Aldous Huxley Unplugged: Must Watch 1958 Interview (and some great quotes)

Aldous Huxley was an extraordinarily prescient and brilliant man who fully understood the state and how it would use pharmaceuticals, propaganda and its draconian powers to reduce human beings to compliant and obedient zombies.

 Aldous Huxley Unplugged: Must Watch 1958 Interview

This half hour interview from 1958 of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, is incredibly powerful and prophetic. He warns us all, so many decades ago, that the biggest threat to the West is a “soft dictatorship,” where as a result of increasingly sophisticated propaganda and drugs, people would actually learn to love their servitude. If you are pressed for time, skip to the seven minute mark where it really gets going. I would also suggest reading Brave New World Revisited, which was written 26 years after the original book was published and is available free online here. Knowledge is power, which is why they want you slurping down fluoride and sucking your thumbs.

A few Aldous Huxley quotes from Brainy Quote:

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

More Aldous Huxley quotes are here.