The Final Revolution

An Address by Aldous Huxley, 1959

He wanted to get the professors out of their separate pigeonholes, to meet together in a concentrated effort to pool their specialized knowledge and to bring it out into the world. And after nearly seventy years, this remains one of our enormous problems. How to make the best of both worlds: the world of specialization, which is absolutely necessary, and the world of general communication and interest in the larger affairs of life, which is also necessary…

We see then that many of the most important ethical truths flow quite naturally and simply from scientific facts, and I feel very strongly that this kind of bridging between the world of pure science and the world of ethics should be made from the earliest age…

For example, if one compares medieval psychology or the psychology of the 16^th Century with the poetry of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one perceives the enormous superiority of the literary artists to the scientific man of the period. The same is true of Shakespeare…

Official psychology, scientific psychology does not begin to catch up with literary psychology until well into the second half of the 19^th century. It’s incredible to perceive the barrenness of the official psychology doctrine of the period in comparison with the literary psychology of such novelists as Balzac or Dickens or George Eliot or Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy…

Our problem is to adapt a language which is not now suitable in describing the continuum of mind and body, a universe of complete continuity…

Ideally, for example, we ought to be able to talk about a mystical experience simultaneously in terms of theology, of psychology, and of biochemistry. This is a pretty tall order, but unless we can do something of the kind, it will remain extraordinarily difficult for people to think about this continuous web of life, to think about it as a continuum, and not in terms of the old Platonic and Cartesian dualism which so extraordinarily falsifies our picture of the world…

The Final Revolution, as I see it, is the application to human affairs, both on the social level and on the individual level, of technology. Now what is technology? Technology, technique in general,  I suppose, is the application in a perfectly conscious and rational way of well-thought-out methods of doing things efficiently. The watchword is “efficiency” …

In general we may say that the more complicated the physical machinery is, the more complicated does the organization have to become in the society which uses these machines…

But compared with the efficiency of police forces even in the democratic state today, these people were wildly inept. And there was a great deal of individual liberty, simply because the people on top couldn’t get hold of the masses…

There is an immense mass of information about everybody in the hands of the central government which never existed before. This thing for which David was punished has now reached an eminence which was absolutely unimaginable even 100 years ago…

I think we will see a further technicization, a further usurpation by the central authority of functions which used to be in the hands of private people…

Propoganda may be defined as opposed to rational argument, argument based upon facts. Argument based on facts aims at producing an intellectual conviction; propoganda aims, above all, at producing reflex action…

The technicization of the means of getting at the human unconscious presents an enormous danger to our whole traditional conception of democracy and of liberty. It seems to make complete nonscense of the democratic process, which, after all, is based upon the assumption that voters make rational choices on the basis of facts…

What is becoming, I think, quite clear now is that the dictatorships of the future probably will not be based on terror, as the dictatorships of the immediate past have been, the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin. Terror is an extremely wasteful, stupid and inefficient method of controlling people. The Romans discovered this many years ago. As far as possible they tried to rule their empre by consent and not by mere coercion. And we are now in a position to do far better than the Romans, because we have this enormous armory of techniques which will permit the rulers to make their subjects actually like their slavery…

And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel – by propaganda, brain washing, or brain washing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to me to be, The Final Revolution…

The question of spontaneity is terribly important, and it is actually one of the great enemies of technique. A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should work, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous...