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Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley
A gathering of friends at Laura Huxley’s home
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s podcast features two recordings of Aldous Huxley. The first is an interview conducted by Mike Wallace, and the second part of today’s program features a lecture of Huxley’s that speculates about the possibilities of some sort of existence after the death of our bodies.
Date the Mike Wallace interview was recorded: May 18, 1958
[NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]https://archive.org/download/578HuxleyFreedomAndMind/578-HuxleyFreedomAndMind.mp3
“We mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology.”
“People with a vested interest in a certain kind of philosophy find it almost impossible to accept facts which go against that particular philosophy.”
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I was annoyed by Mike Wallace’s patriotic defensiveness of television and US “purity” from any taint of mind control. Meanwhile we were being lied into wars, the FBI was blackmailing congresspeople and presidents, we had begun research for Cointelpro and 60 minutes regularly showed the depth of corruption in US politics. I remember well the Orwellian propaganda against Russia that was being promoted.
I loved the second talk. Huxley was a profoundly rigorous thinker. He turns out to have been wrong about the genetic uniqueness of any organism. The research has gone in the opposite direction, showing a shared genetic pool that connects all species and individuals. I actually am deeply sympathetic to the importance of individuals freedom of thought, but I think we have to look elsewhere for the value of that belief. In some ways this value seems to be about the importance of questioning social conditioning and inherited truth. That tendency to follow the crowd that may be partly a genetic predisposition that needs to be modified by open inquiry.