The Ultimate
Revolution
March 20, 1962
Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring
semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research
professor. Mr
Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study
of
Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the
development of new techniques by which to control and direct human
behavior.
Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the
application
of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation
of man's
physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the
cruder
techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about
which Mr.
Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral
controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of
man. That is
the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those
of us who
are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he
has been
concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation
of
approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by
the two
panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr.
Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara
was not directly
concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have
been two of
them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one
this year
which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable
discussion
on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general
and the
effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to
technological
transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been
very well
summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions
have essentially
aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I
mean there's been
the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the
reformation, the
religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being,
but at his
surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did
one remove
the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the
ultimate
revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body
of his
fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human
mind-bodies has been
going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a
violent nature. The
Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have
employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty,
sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error
finding out
what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various
kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can
do
everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control
any population
for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly
difficult
to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for
a fairly long time,
but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an
element of
getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now
faced is
precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of
techniques which
will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably
will
always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems
to me, the ultimate
in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has
interested me
many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World,
which is
an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the
devices
which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all,
to standardize
the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say,
mass
produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste
system. Since
then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have
noticed with
increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when
I made
them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And
there seems
to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution,
a method of
control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any
decent
standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well
this process is,
as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more
interested in
what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with
another
parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen
Eighty-
Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the
time when the
Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of
the Hitlerian
terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very
great talent and
extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the
immediate
past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was
a
projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by
terrorism
and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild
dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the
idea of
terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to
think about
these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined
to think
that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to
be scientific
dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer
to the brave
new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not
because of
any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW
pattern
is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're
living. The
state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and
being made
amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this,
then you
have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society.
Much more easily
controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and
firing squads
and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture
was tinged of
course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the
past and
present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is
going to happen,
needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its
way to the
surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and
more
concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be
more and
more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from
existing
realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate
revolution is not really
very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this
kind of
control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they
will first
be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the
techniques of
terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all
made some extremely
profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among
other
things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state
either of
psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the
mind-body of the
creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to
be embedded
more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People
did make use
of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical
intuitive
methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and
miss
craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I
think there is a
real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century.
We know
much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because
of
our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area
with a
greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in
Dr. William
(sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how
intuitively some of
the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method,
he speaks
specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially
based
on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking
about hellfire
and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly
releasing
this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter
of showing
how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural
psychologist,
as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's
no
doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was
possible in the
past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing,
both as applied to
prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in
China, we see
that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently
with
extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the
application of these
methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The
conditioning
has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into
the very
depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to
ever be rooted
out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of
terror
because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the
person who
is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a
kind of
voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he
has been
driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even
in the techniques
of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques,
non-terroristic
techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their
servitude. Here, I
don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of
them, but I
mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are
based on
recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected
with straight
suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past.
People of
course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the
word
'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I
think, a much
greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our
knowledge
in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For
example, one of the
things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean
this has
always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to
their
suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical
structure of a
population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you
look at the
findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of
administering
placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of
drowsiness or light
sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping
up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the
number of
people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility
(snaps),
just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end
of the
scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in
between lies a
large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that
they can
gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and
in the same
way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the
administration
of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general
hospital in Boston
on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering
comparable
kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections
whenever
they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of
the time
were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who
went
through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the
distilled
waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled
water, and in-
between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to
what in
BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a
man who
manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part
of sleep, I
mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd
laughs), for
confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting
that these are
records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15%
and 20%
of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he
sends the
money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who
write
enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better
(laughter)
etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of
these records.
And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have
to have letters
written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you
will get there, and
they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the
human populations
can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect
very strongly
that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also
that it would not
be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are
extremely
suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who
occupy
the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely
unsuggestible
organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely
suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean
it's very fortunate
that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who
therefore
preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be
formed. But, once
given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it
becomes quite
clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any
demagogue
who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people
and to
organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any
country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example
in recent years by
what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form
of Hitler.
Anyone who has read, for example, (Sounds like Bulloch's) Life of Hitler, comes
forth
with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood
human
weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all
the
resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew
intuitively
this pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue
goes much
deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why
all his big
speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in
Mein Kampf,
this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less
capable of
resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his
techniques he was
using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the
weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much
more
clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this
susceptibility to hypnosis I
do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to
any kind of
thought about democratic government . If there are 20% of the people who
really can be
suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely
careful steps
into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme
positions then
organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may
overthrow the
government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more
than we did
in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the
demagogues
voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler
was
making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people
simultaneously.
This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient
demagogue.
The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could
reach by
yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions
at a time,
and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of
hallucinatory
effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank
heaven, as yet
have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example,
the
pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW.
I invented a
hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood
there because
it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems
unlikely in
one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different
substances you could get
almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the
new
chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back
into
history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing
chemicals, he
has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the
most
extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant,
sedative, or
hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don't think there is
one single
one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has
discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of
these
drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances
of
extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was
made by
primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for
example, in the
underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in
Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were
already
using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the
days of
the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict
before he was a
farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the
traditional mind-
changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the
new ones
are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely
harmless, as
people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones,
such as
opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed.
They rapidly
produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical
degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number
of these
new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental
side
of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You
can have an
enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized
drug
psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom.
You can have
this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you
would
get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary
effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new
wonder
drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new
edition of
medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic
diseases,
that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true,
many of the
wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce
extraordinary effects,
and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be
used with the
utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting
the CNS which
can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole
mental
process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents
to me
the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these
substances in one kind
or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the
result would
be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in
the
most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean
after all this is
even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago
remarked after
reading Milton's Paradise Lost, He Says "And beer does more than Milton
can to justify
God's ways to man" (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely
crude drug
compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the
psychic energizers
and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the
Theologicians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our
existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an
enormous area in
which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which
a great
deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem
much more
enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said
before, Human
beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human
standard
they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments
in the
sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain.
This of course has
been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the
cases of the
hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with
electrodes
placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most
extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a
hold of by a
dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at
UCLA there were
two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the
technique
was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for
a short
space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which
stimulated
the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were
pressing the
bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from
pressing the bar for
a day, they'd press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they
fell down in
complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in
the
opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted
halfway
between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of
mixture of the most
wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you
would see the
rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying "To be or not to be that
is the question".
(Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back
with this awful I
mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait
some
time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again.
This was the
extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there's a very
interesting article
on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious,
where you
sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can
then be
screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment
according
to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you're stimulating and
these
creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they're fitted with a miniature
radio receiver
which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be
communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and
you
could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the
electrode has been
screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic
phenomena, where a
sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would
suddenly sit
down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she's hatching out
an egg, or a
fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in
the few cases
in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently
very
remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the
most
eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that
he's seen
hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people
were
suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes
inserted into the
pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just
pressed a button
on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the
mouth pointing
down would suddenly turn up and they'd feel very cheerful and happy. So
there again
one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now
available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these
techniques are
not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for
us to realize
what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened,
and
then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the
sort of things
that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful
techniques were
used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort
of
society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back
over history
we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has
profoundly
changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems
to me that it
was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were
making
possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see
what was
happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful
consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country
for
sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a
certain
amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if
people had
first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to
see what
might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst
applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western
humanity
might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been
imposed
on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to
think
about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may
arise
with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate
revolution. Our
business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination
to see what
might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the
enormous
powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological
advances to be
used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation.
Thank You
{Applause}