Anyone else read Aldous Huxley's "Island" ?

>> ^kevingrr:

As Huxley said, "It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past, but then I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with breads and circuses and you can provide them with endless distractions and propaganda."
@StukaFox
Your comment is as clever as it is simpleminded. You can worship the elephant or the donkey and I'll disagree with you based on the zeal you have for one and the disdain for the other. The world is a complicated place and whats best isn't found in one camp or the other.
Look at Huxley's last novel Island. He merges 'East and West'. He takes what he feels is best from both.


I upvoted because my reaction to this is that we've ended up in a world a lot closer to Aldous Huxley's shiny, distracted, and soul suckingly disconnected dystopia than we have 1984's drab, brutal, overtly totalitarian one. Our dystopia is much harder to break out of, because on the surface it seems open, free, and filled with prosperity, until you scratch the surface, and see the rot festering underneath.

I could've just as easily have downvoted for the stupidity of your pox upon both their houses view of modern politics though. I don't really get the sense much of anyone on the left is filled with some sort of "zeal" for the "donkey" -- and the disdain for the Republicans largely stems from the way they seem to be functionally identical to the Inner Party members from 1984. They can shamelessly go from lauding an individual mandate as the "personal responsibility principle that's essential to bring costs down" and then when the party's needs change, decry the same policy as somehow being a violation of everything that Americans hold sacred. All this while demanding they still be treated as if they were serious people of conviction and principle, and painting those who dare to point out their hypocrisy as some sort of dishonest partisan hack.

The fact that one side, and only one side has fully committed to this level of partisan loyalty should make even the most cynical, above the fray, non-partisan person sit up and take notice. Maybe it's time to stop pretending this is politics as usual, and see it for what it really is: a battle to stop a group of committed fanatics without a shred of human empathy from pushing out the last vestiges of the flawed, inept, but well-meaning opposition standing in their way.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

^It's like Shiny wants to be entirely rational about this subject...
But can't, cause all his thought and opinions are coated in a layer of bible nonsense.


I know exactly how the mind of a secular liberal works, GenjiKilpatrick, because I used to have one. It's not a mystery to me why you believe what you believe, or how you came to those conclusions. I used to think along the same lines and I used to buy the same things which the world is selling you.

The difference between us is, revealed truth versus autonomous reasoning. God has revealed Himself to me in such a way that His existence is undeniably true. I could no more deny God than I could my own reflection in the mirror. You, on the other hand, suppress the truth God has given you because you prefer your autonomous reasoning. Do you relate to this quotation?:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves...

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.

-Aldous Huxley

God put you here for a reason but you would rather deny it and dream up your own reasoning, regardless of the truth. And you believe that your reasoning is superior, yet what is the basis of its validity? How do you justify it?

I'd love to give Soma (from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) a go.

*Edit ^Gwiz said it much better than me... But I will keep my post up anyway... muahahaha...

* Disclaimer: This became a wall of text as I explained my reasoning. Also it is really really late so spelling might be off.
I hate to do this but winstonfield actually has one valid point even though his way of saying it was clumsy/not PC.
Reader's Digest: Wars are not winnable in modern times.

Full text:
Wars are not winnable in modern times as the populations are too big and know too much to simply accept a new ruler, even in backwater places like Afghanistan. Back in the day before proper nation states and democracy and all that a farmer could probably not care less who he paid his taxes to as long as he was left alone and had enough to feed himself and his family, and if he wasn't what could he do? The king was a king because God wanted it to be that way and he had knights and armies and the farmer did not. Today a 10 year old can mass produce home-made bombs that cost under 100 dollars a pop whilst a Military drops bombs that costs over 100 000 dollars a pop from 20 000 000 dollar aircrafts that land on 200 000 000 dollar Carriers. Today we know that wars cost money. We know that if you drag out a war long enough the populace of the invading force will most likely falter in their support, war weariness and all that (Vietnam anyone?). When the 100 000 US soldier dies by IED after 50 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq somehow I doubt that the support for the war will be there any more.

IMO if you want to win a war militarily you have to commit to total war and genocide and simply kill of all of the natives and move your own people in to settle the area. As long as one person remembers what it was like to be free from invaders they will fight. It is human nature. Just imagine if the USSR had invaded the US during the Cold War and conquered it militarily. Would the US citizens who survived the initial bombings just say, after a year or two or 8: "Oh, well. Guess I will stop fighting now and join the invading side. Seems like they have some things going for them..."? I doubt it.

Clarification:
Is this (Genocide and total war) something I advocate? No, but as Aldous Huxley said: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." IMO War serves no other purpose than to cull some of the human population. Nothing more and nothing less. It has served its purpose in the past, when countries could be conquered, but it has become obsolete in the modern world where populations are too large to control properly.

A couple of random thoughts:
To win a war today you have to break every single convention on warfare there is and use NBC weapons, or massive bombardments and just carpet bomb every inch of the country you are at war with, to annihilate the populace. If you are not prepared to do that you should not go to war as you cannot win, ever! (If you are prepared to do that I hope you never get into a position of power!)

Militaries are not for winning wars, they are for fighting them. When the politicians are bored of the fighting or it starts to affect their ratings negatively they sue for a peace treaty...

What is the definition of winning a war? Aren't wars supposed to be about conquest and getting new land and natural resources or perhaps vindication for a perceived insult to the crown or something? What would constitute a win in the Afghan and Iraqi wars? And is that a military goal or a political one?

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

You're missing the point. To you, Hypotheticals may just be a string of words. But those words hold meaning.
Words represent pictures that pop into your head. Those pictures trigger emotional responses which in turn effect our attitudes and actions.
If it's okay to talk about presidential assasination in hypotheticals, it's okay to talk about rape and robbery and homocide of fellow students and teachers in hypotheticals.
They're just hypotheticals, right?
>> ^LarsaruS:
Yes. It would be. I don't let hypothetical statements bother me... there are a lot more stuff to be bothered by in real life. And if it works and the students learn (more than they would have otherwise)... I say go for it.



First up: Yes they are just hypotheticals. As long as you use them to trigger meaningful debate and clearly define the actions as abhorrent I don't see a problem with it, rapes happen and so do murders. Students kill and rape other students and teachers get raped and murdered too, shit happens as life is not fluffy pink clouds and unicorns farting rainbows! (school shootings anyone?). To ignore facts do not make them go away it only allows these things to sit undisturbed and fester. Or are you a subscriber to the idea that if you don't talk about horrible things they don't happen? "Out of sight, out of mind" or as Aldous Huxley so succinctly put it: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

To use murders and rapes and other criminal actions to discuss and bring up the values we as a society have on these issues and contrast them with the students own views on these things can bring about meaningful insights on these issues. And it is not something to be done lightly of with a flippant attitude as they are people with emotions, I agree with you on that.

Secondly: Would you prefer it if we censor what teachers are able to bring up in classrooms and/or start to self-censor ourselves the way people in oppressive regimes do? Only happy things are allowed to be discussed or else you disappear/become a pariah? In almost all repressive regimes the teachers are the first to be murdered/sent to be "re-educated" about the grandeur of the new ways. Knowledge is power and the people who give other people knowledge are the most dangerous of all. They define how we see the world and ourselves in relation to it.

*Disclaimer, written when tipsy/drunk, grammar and spelling might be a bit off. And I don't mean to flame.

Yup, Doc Ellis took the acid.. So did Dan Rather, Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, Francis Crick, Anais Nin, Bill Gates, the creators of South Park, and others.


Good thing it's finding its way back into clinical studies.

surprised to see this many Camus fans. here's mine:

1 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
2 The Fall - Albert Camus
3 Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut JR
4 Animal Farm - George Orwell
5 Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

I'd give Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and honorable mention, but only because I'm still reading it; great book so far though.

Looking back on it, all are fairly quick reads; great for a weekend or light reading.

>> ^doogle:
Sorry, I don't see books or fear here.
Books may be inferred cuz Aldous wrote a book, the the book on LSD...but he also created LSD, and I think that's enough.
-books -fear (as in nochannel Documentaries Dark Drugs)
-doogle, the Channel-assignment-nazi for the week.

Um Albert Hofmann stumbled across LSD actually. Oh yea and have you ever heard of a little book entitled A Brave New World? Yea, that's Aldous Huxley, the guy who wrote *books

In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg puts it in one of his chapter titles.

The vapid stupidity of this argument is profound, Jonah cites what Mussolini said as fact, as if the usurpation of power in Germany and Italy were political campaigns run in democracies not simply two men saying and doing whatever would garner them power. The whole argument reads like an excuse to call liberals Nazis.

John Cole put it very well in saying that Goldberg basically twists words to make them mean whatever he wants them to mean.

The Salon.com interview from which I pulled the gist of the book is a hilarious read, and filled with miles of bullshit and quotable lines.

"I would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

[On Mussolini but could be self referential] "And he said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum."

"But there's another dystopian understanding of the future, which we get from [Aldous] Huxley's "Brave New World." That was a fundamentally American vision ... [T]he vision of the Huxleyian "Brave New World" future is one where everyone's happy. No one's being oppressed, people are walking around chewing hormonal gum, they're having everything done for them, they're being nannied almost into nonexistence. That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision. It's not the Orwellian stamping on a human face thing, it's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. It is the nanny state. That is a much more benign dystopia than "1984," but for me at least, it's still a dystopia. An unwanted hug is still as tyrannical or as oppressive -- not as oppressive, but an unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it ... [O]ne of the biggest distinctions between what I'm calling liberal fascism ... and classical fascism, is that classical fascism was masculine and violently oppressive and today's liberalism is feminine and not oppressive but smothering with kindness."

The full interview is here at Salon.com.

The art that he is talking about isn't the commercial industry that art is today.

It is art in the sense of the chaotic imagination, the pure inspiration to put something on a blank canvas, which is the same inspiration that makes a man want to go to the moon. Art in this sense is the antithesis of culture.

It's this deeper sense of the word 'art' that Mark Twain and Aldous Huxley wrote about. To get a sense of it Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell' is the book to read.

Real art is political, moving, inspiring, bewildering, emotional, carries sentiment, is powerful and is entirely and uniquely human.

I have to make clear that the bard Terence is not referring to a specific time and place and function type of culture, he is talking explicitly about all culture.

In reply to Smugglarn.

From Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'

"I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art... Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner."

No, the drug was released in the US, and it was used to treat anxiety disorders. You can google to find out more information about the drug, but during pre-production and the development phase of the film, the scripts were called LIBRIUM. I still have a copy of the original somewhere around.\

I've heard of that book, though I'm not sure if it's a good read or not.

In reply to this comment by Majortomyorke:
Thanks for the info on Equilibrium. I knew nothing about a drug called librium. Where might this drug have been released? Assuming not the US, or if so perhaps knowledge of it has simply not made it's way to me before now.

Kinda sorta on this note I've got a friend who insists I read Aldous Huxleys A Brave New World, which from what I understand operates under the same premise. A world lulled into submission by drugs and propaganda. One of the prominent Dystopian books, much like 1984.

Thanks for the info on Equilibrium. I knew nothing about a drug called librium. Where might this drug have been released? Assuming not the US, or if so perhaps knowledge of it has simply not made it's way to me before now.

Kinda sorta on this note I've got a friend who insists I read Aldous Huxleys A Brave New World, which from what I understand operates under the same premise. A world lulled into submission by drugs and propaganda. One of the prominent Dystopian books, much like 1984.

<ahref="http://www.videosift.com/edit.php?id=29337">Aldous Huxley: Sum & Substance (1/3)
A conversation with Aldous Huxley. The first of three parts covers the following:
- Intelligence & Good Will
- Discoursive Logic & Non-verbal Awareness
- Scientific language & Poetry
- Culture's Benefits & Traps
- Breaking out of our culture

<ahref="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbAPLJUl3mI">Aldous Huxley: Sum & Substance (2/3)
The second of three parts covers the following:
- Power politics / Arms race
- Destruction of the environment
- Corybantic dances / Dionysian orgies
- The Third World's dilemma
- Large-scale educational experimentation
- Reptilian brain vs. Neocortex

<ahref="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwDMtbadCYY">Aldous Huxley: Sum & Substance (3/3)
The last of three parts covers the following:
- Human potential
- New educational approaches
- Receptivity: "A wise passiveness"