"making him actually love his slavery"

[Cerridwen]

Apropos of nothing of today's popular culture and/or media manufactured scandal.

"...the dictatorship of the future will be very unlike the dictatorships which we've been familiar with in the immediate past.

...take another book...George Orwell's "1984"...written at the height the Stalinist regime, and just after the Hitler regime, and there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence...I think what's going to happen in the future is that the dictators will find, as the old saying goes, you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.

...{the new dictators will find} 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.., partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the rational part of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and physiology even...making him actually love his slavery.

...this is the danger that actually people may be in some ways be happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations in which they oughtn't to be happy..."

Aldous Huxley, The Mike Wallace Interview, 5/18/1958 link:http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous.html


The interview includes a discussion about the new medium - television, propaganda, Madison Avenue, political elections and marketing candidates, the "pharmacological revolution", and much more.

Previously posted: Sat Jun-14-08 11:03 PM
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3454884

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Cerridwen.

[Cerridwen]

6. Thank you, Uncle Joe and you are most welcome.

A little reminder here and there.

[Solly Mack]

2. Thanks!

[Cerridwen]

5. Hey, Solly.

Thanks.

Long time no "talk". I hope things are well with you and yours.

[Fumesucker]

3. Meh, Huxley never saw a smartphone

Makes soma look like the pills Mother gives you.

[Cerridwen]

4. Imagine the possibilities. n/t

[Fumesucker]

7. They don't call it Crackberry for nothing

I'm not addicted, I'm just wearing Google Glass.

[Cerridwen]

8. LOL I love technology. I hate the cynical use of technology.

Imagine all the technology humans have created, discovered, re-discovered, used to promote creation and the success and abundance of the planet.

Imagine....

[Egalitarian Thug]

9. Bang on. It's already mostly done, and most would be anxious to sign on.

Not too long from now Americans will be the willing donkeys sneaking into civilized nations willing to work themselves to death for nearly nothing.
& R

[Cerridwen]

10. I hope you are wrong and fear you are right.

Such is the world today in which people with no knowledge of history perpetually repeat it and deem it "just the way it is", "it's the law".

[Mnemosyne]

11. K&R nt

[BainsBane]

12. There are currently 27 million enslaved people in the world

To have the life of middle-class Americans compared to slavery is thoroughly offensive.
You need to find a way to talk about your opposition to surveillance without trivializing the lives of people captured, beaten, and deprived of ownership over their own person.

[jtuck004]

13. "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves".

Harriet Tubbman wrote that. She also wrote "I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it."

Something somewhere changed her, which leads me to think there might be hope for others. The thing I am most afraid of is that she existed in an ocean of "free" people. But when a society becomes mostly subjugated, even "happy" about it, maybe whatever caused her to change dies. or at least loses most of its power to change a person.

I wonder sometimes if we have schooled too many generations to be subservient to other's evaluation, given them too many excuses as to why we did what we did to others, maybe so much that we have created a "super race" of sorts, forever unable to free themselves.

Thanks for that post.

[awoke_in_2003]

14. Good post. K&R. nt

[liberal_at_heart]

15. corporate America and the US government have already perfected the art of propaganda.

[Demo_Chris]

16. This ignores the critical aspect of many oppressors....

Irrationality and terror.

Orwell and Huxley both imaged an efficient and sane dictatorship, a police state in crafted for perpetual power in which merit and skill determined how far one rose within the party establishment, and in which the future of the party was a consideration. Doing so, they neglect both history and human nature. In asking whether a perfect totalitarian regime can theoretically exist, one neglects the purpose of the regime and the attributes which draw sociopaths to it.

Let me cut to the chase: Terror, horror, and power are not the tools of the dictator or his agents to secure the future of the state, these things are the goal.

[Egalitarian Thug]

17. Good morning. n/t

[OneGrassRoot]

18. With freedom comes great responsibility...

As much as the US citizenry speaks of "personal responsibility," I think most fear true responsibility and thus freedom.

[idwiyo]

19. K&R