Aldous Huxley - The Politics of Ecology

From the Psychedelic Salon Podcast July 9, 2010
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/

This is a lecture by Aldous Huxley held on November 30, 1962.

Being almost 48 years old, this lecture could have been held today. I am amazed on how clearsighted and intelligent he was and how the society he talks about is exactly what we have today. The topics of the lecture are still relevant right here, right now.

On October 21, 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of 1984, congratulating Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience."

Some snippets from the lecture:

“When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man’s long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?”

“And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty.”

“In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it’s technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit.”

“My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological.”

“It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment.”

Duration: 50 minutes 47 seconds
Codec: MPEG 2 Audio, Layer 3 (MP3)
Bitrate: 64 kbps
Size: 23.3 MB