In the 1930s, as authoritarian leaders tightened their grip across the world world, Aldous Huxley threw himself into the pacifist movement and the Peace Pledge Union. His 1937 book Ends and Means became the pacifist manifesto of the era, built on one simple but devastating premise: bad means produce bad outcomes, always.

This was a direct shot at utilitarianism and the Machiavellian logic that “the ends justify the means.” Instead, Huxley argues that the means, in fact, become the ends. Use violence to achieve peace? You’ll get more violence. Revolutionary terror to create justice? You’ll get more terror. It’s a principle that feels simultaneously obvious and impossible to accept.

Football as Rehearsal for War

Huxley’s critique of violence extended to surprising places. In Ends and Means, he argued that international football matches do “almost nothing but harm” in a world without a shared philosophy. He argued that these sporting events aren’t building bridges—they’re tribal rehearsals for conflict, “preliminaries to more serious contests.” Given how modern football culture accepts routine violence between fans as the price of admission, maybe he had a point.

But Huxley wasn’t naive. He knew what he was asking people to do was nearly superhuman. Non-violence, he argued, requires supreme discipline combined with the willingness to take “four or five punches” without fighting back. Gandhi’s movement in South Africa proved it could work, but the time and training required—three to four years of preparation—made it hard to scale up.

The Problem With Everyone’s Solutions

Huxley rejected all the easy answers. Capitalism? It created military-industrial complexes with obsolescence problems—weapons had to be used before competitors developed better ones. Communism and socialism? They promised utopia through violence and centralized power, which would inevitably corrupt. Nationalism? An “idolatrous worship” that turned citizens into cannon fodder.

His diagnosis of war’s root causes went deeper than economics: nationalism, ideological idolatry, centralized power, and—most disturbingly—the maniacs who rise to lead nations. He called them out by name: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. These weren’t aberrations. They were predictable outcomes of systems that concentrated power.

Non-Attachment: Not What You Think

Huxley’s solution sounds cold at first: non-attachment. But this isn’t about being emotionally distant. It’s about breaking free from the obsessions that make us subhuman: attachments to money, power, ideologies, even religious beliefs that become fetishes.

We should stop trying to be perfectly rational machines. Instead, we should work on ourselves through meditation, breathing exercises, and contemplation in small groups of 20-30 people.

By the mid-1930s, Huxley realized his earlier philosophy of “balanced excess” was lethal in a world of Stalins and Hitlers. He pivoted to something more mystical: grace. Not religious dogma, but an awakening to genuine humanity through inner transformation.

Time was his biggest problem. Can you really fix the world through meditation when fascism is spreading like wildfire? The solution of Huxley’s socialist and communist contemporaries would have been to immediately change the socioeconomic conditions, even at the threat of killing millions. In a time of deep political divisions and actions seemingly without precedent, these are questions that feel as urgent now as they did in Huxley’s time.

Huxley’s answer was radical then, as it is now: No amount of external change will work if humans don’t change inside first. And in our current moment, with violence justified from every ideological corner, maybe we need to sit with that uncomfortable truth.

Works Discussed

* Ends and Means (1937) - Inquiry into the nature of ideals and methods for their realization

* Eyeless in Gaza (1936) - Novel exploring pacifism and personal transformation

* Those Barren Leaves (1925) - Features “Caesar poems” referenced in the transcript

* Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) - Travel writing with examples of successful non-violence

* Island (1962) - Utopian novel featuring mutual adoption societies and the aphorism about irrationality

* Science, Liberty and Peace (1947) - Essay on decentralisation and his prediction about efficient batteries

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com