Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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Huxley's future world resembled Orwell's in that all physical experience was rigidly limited. Orwell's list was considerably grimmer, but Huxley realized that the point was a short list rather than a grim list. Sensual pleasures were encouraged in Brave New World, programmed into people as infants through "hypnopaedic" messages repeated thousands of times as they slept. The messages encouraged sexual promiscuity, attendance at mass entertainments such as "feelies" (movies with tactile stimuli), and, most important, the ingestion of drugs such as "soma" for any and every unpleasant feeling or little distress.

The goal was to keep people focused on their own satisfaction and limit their needs to those that could be conveniently satisfied by the social engineers. This precluded any form of discontent.

Most important, life was contained within planned, controlled environments. People were programmed to believe that any "natural" experience was inconvenient or disgusting. The idea of personal love or caring for one's own infant, especially to the extent of breast feeding, was made so horrible that the very thought of it would send people groping for their drugs.

There is no underground in Brave New World, but there are two contrasting societies. One, modeled after the Zuni and Hopi villages where Huxley lived for a time in the 1920s, is the home of the "savages," museumized remnants of the nontechnological past. The city people take helicopters to these places to observe the savages' strange and sickening ways. The second society, confined to "islands," is filled with the mistakes of the genetic and hypnopaedic assembly line, people who've expressed the cardinal aberration: dissatisfaction.

In a foreword Huxley added to later editions of the book, he mused on the trends he saw in the world: "To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world's governments will be more or less completely totalitarian before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization . . . can arrest the present tendency . . . . At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.

"There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane . . . it is demonstrably inefficient, and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned. . ."

This could be achieved, Huxley believed, by new technologies offering "a greatly improved technique of suggestion." by the dissemination of drugs, by mass spectacles to unify experience and feelings, and by eugenics, which would standardize people themselves. Writing in 1932, Huxley was not aware of any single technology that could achieve this standardization and unification process, but he saw that technology would inevitably lead in that direction. It was his particular genius, I believe, to perceive that the critical element was the creation of the joyful cooperation of the people being controlled.

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