28 octobre 2018

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (note de lectura)



Freedom and individualism are willingly exchanged for sensory pleasure and endless consumption.

Chapter 1. Over-population
- the completely organized society
- the abolition of free will
- the scientific caste system
- the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness
- the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching
- the nightmare of too much order
- prophecies made in 1931
- George Orwell’s 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism.
- animal behaviour – control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards
- 1984 – punishment and fear of punishment
- Brave New World – mild punishment, systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, many kinds of non-violent manipulation, genetic standardization
- representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses
- human numbers are now increasing more rapidly than at any time in the history of the species
- in the Brave New World, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been solved.
- The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation with natural resources is the central problem of the mankind.
- the Age of Over-population
- there is a close correlation between too many people, too rapidly multiplying, and the formulation of authoritarian philosophies, the rise of totalitarian systems of government


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