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."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

The complete recordings

of the Aldous Huxley

1961 London interview

may be found at:

The Grey Lodge Occult Review