Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]
I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.”
“I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do.”
“That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in “Brave New World,” partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy.”
“Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time.”
“Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written.”
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The complete recordings
of the Aldous Huxley
1961 London interview
may be found at:
Hi there
Do you happen to still have the recordings from the Grey Lodge Occult Review? I’ve checked the links and they no longer work. I’ve searched on the site but can’t find it there either. It would be great to hear them in full!
Thanks for any help,
Dan
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: No, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t save a copy of these recordings. While I’m sure that they must be available online somewhere, I don’t have any leads on them myself. … sorry]
Comments from original blog page: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1466
Andy O
Thanks Lorenzo !!
bill
I have enjoyed the Huxley podcasts, definitely. I think the quotes above, about technology, are really in line with what seems to be happening these days, on a lot of fronts.
I haven’t bought it yet, but there’s a book I’ve been flipping through in the bookstore by Jaron Lanier out now, called You Are Not A Gadget, and it is very interesting reading, sort of along similar lines but explicitly directed at current issues in the net and associated tech. (Pretty sure I’m gonna buy it once I finish what I’m reading at home, I’m not trying to read it for free. 🙂 It might go on sale in the meantime…)
Mr. KandH
Peace & Best Wishes to All
Wonderful Podcast Lorenzo! Thank you.
Warai O.
Thanks a bunch Lorenzo. This is the first time I’m commenting on any podcast here but I have been following the Psychedelic Salon podcasts for quite some time now. Though I appreciate and enjoy all of them, I wouldn’t mind hearing some more Aldous Huxley talks, if you have some that you are keeping to yourself right now!
As you no doubt already know, there are people from all over the world appreciating these podcasts and the sometimes not-so-common and interesting opinions expressed in them. Thanks for that.
Kevin
Great material! Huxley’s novel “Island” is the single most inspiring book about the possibility of building a sane society that I’ve ever read.
For those who are interested, here’s a video of the Mike Wallace interview:
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/
wallace/huxley_aldous.html
I’ve broken the line to be sure it fully copies into the blog format. If cut-and-pasted into a browser, the page should load just fine.