than another? It's victimization. A cardinal sin.
If a thousand robots working in a factory can turn out more cars per day
than their human counterparts, thus alleviating the stress of labor,
then by analogy, delivering pleasure to a population through drugs or
electromagnetic stimulation, bypassing the need
for work, is a worthy objective.
These are the arguments, and a significant and growing percentage of the human race would find them persuasive and attractive.
"I'm bored (tired, frustrated, unhappy, confused). Give me pleasure. Now."
Kent Berridge, PhD, at the University of Michigan Affective &
Biopsychology Lab, "Hedonic hotspots of 'Liking' -- The brain's pleasure
gloss"):
"Pleasure arises within the brain. Sweetness or other natural
pleasures are mere sensations as they enter the brain, and brain systems
must actively paint the pleasure onto sensation to generate a 'liking'
reaction -- as a sort of pleasure gloss or varnish.
Our lab has discovered brain generators of sensory pleasure, in the
form of anatomical 'hedonic hotspots' in the brain, which use
neurochemcal signals [to] paint intense pleasure on sensation, embedded
within larger hedonic circuits. It is important to identify
such pleasure-causing brain hedonic hotspots, neurochemicals and
circuits, in order to identify true mechanisms of pleasure. The need to
find true pleasure generators is especially pressing because hedonic
circuit dysfunctions may underlie mood disorders and
related clinical disorders, and because several other brain candidates
once thought to mediate pleasure are now increasingly recognized to not
cause pleasure after all (e.g., dopamine, electrical brain stimulation).
Therefore we aim to find true causes and
mechanisms in the brain for pleasure."
Thousands of brain researchers all over the world believe they are on
the road to curing "mood disorders." But the big picture is quite
different. It involves the shaping of society.
The individual, stripped of goals, vision, imagination, and creative
force drops into a slow-motion vortex of despair; and painting a
pleasure-gloss on his interior sensations is no cure.
It's reduction.
Brain research has come a long way since Pavlov, but the basic formula is still the same: stimulate a reaction.
Humans brought to a trough of "sweetness" and drinking from it all at once may initiate a pleasant scene; but at what price?
Tesla is just a little boy with wild ideas and a talent for mechanics,
and he is offending other little boys who can't approach his insight; so
he must be cured of his disorder. To do that, he's given a few jolts
of precisely directed pleasure-stim, and he
forgets. He forgets what he is and what he can do.
He's sacrificed on the collective altar.
The pleasure dome expands. People are happy.
The level of happiness is not important. It only matters that people
will accept the degree of pleasure they are afforded. They will come to
view it as the fulfillment of what is possible.
So it rests with the individual to become free, powerful, and creative. No one else is going to deliver that gift.
Up the road toward the Brave New World, pleasure will be counted as a
fundamental sacrament underlying the Bill of Rights. "Everyone deserves
it."
In whatever form the technology can deliver it, it will be given.
Until something untoward happens.
Below the level of consciousness, a massive rebellion will be brewing
and boiling. People, like it or not, will experience waves of repressed
energy they can't explain or identify.
The inchoate desire to be what they actually are will force its way to the surface and shake the world.
The pleasure dome will shatter and fall into the sea.
Beyond the reworked and cauterized brain, like a memory, the fires of consciousness will return.
The technocrats will take to the hills.
Or: knowing what the utopian program is---and what we are---we can refuse the program now.
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