“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Aldous Huxley, California Medical School, 1961
Written during the Great Depression, Huxley retreated to Sanary-sur-Mer, a small coastal city along the French Mediterranean to write his futuristic tale and some 90 years later it serves as a parable for our present day society. The premise of Huxley’s book is twofold. Firstly, Huxley believed that because of technological advancements in health and agriculture people of the future would enjoy longer lifespans, inevitably leading to over-population. Secondly, Huxley believed these advancements in technology would create an ever more complex civilization in need of an ever more controlling corporatocracy (a society ruled by corporations not governments). These ‘two main impersonal forces’, as Huxley refers to them, will then compound upon each other resulting in mass unemployment, deprivation, social instability and finally a bloody revolution.
In response to these impending challenges, Huxley postulates the use of several devices in order to maintain social stability – namely the use of birth control, propaganda, psychiatric prescription drugs, operant conditioning, brainwashing, hypnopaedia, and the highly controversial practice of eugenics. Further exploration of these subjects can be found in my article entitled, Stanford Research Institute: The Changing Images of Man. Each of these devices were to be introduced incrementally and discreetly for the betterment of all humankind. And we’ve now lived long enough to see the results of this agenda as our present day – largely an unsuspecting population – is being slowly subsumed into a socialist one world state.
According to Huxley, “society will be directed by highly standardized totalitarian governments. Inevitably so; for the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, and in the immediate past rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to produce economic and social confusion. To deal with the confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world’s government will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain.”
Brave New World, authors forward.
When we first enter Huxley’s proposed dystopian world, we find ourselves propelled some five hundred years into the future as Thomas, the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre leads a small group of sophomore students through an orientation of the main laboratory. As they meander through the sterile hallways, the students are introduced to the latest advancements in genetic reproduction. From the Fertilizing Room, they enter the Social Predestination Room, and finally, after arriving in the Bottling Room, Huxley’s brave new world comes into sobering view.
Along with the students, the reader is introduced to what is the end result of an eugenics program given the freedom to wander within the limitlessness of Man’s imagination. Scientists of the future now perform a perfected biological balancing act, sustaining society at a constant population by using “biologically superior ova, fertilized by biologically superior sperm”.
People are no longer born but created under specific conditions in test-tubes and stored in sterilized glass bottles, moved along through a systematic process. What we see, is a progressive technocratic society being stretched to its furthest extension.
A single embryo can now be divided ninety-six times to create uniform batches of identical sub-human servants. In a future according to Huxley, natural reproduction is far too slow and unpredictable – the gestation period no longer occurs in the mother’s womb but on a long-accelerated assembly line under the ever-watchful eye of a centralized omniscient government.
The use of terms like ‘mother’ or ‘father’ are now outlawed – considered socially taboo – and the ‘traditional family’ an unspeakable remnant from our savage past. People are pre-destined into a caste system, labelled either Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas or Epsilons and, thanks to superior genes and a regular rejuvenation process, no one ever grows old – at least that is what they want you to believe.
Following the invention of a hallucinogenic drug called soma, the experts have relieved society of all archaic human feelings of pain, jealousy, fear, misery and sadness, and deviation subdued by the instantaneous euphoria of taking a ‘soma’ holiday.
Far from the highly-regimented life of London exists a savage reservation in which the nearly extinct traditions of family, child birth, and religion continue, but only by a population of sub-human pueblo savages. In Huxley’s imagination this savage reservation, located in the deserted western United States, is a coveted vacation destination for Alphas.
Much like we travel to the continent of Africa today to witness big game animals in their natural habitat, Alphas travel to the savage reservation to witness humans in their most vulgar and uncivilized.
Only when a troubled employee of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre named Bernard Marx applies for a vacation to the savage reservation do we find out that his boss – the aforementioned Director Thomas, had at one time taken a ‘very pneumatic’ (sexually prolific) female Beta named Linda to the reservation. Thomas explains to Marx how he and Linda, while out on a sightseeing trek, became separated and despite a lengthy search in the days to follow, Linda was never found. Thomas, believing that she had died, returned to London alone.
After receiving a security pass, Marx and his Beta female guest Lenina finally arrive at the reservation, during their visit, they discover that Linda had not only lived through her ordeal but had given birth to Thomas’ son, John. Linda had long held out hope that one day she could return to London with John but was instead forced to raise her son on the reservation in complete squalor among the savages. Upon realizing who Linda and John were, Bernard agrees to bring them back to London as a way to advance his own status within London’s social hierarchy.
Upon their return to London, Thomas is reintroduced to Linda and is presented with his savage son. Thomas is so publicly humiliated (not for the immorality of leaving a defenseless, pregnant woman to die in the desert, but for the unspeakable act of fathering a naturally born, human child) that he is forced to resign from his position and is exiled to the island of Iceland forever. Having never seen a naturally born human before, Londoners are astounded by the novelty and the sensational news spreads quickly. Marx immediately becomes somewhat of a celebrity.
John quickly falls in love with Lenina, but, unaccustomed to the ways of London society, he is appalled at the way she and the rest of the population freely engage in multiple sexual encounters called orgy porgy’s. John also grows impatient with society’s incessant drug taking and their pursuit of painless existence through endless irrelevant, baseless distraction. Unfamiliar with the ways of this strange brave new world, John finally becomes disillusioned and in a fit of rage destroys a soma dispensary.
He pleads with the drug induced population to finally wake up, break from their trance, and see themselves as they truly are – conditioned slaves. But the citizens, unable to get their soma, soon become belligerent, overwhelm John and the situation quickly turns into a full-scale riot. Bernard and John’s friend Helmholtz Watson attempt to rescue John from the angry mob but the police arrive and quickly subdue the crowd by dispensing a vapourized soma into the air.
John the Savage, Bernard, and Helmholtz are all arrested for insubordination and brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe.
According to Huxley, our world could no longer afford a dissenting voice like Johns corrupting the minds of the domesticated citizens. Far too many strides had been made towards the Great Society to have it ruined by a single contrarian voice.
Even the Constitution and Bill of Rights, coveted as the last defense against tyranny, have been necessarily removed long ago from Huxley’s future perfect, classic liberal ideas of free will have been buried under a deluge of gratuity, hedonism, and instant gratification. The here and now being hard to distinguish from future fiction as Huxley’s society, focused on a pursuit of pleasure and an avoidance of pain, engage in meaningless sexual encounters, treating each other as a means to an end, and in doing so degrading the human experience to that of a contrived, disingenuous robot machine.
In our present day, both Huxley and his dystopian novel have been cast into a relatively obscure corner of public consciousness, his legacy buried underneath a pseudo environment he helped create. And there is good reason for this. Even a cursory look into Aldous Huxley reveals a completely different man from that portrayed in conventional mainstream circles. Huxley’s underlying motivations far from that of a simple public philosopher or best-selling author. And while one cannot argue that many of Huxley’s wild predictions have certainly come true – it must also be clearly stated that Brave New World is less the result of an over-active imagination and more the confessions of a high level social engineer revealing a grand strategy.
When one takes a closer look at the society Huxley depicted in Brave New World, we see indisputable similarities between its values and principles and those found in the early utopian and ethical socialist movement.
History shows that Huxley and his brother, Sir Julian Huxley were members of the infamous Fabian Society, the London School of Economics and the Eugenics Society, however the connections most relevant to this story are that of Aldous Huxley and his involvement with the CIA funded MKULTRA program.
Through the excellent research of forensic historian Jan Irvin at Logos Media, we have been availed an impressive collection of primary and secondary source material linking Huxley directly to projects initiated and funded by U.S intelligence. All of this even further corroborated in a later interview Irvin made public on September 14, 2013 with Albert Stubblebine in which the former commanding general of the U.S. Army intelligence and Security Command(SOCOM) admitted that Huxley was not only involved but was the director of the infamous MKULTRA programs(!)
Huxley’s direct affiliation with men like Timothy Leary, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Harold Abramson, Al Hubbard, Dr. Humphrey Osmond and Dr. Louis Jolyn West reads like a guest list to a MKULTRA reunion party and leave very little room for debate regarding Huxley’s direct involvement.
Timothy Leary’s CIA associations are legendary, even admitting that the CIA orchestrated the 60’s counterculture movement of which Leary was one of the most prominent figures (1). Leary even admits to his witting involvement during an interview with Walter Bowert, in Lords of the Revolution: Timothy Leary and the CIA;
I told Leary that, based on some of the documents I’d read, it seemed that he could have been just one of many scientist who’d been used without his knowledge by the CIA to conduct their mind control experiments.
“I’ve known this for ten years,” Leary said.
“You were witting of it?” I asked in surprise.
“Of course,” Leary said, leaning back in his chair with confidence.
…”I knew I was being used by the intelligence agents of this country.” (2)
Dr. Harold Abramson was chief of the allergy department at Mount Sinai Hospital and one of the CIA’s principle LSD researchers (3). He was directly linked to the alleged suicide of CIA employee Frank Olsen and a part-time consultant to the Army Chemical Corps. He also proposed to the CIA a study in which LSD would be given to unwitting hospital patients – something that the government initially denied but eventually had to admit under the weight of growing evidence and public scrutiny.
Al Hubbard, was high-level OSS during the Second World War and worked extensively with the CIA and FBI most notably being the LSD experiments that took place under the watchful eye of Dr. J Ross Maclean at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada.(4) Hubbard is also credited with administering Aldous Huxley with his first hit of acid.
Dr. Humphry Osmond was directly affiliated with the CIA while working out of Weyburn Saskatchewan. He had extensive written correspondence with Hubbard and Huxley(5), even visiting Huxley in California to personally administer a dose of mescaline in 1953 (6). Osmond and Huxley together are credited with inventing the word psychedelic.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West was also a contractor for MKULTRA sub project 43 and worked directly with the CIA on hypnosis and ESP (Anomolous Cognition) experiments.(7) In his letters, Huxley even mentioned “my friend Dr. J. West” , and suggested to West that he hypnotize his subjects prior to administering LSD in order to give them “post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction.”
So here we have documented proof of Huxley giving directions to MKULTRA doctors on how best to administer LSD-25 to patients. We know of Osmond and West’s undeniable involvement in MKULTRA and, at the very least, thanks to primary source material, we can now link Huxley acting as counsel, in a role similar to that admitted to by Stubblebine. You add to these facts that Huxley had similar personal relationships with Harold Abramson, Al ‘Captain Trips’ Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, Sidney Cohen, Humphry Osmond, and Harold Abramson, its hard to deny that Huxley wasn’t at the center of the action.
“I give the CIA total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement, counterculture events of the 1960’s….The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with this drug.” Timothy Leary interview (8)
Besides all of these connections, Huxley also worked closely with anthropologist and ethnologist, Gregory Bateson and hypnotist Milton Erickson while living in Palo Alto California. Bateson, a member of the OSS(CIA) who worked in the propaganda division and was also director of LSD studies at the Palo Alto Veterans Administrations Hospital – which just happens to be the same hospital in which Ken Kesey was a test subject just prior to him embarking on his Acid Tests with his chaos agent friends, the Merry Pranksters.
It was in 1937, that Huxley and his wife Maria moved from London to Los Angeles eventually making their way to Palo Alto, where he would live out the rest of his days. It is during this time that Aldous began working intimately with the contributors of the early Macy Conferences on cybernetics, where they studied the affects of positive and negative feedback loops on the human mind and where their goal was to secure similar social control to that depicted in Brave New World.
It is during his short time lecturing at MIT that Huxley and Osmond first connected with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert while the two were busy feeding acid to undergrad students across town at Harvard. Alpert, better known to the hippies as Ram Dass even contributed a video tribute to Huxley’s second wife at her funeral in 2008 (9)(10)
To the uninitiated, the MKULTRA programs were a series of at least one hundred and fifty Pentagon funded sub projects that began in the 1940’s and extended into at least the late 1960’s, officially. They were exposed for the administration of experimental drugs including thorazine, nembutal, curare, and the hallucinogenic LSD – 25 to unwitting civilians, prisoners, psychiatric patients and soldiers. It was also discovered through declassified CIA paperwork that these experiments took place at several universities across the United States and Canada, and one is of particular interest for this book review.
It was between the years 1957 and 1964 that infamous MKULTRA Subproject 68, under the direction of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and Sidney Gottlieb, had been conducting psychic ‘driving’ and behavioural modification experiments at McGill University in Montreal similar to what Huxley hypothesized in Brave New World.
Cameron also just happened to be the president of the American Psychopathological Association, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the World Psychological Associations while he was practicing on unsuspecting patients – which suggests some level of government culpability. Interesting to note that the very word government comes from the latin and means to control or steer the mind.(11)
Cameron’s infamous sleep hypnopaedia techniques were not only the exact type of techniques discussed by Huxley in Brave New World but Huxley was an integral figure in the administration of these highly unethical experiments in real life(!)
Cameron’s experiments went beyond the inhumane, often inducing comas that kept patients asleep for weeks even months at a time while implanting affirmations directly into the subconscious via prerecorded tape loops, and it was fully funded by the CIA. The heinous events at McGill under Cameron’s direction are no longer up for debate and are a matter of historically documented fact – victims even being publicly recognized and compensated by the Canadian government. Another interesting side note is that Cameron was originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Gregory Bateson
So I ask you dear reader, is it mere coincidence that Huxley, the author of Brave New World, the Perennial Philosophy, and Doors of Perception worked at the same hospital where Gregory Bateson, Milton Erickson and Ken Kesey were all experimenting with LSD and that hospital just a short walk from where Timothy Leary would first utter the phrase “Tune In, Turn on, and Drop Out!” – which in turn, sparked the very counter culture movement? Is it prophecy or coincidence that he wrote about our modern day scientifically governed society in the future tense?
Is it coincidence that a large section of his work is preserved in the Stanford Research Institute libraries and that the headquarters of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter rose to prominence in the very same small area some thirty years after Huxley’s death? Is it coincidence that he was only a short drive from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury – the alleged epicenter of the 60’s counterculture movement? I
Is it coincidence, that within a few short years of writing Brave New World, Huxley would find himself living in what many of these scientists called, the Los Angeles laboratory, at the precise time in which he could best fulfill even his most boldest ideas while associating with the very people that could best assist him in bringing his fictional tale to life?
And, is it coincidence that nearing one hundred years after it’s publication, we can clearly see a society half under Orwell’s totalitarian jack boot and half under the heavy sedation and pleasure depicted by Huxley in Brave New World?
For more please refer to two other articles: How Huxley Highjacked Hollywood, and The Exilliteratur.
As far as this author is concerned, when all information is considered, there are only two conclusions that can be made. Either all of these people worked together for years totally oblivious of each others connections to the intelligence community or they were witting, knowing participants. Many if not all in the outer circle were to varying degrees compartmentalized; however, for men like Huxley, Leary, Abramson, Hubbard, Osmond, West, Janiger, and Cohen, there is no escape – the evidence is damning.
And, when you take into consideration the evidence presented in my previous article entitled, Stanford Research Institute and The Changing Images of Man, we see Aldous cited several times and the entire study seams inspired by Huxley’s work. His brother Julian also cited, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead all had direct involvement, it becomes crystal clear that Huxley is far less an amazingly accurate prognosticator and far more likely the grand architect of an insidious plan to mould society into the caste system portrayed in Brave New World. Incredibly, after saying all of this, Huxley’s associations with the intelligence community only tell half of the story.
“[Huxley’s] psychedelic proselytization and his experience with the drug are inseparable from the intelligence community.” Dave Emory, America Free Radio(12)
Robert Gordon Wasson, vice president and head of Public Relations for JP Morgan was funded by the CIA to travel to Mexico to investigate mythical stories of a ‘magic mushroom’. Wasson successfully obtained specimens and returned them to the CIA and it is from this discovery that LSD was first synthesized. Wasson a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Club. He was close friends with Thomas W. Lamont, John Foster and Allen Dulles, Joseph Grew. Wasson and his assistant reportedly the first white men to ingest the magic mushroom and experience the rite of the curanderas. Wasson would later right a book of his experiences entitled of all things, Soma.
Whenever Huxley’s Brave New World is discussed one name inevitably will enter the conversation – George Orwell. But few know that Huxley actually taught Orwell, even sending Orwell a letter of congratulations following the release of 1984. Huxley and Orwell are seemingly forever entwined within the fabric of literary history, often compared and debated for their accuracy. But, when one looks at contemporary society, there seems to be a melding of the two. Where Orwell predicted a world ruled by the jack boot, Huxley envisioned a society placated into docility by drugs. Where Orwell foretold of a totalitarian government forcing history down the ‘memory hole’, Huxley depicted a docile society to which history was deemed unimportant, even revolting. Where Orwell pictured a society in which the truth was eliminated from view forever, Huxley depicted a scenario in which the truth was buried by a deluge of irrelevant information a la Merton and Lazarsfeld’s, Narcoticizing Dysfunction. From that same Princeton Radio Research Project funded by Rockefeller came the War of the World’s broadcast.
Where Orwell believed that society would be constrained within physical barriers, Huxley’s society would be kept in-line by trivial distractions. Where Orwell predicted that intimate human contact was only attempted at the risk of death, Huxley believed that human contact – especially of the sexual variety – was encouraged as ethical, moral and a sign of social stability – “everyone belonged to everyone else”. While Orwell’s society participated in ‘Two Minutes of Hate’, Huxley’s looked forward to ‘Community Sings’. Orwell’s society was entrenched in a never ending war while Huxley depicted a society without any war at all.
John the Savage is brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe to answer for his unacceptable behaviour earlier at the soma dispensary. Mond tries to pursuade John to acclimate to a society free of inconvenience but John refuses.
“But I like the inconvenience.”John says.
“We don’t,” said the controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right, then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,”
Above, Wasson with the curandera Eva Mendez. Below, Wasson with others, sorting through the mushrooms during the drying process.
Mond decides to send John to the outskirts of London where he can be free to live out his remaining years alone in an empty lighthouse overlooking the ocean. Now a sovereign citizen, he was free to catch his own food and to grow a garden. He was free to read whatever books he wished, free to feel the emotions of love, hate, fear and even misery.
He was free to feel all of the emotions of a truly free human being. However, the public was so infatuated by John the Savage that a constant crowd surrounded the lighthouse and their relentless interest so intense that John eventually succumbed to the scrutiny and kills himself by hanging.
What we see is the admonishment from society that Marxist authors Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno promoted in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (24) and the moral of Huxley’s story is clear, if you push back against the power of the State you will be banished, put into solitary confinement, labelled an ‘eccentric loner’, and ‘convicted of inadequacy’.
“Only a large-scale popular movement towards decentralization and self help can arrest the present tendency towards statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.”
Brave New World, author’s foreword.
And herein lies the solution. Huxley himself even admitting in the foreword to A Brave New World that the only thing potentially standing in the way was an awakening of the populace. And what do we see today taking place but that popular movement towards decentralization meant to arrest the present tendency towards statism.
Footnotes:
1. Leary interview https://www.winterwatch.net/2018/11/aldous-huxleys-philosophy-and-schemes-involving-psychedelic-drugs/
2. http://whale.to/b/bowart8.html
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson
4. Al Hubbard https://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/acid-al/
5. https://www.mqup.ca/psychedelic-prophets-products-9780773555068.php
6. Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. pg. 396. Nicholas Murray(2009).
7. https://archive.org/details/JolyonWest/page/n56
8. Leary interview https://www.winterwatch.net/2018/11/aldous-huxleys-philosophy-and-schemes-involving-psychedelic-drugs/
9. http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm
10. https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/tag/ginny-pfeiffer/
11. from the latin; gubernate: to steer or control. mentis ablative singular is mens; the mind, intellect, reasoning, judgement.
12. Dave Emory quote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL7BaNob7y8
13. The ruler no longer says: ‘Either you think as I do or you die.’ He says: ‘You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property – all that you shall keep. But from this day on you will be a stranger among us.’ Anyone who does not conform is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner. Disconnected from the mainstream, he is easily convicted of inadequacy. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno pg. 105