Aldous Huxley Suggested Mind Control as a Means of Keeping the Insane Content

JonesReport.com | December 25, 2007

Huxley has long been an advocate of social control by means of keeping the population in relative bliss (and incapable of challenging or even recognizing its controllers). In Brave New World, as in his later work, Huxley proposes psychotropic drugs to maintain happy, content workers.

In The Doors of Perception (1954) (otherwise concerned with mescaline and LSD experimentation), Huxley puts forward a system of psychological reassurance to calm the insane by subjecting them to mind-controlling audio recordings not unlike the hypnopædia (sleep-learning) in Brave New World.

"I took... The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opened at random, "O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted"... by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliations, by all the fears and hates and cravings that ordinarily eclipse the Light."

"What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the dead, might not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind. By means of such devices as recorders, clock-controlled switches, public address systems and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact."

While there is little doubt this suggestion was sincere and benevolent in its contextual intent, the implications for larger social control are not only self-evident, but were also put forward by Huxley in his other works.

For example, his 1962 'Ultimate Revolution' speech at Berkeley might be summed by his statement that "there are ways of making people love their servitude"-- wherein he argued against 1984's society ruled by terror, believing that a society more like Brave New World offered the possibility for subjects to comply willingly and would, thus, be more efficiently run.

Huxley also discusses his involvement with research on chickens, rodents, the criminally insane and other subjects who are easily controlled by (remotely engaged) electronic stimuli that instigate a desired behavior.

In the case of the criminally insane, it was the chance to overcome hopeless depression and fits of madness by pushing a button and triggering a temporary blissful sensation that offers some escape from their hellish mental state.

This is essentially the application Huxley proposes in The Doors of Perception-- that the insane might chance 'the light' and escape their 'most cruelly tormented mind.' This work, as with much of his career, was in conjunction with the Tavistock Institute, pre-eminent in mind control.

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