The Promise of Pleasure or the Threat of Pain: Reflections on Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Future of Life on Earth
By James Kullander
JamesKullander.com
July 28, 2022
“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Soon after the publication of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, his publisher sent a copy of it to Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. Orwell’s book describes a dystopian hell realm of a world ruled by an invisible yet omniscient “Big Brother,” whose minions keep the masses in check with twenty-four-hour surveillance everywhere, even in one’s home and with threats of violence should any “prol” (short from proletarian) disagree with, and part from, the one and only totalitarian narrative and its demands. Having read that novel years ago, I reread it recently because I recalled that it had quite accurately described back in 1949 when it was first published much of what’s happening in the world today.
Brave New World was published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A lot had happened in the world in those 17 years: the Great Depression, the fascist overthrow of Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and WWII. Orwell, an Englishman, had joined the International Brigades to fight against Francisco Franco and the Nationalists. Orwell was wounded in a battle in the Spanish countryside—shot in the neck—only later to be hounded and hunted in the littered streets of Barcelona during skirmishes between different factions of the Spanish Republican Army as it met its violent demise. It is said that some of what Orwell experienced and witnessed during those years—the relentless and bogus propaganda coming from both sides, the frenzied destruction of churches and the killing of priests and nuns, the fanatical in-party fighting among those who were supposed to be compatriots, and a “general ‘bourgeosification,’ a deliberate destruction of the equalitarian spirit”—had found its way into his Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In a letter dated October 21, 1949, Huxley wrote to Orwell some of his musings about Nineteen Eighty-Four that indicated that Orwell had got it all wrong in terms of how the “ruling oligarchy” would eventually govern the world in the future. Orwell’s novel tells a story of the masses being governed by pain or the threat of pain. Huxley said, no, it would be governed by pleasure and the promise of pleasure. In his book, Huxley depicts a world where birth (babies are “decanted” from bottles), life, and death are completely controlled, and where if anyone feels the slightest spasm of anger or unhappiness or jealousy or any other sort of unsettling mood, there was the narcotizing soma, freely handed out, always available, and readily taken. “The perfect drug,” Huxley wrote. “Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”
In his letter to Orwell, Huxley wrote: “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.” Later in his letter, Huxley goes on to say: “Within the next generation I believe the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as easily satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
These two opposite approaches to governing beg the question: How will the ruling oligarchy launch what might be their final attempt to completely destroy what’s left of our shredded freedom and dignity and sovereignty? Up to now, it’s plain to see, that the approach has been following Orwell’s boot-on-the-face playbook—punishment or the threat of punishment. To wit: over the past two and a half years, millions of people around the world have been excluded from society by being isolated from family and friends, fired, silenced, kicked out of schools, barred from restaurants and cultural institutions and international travel, censored, de-platformed, delicensed—basically the right to participate in society—all for not submitting to the unsafe and ineffective and experimental and, in fact deadly, injections. Millions around the world protesting the tyrannical mandates have been beaten with clubs or have had water cannons turned on them. Many have been arrested and jailed.
Now that the mandates appear to be lifting here and there for now—not because the COVID mRNA injections have succeeded, mind you, but because they have failed—perhaps we’re being lulled into Huxley’s world of pleasure and the promise of pleasure. The stage for this has already been set, after all. The United States has had a substance abuse problem for much of its history, but evidence shows COVID-19 has made it worse. Across most generations, genders, and demographics drug use in America has increased. Whether it be heroin, prescription drugs, marijuana, or synthetics, the fact is that American drug abuse has reached alarming levels, generating a new breed of marijuana addicts.
The American Psychological Association reported in March 2021: “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of June 2020, 13% of Americans reported starting or increasing substance use as a way of coping with stress or emotions related to COVID-19.”
What’s more, U.S. deaths from drug overdoses leapt nearly 30 percent to more than 93,000 in 2020—the highest ever recorded. In June 2020, the Washington Post reported: “Nationwide, federal and local officials are reporting alarming spikes in drug overdoses—a hidden epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic. Emerging evidence suggests that the continued isolation, economic devastation and disruptions to the drug trade in recent months are fueling the surge.” The Post additionally reported that “overdoses have not just increased since the pandemic began but are accelerating as it persists.”
Incidences of alcohol abuse have also risen. In July last year, the New York Post reported a 54 percent increase in alcohol sales for the week ending March 21, 2020—just days after the lockdowns were set in place as if people were stocking up for the worst—over the previous year, while 75 percent of Americans reported drinking more during the lockdowns “to deal with pandemic-related stress.” In December 2020, 10 months into the so-called pandemic, Fox News cites a University of Texas Health Science Center School of Public Health study that reported: “One in three Americans has engaged in binge drinking since the pandemic began. The study defines binge drinking as taking as many as seven drinks in a single session.”
Clearly, the greater the weight of the boot on our faces the more a lot of people are seeking a way out from under it through substances that alter the mind, dull the pain, and give some modicum of pleasure. The free-floating anxiety and stress that millions are feeling is indicative of the fact that something about all of this is just plain wrong. In a world where the prevailing dogma would have us believe that 2 + 2 = 5, what are the alternatives for those who sometimes just can’t cope with the mess we’re in—the lies and being surrounded by so many who slavishly believe the lies, all while the truth is shoved down the memory hole barely before it even has a chance to see the light and reach those with eyes to see and ears to hear?
It’s a perfect storm. The more we’ve been constantly pummeled by the actual manifestation of Orwell’s boot-on-the-face world in real time, the more many people with already splintered coping skills or a threadbare patchwork of safety nets took up the induced pleasures depicted in Huxley’s world, as if we’ve been forcefully re-oriented toward that brave new world, the idea of a “new normal” that the global elite and their toadies in the legacy media have drilled into our psyches like so much fertile farmland seeded with poisoned beliefs that will now grow into a permanent way of life.
Imagine people all around the world indoctrinated with these lies and loving their servitude while ever reaching toward new heights of psychotropic escapism. It looks like some of our demented representatives in Washington are about to likely lend us a hand by passing a bill to legalize marijuana just in time for all of us to stockpile reefer in our basement along with the canned beans and packages of pasta before the next evil lockdown and demonic round of mandates sweep over the land. In Vancouver, Canada, pharmaceutical-grade (and highly addictive) fentanyl is now available through commercial dispensaries, which “sell to those who can pay and provides free drugs through the program’s operational budget to those who cannot.”
In an even more diabolical development in this campaign to lobotomize the human race, a certain Oxford University academic, Dr. Anna Machin, addressing the recent Cheltenham Science Festival in England, suggested that drugs that enhance feelings of closeness, empathy and love are on the horizon. “Oxytocin could be available within a decade for people to squirt up their nose before they go out on a Saturday night, at the same time as having a glass of prosecco,” she explained.
In response to this, one Unherd columnist wrote last month: “When we already know that scientists are claiming we’ll have access to love-enhancing medications within a few years, and prominent bioethicists are openly making the case for human bio-enhancement on moral grounds, the implicit direction of travel should trouble all of us.”
Indeed. Even more disturbing than all of this put together is the idea that humanity be administered en masse so-called “morality pills” to make us, well, “better” people. Along with the idea that it should be administered without our knowledge. Such is the argument made in a new book, titled Moral Enhancement and the Public Good, by Parker Crutchfield, an associate professor in medical ethics, humanities, and law at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. According to the book’s description, this moral bioenhancement, Crutchfield argues, “should be both compulsory and covert.”
In an August 10, 2020 post on The Conversation, Crutchfield writes: “My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?”
Could anyone possibly propose anything more insane and, frankly, immoral, than this? It would be disturbing enough if COVID-19 and its variants are as contagious and deadly as the legacy media, governments, and the pharmaceutical cartel would have us believe for the past two and half years. Disturbing enough if the jabs were “safe and effective.” But, in fact, none of this is remotely true.
We were ominously warned time and time again that without the jabs and the lockdowns and the social distancing and the masks that any one of us could get sick and die from a virus that, with rare exception, no healthy person under 70 years old would ever even catch. What’s more, the jabs do not prevent anything. Except, perhaps, rational thinking. And the only thing they are effective at is maiming and murdering their victims. There’s now ample evidence that “all-cause” mortality—deaths of all causes—is spiking in countries with hefty vaccine compliance. This was never not about our health. This is all about control and compliance.
To that end, should anything like a “compulsory and covert” administration of a moral bioenhancement be administered somehow—dumped into public water supplies, genetically engineered into in our food, sprayed on us from planes like crop dusters—we would be force-fed to accept a lie that could very well kill us. Which is what the soulless robots sneering down upon us plebes from their Pyramid of Evil called the World Economic Forum are trying to do, anyway. Why not narcotize us into embracing their agenda to eliminate that last drop of resistance in our freedom-loving blood in every last one of us? It’s the covidian cult’s ultimate wet dream come true.
In a follow-up to his Brave New World, Huxley published in Time magazine in 1958 a long and alarming essay titled “Brave New World Revisited.” In that essay, he wrote about the possible, if not likely, end of democracy not only here in the United States but everywhere else it had managed to take root and flourish. The cause of death would be due to a population overcome by what he called “herd-poisoning.” He wrote: “Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.”
In his novel, Brave New World, Huxley invented a world in which soma assuaged our pesky human woes. But at least in his story, taking it was optional. Now, there are people in the real world suggesting it be mandatory and covert, giving rise to a whole new thing, a combined “herd-poisoning” and “boot-on-the-face” takedown of humanity not even envisioned by Orwell or Huxley. And this is not a story. It’s reality. And if it’s allowed to go on it’s not going to end well.
The Best of James Kullander
The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human
A Review
Fourth Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
Third Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
Second Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
A Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
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