Aldous Huxley is one of the most important writers in modern history. His novel Brave New World is one of the most eye-opening warnings about the dangers of growing government power and the rise of technocracy ever written. The powerful and widely applicable insights contained in the novel have conferred an almost prophetic status upon Huxley among modern readers. Along with George Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World has become one of the essential books to read if one wants to understand the methods by which those in power corrupt society and exert total power over humanity. But it isn’t the only thing Huxley wrote. In addition to nearly fifty novels, Huxley wrote hundreds of essays in which his insights into the nature of government and the dangers of the State are presented even more incisively and clearly than in his novels.
In this article, I cite many of Huxley’s insights from but one of his lesser known books, Ends And Means : An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed For Their Realization (here after Ends and Means) in order to reveal the depth of his understanding of the true nature of modern governments, the dangers they present to humanity, the inevitability of authoritarianism if things do not change, methods by which the masses are dominated by the few, and ultimately the means by which we can break free of the flaxen cords and biting chains of control placed upon us by those in power in order to establish a truly free, truly prosperous, and truly meaningful society.
The Means of Control
Why do people obey those in power? Why do political parties rail against their opponents and then continue the same evils when they obtain power? Why do the masses go along with it? In Ends and Means, Huxley explains:
The ruled obey their rulers because, in addition to all the other reasons, they accept as true some metaphysical or theological system which teaches that the state ought to be obeyed and is intrinsically worthy of obedience. Rulers are seldom content with the brute facts of power and satisfied ambition; they aspire to rule de jure as well as de facto. The rights of violence and cunning are not enough for them. To strengthen their position in relation to the ruled and at the same time to satisfy their own uneasy cravings for ethical justification, they try to show that they rule by right divine. Most theories of the state are merely intellectual devices invented by philosophers for the purpose of proving that the people who actually wield power are precisely the people who ought to wield it. Some few theories are fabricated by revolutionary thinkers. These last are concerned to prove that the people at the head of their favourite political party are precisely the people who ought to wield power – to wield it just as ruthlessly as the tyrants in office at the moment.
Ends And Means pgs. 57-58
People do not obey those in power because of their grand intelligence or inspiring morality. People obey those in power because the people have been indoctrinated into ideologies of subservience, taught to think and act as servile beings obedient to those in power. This indoctrination takes many forms in society in many places – from education, to public statues, to political parties, are but a few examples. The outcomes are all the same – the get us to love and obey those in power. This is why we are so inundated with the need to protect the “sacred” right to vote and constantly hear about our “sacred democracy.” When we worship the means by which those who gain power justify it then we worship that which those means create – the government itself – and deify those in government offices.
Of course, none of this is actually about protecting human rights. The whole ritual system of political parties and voting is about constructing the means by which those in power manufacture your consent to their actions, no matter how horrific, how destructive, and how evil those actions. And until we actively refuse to accept their lies, break their conditioning, and look for different ways then nothing will change. We will merely exchange one tyrant for another and then pat ourselves on the back about how “free” we are while wearing more and more chains. This will never occur in public schools nor among those influenced by said schools because, as Huxley explains, they have been indoctrinated to the point of making it impossible for them to actually question the existence of the system itself or its “right” to rule over them:
In order to create the proper contexts for economic reform we must change our machinery of government, our methods of public administration and industrial organization, our system of education and our metaphysical and ethical beliefs. With education and beliefs I shall deal in a later section of this book. Our concern here is with government and the administration of public and industrial affairs. In reality, of course, these various topics are inseparable parts of a single whole. Existing methods of government and existing systems of industrial organization are not likely to be changed except by people who have been educated to wish to change them. Conversely, it is unlikely that governments composed as they are to-day will change the existing system of education in such a way that there will be a demand for a complete overhaul of governmental methods.
Ends And Means pg. 59
It doesn’t matter if you’re an anarchist, a libertarian, a Leftist, a Rightist, a “Progressive,” a “Conservative,” a free market Capitalist, a Socialist, etc., because everyone recognizes the power of the state to manipulate and mold the minds of those in the public school system, to totally transform their worldview, to inculcate into them the assumptions that your beliefs are fundamentally correct while all others are wrong, and to thereby dominate the direction of society for generations to come. After all, the Progressive Movement came to power first by taking over the universities and then indoctrinating the following generations into their worldview as the default morally and intellectually correct one. It is why politicians today fight so much over who has control over schools, what they teach, and what books can be found in their libraries. We all recognize the power we have to generate more members of their parties and political movements through the indoctrination that takes place in the school system.
This is why, as Huxley points out, you will never see meaningful change come from politicians. The goals of those in government positions are centered on maintaining and extending their power. They will never produce masses of children indoctrinated in ideologies that challenge the authority and power of the government because that goes against the core goals of those in power. Instead, public schools (and those schools led by people indoctrinated in public schools) will always bend all their will towards trying to legitimize and defend the system of power and political domination that exists. Schools will never prepare people for freedom and liberty because those are antithetical to the purposes of the state.
The Threat to True Democracy
Perhaps the deepest irony of this system, as Huxley points out, is that the very modern statist (“state-ist”) system that idolizes democracy and voting as sacred only functions by methodically destroying the true essences of democracy:
The political road to a better society is, I repeat, the road of decentralization and responsible self-government. But in present circumstances it is extremely improbable that any civilized nation will take that road. It is extremely improbable for a simple reason which I have stated before and which ] make no excuse for repeating. No society which is preparing for war can afford to be anything but highly centralized. Unity of command is essential, not only after the outbreak of hostilities, but also (in the circumstances of contemporary life) before. A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive. (Hence the absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.)
Ends And Means pgs. 64-65
The heart of democracy is self-government, the ability of the people to act as individuals and choose how they will live free of government laws regulating their choices. Therefore the foundation of democracy is decentralization, the breaking down of government power such that no one group or organization maintains a monopoly of force and control over the others. Only when both of these are present can any democracy function because it is only when these are present that individuals have the ability to make meaningful choices about how he or she will live and then to enact those choices in his or her life. Without decentralization and self-government you may have democracy in the form of voting but it is a meaningless thing, its soul having been ripped out of it and the leftover husk hollowed out to be used as a prop for those in power to continue to aggrandize themselves at the cost of the human rights and humanity of individuals and the masses.
Both decentralization and self-government are destroyed by the necessities of war. War requires a highly specialized and centralized bureaucracy with one person in charge at the top of the pyramid to make final decisions and give marching orders. Paying for war requires an extensive taxing bureaucracy that regulates trade and every aspect of economic life in order to extort as much wealth from the masses as possible. War requires a society raised and indoctrinated into war, into obedience to those who control the military and inculcated with a desire to sacrifice themselves and their children in the name of the country, a society taught through the public school system to embrace, valorize, and love human sacrifice in the name of the state. The necessities of war require a society that treats decentralization as evil and self-government as foolish, that lionizes the growth of government power, that idolizes politicians as heroes and saviors who will fix the nation’s problems, where people are trained to have a servile mind as they obey the experts and those in power even as their decisions are destroying society itself.
On the results of this centralization of obedience to those in power, Huxley writes:
So long as civilized countries continue to prepare for war, it is enormously improbable that any of them will pursue a policy of decentralization and the extension of the principle of self-government. On the contrary, power will tend to become more narrowly concentrated than at present, not only in the totalitarian states, but also in the democratic countries, which will therefore tend to become less and less democratic. Indeed, the movement away from democratic forms of government and towards centralization of authority and military tyranny is already under way in the democratic countries.
[He then describes the military build up happening in multiple European countries before World War II.]
… An increase in the amount of a country’s armaments implies a corresponding increase in the degree of its militarization. The fire-eaters of the Left who, for the last two years, have been calling for a ‘firm stand’ (i.e. military action) on the part of the democratic countries against Fascist aggression have in effect been calling for an acceleration of the process by which the democratic countries are gradually, but systematically, being transformed into the likeness of those Fascist states they so much detest.
Ends And Means pgs. 65-66
True democracies, in order to survive and wage war, must become tyrannies in all but name. None of this means that such societies will get rid of the forms or language of true democracy. Rather that language and those forms will be co-opted to serve the needs of the tyrannical state. For example, more people in the United States can vote now than ever before. We are constantly told voting is about protecting our liberty. But this is obvious nonsense. It doesn’t matter how many people you have on the ticket, whether it is one or one million. If the end result of the process is the investment of a person into a position of power and authority where he or she, either acting singularly or as part of the whole, can violate the life, liberty, and property of individuals and the masses with near or complete impunity then all you’ve done is inaugurate tyranny. That you voted for your new autocrat is irrelevant. To quote the inestimable Lysander Spooner:
Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the men holding this absolute, irresponsible power, must be chosen by the people (or portions of them) to hold it. A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and Irresponsible.
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, pg. 24
To prepare for war is to destroy democracy. Which is why, as Huxley so astutely argued, no nation which participates in warfare, or even prepares to do so, can be democratic. It will always become tyrannical. Which is why the so-called “Western democracies” are in reality anything but and why so many of them had no problem being openly tyrannical and imprisoning hundreds of millions in their homes even as it starved hundreds of thousands of children to death and drove many more to destruction, poverty, and suicide. They didn’t become tyrannical, they are tyrants. The mask simply slipped. It is also why so many cheered their tyranny openly. Because in all these nations true democracy is and has been dead for decades if not longer. They are Fascist in all but name and their people have been long indoctrinated into Fascism using the language of freedom to hide what is really happening and to make it palatable and delightful to those being taught to embrace it.
The Manipulation of Thought Through Language
Huxley said this on the subject of the way that language is used by governments:
Every dictatorship has its own private jargon. The vocabularies are different; but the purpose which they serve is in all cases the same—to legitimate the local despotism, to make a de facto government appear to be a government by divine right. Such jargons are instruments of tyranny as indispensable as police spies and a press censorship. They provide a set of terms in which the maddest policies can be rationalized and the most monstrous crimes abundantly justified. They serve as moulds for a whole people’s thoughts and feelings and desires. By means of them the oppressed can be persuaded, not only to tolerate, but actually to worship their insane and criminal oppressors.
Ends And Means pg. 66
Where you live may dictate how those in power manipulate language to manipulate your mind and manufacture your consent or at least your submission to them, their system, and their actions. But the purpose and outcomes are the same. In the United States everything is wrapped in words like “freedom, “liberty,” “equality,” “rights,” and “justice.” Like democracy itself these terms are hollowed out, all of their true meaning emptied out and thrown away with the refuse. In place are zombie terms that mean nothing and therefore can be used in any argument as emotionally triggering buzzwords which you can use to “win” and argument and to justify any action.
This is why people affirm their “right” to murder babies and accuse you of being a tyrant when you point out that by no definition of right can one justify taking the individual right to life away from another defenseless human being. This is why the same people who endlessly talk about the right of people to live their lives free of control form “bog government” had no problem lining up behind to support (and many of whom continue to support) a President who turned the entire nation into a prison (to increase his reelection chances!) and used the military against civilians. Because those terms have no meaning. They’re just jargon used by those in power to manipulate the minds and emotions of the masses and make them easier to control.
Be aware of how the government of your country does the same in order to control you.
The Illusion of Correctness
If you’ve ever even thought out loud to another person that maybe there was another way for governments to function than extorting money form the public through the threat of kidnapping, imprisonment, and even death – i.e. some other way than taxation – you’ve probably been confronted with people dismissing you as an absolute buffoon, sometimes through long winded diatribes that sound intelligent to those ignorant of the actual topic at hand. Why is it that people automatically assume that because the government regulates education that this is the best way for educating the public to occur or that the education received is a good one? Why do they assume that the broken nature of healthcare, one of the most highly regulated parts of the society with nearly every aspect of it governed by some law, is due to too much freedom and not too much government? Why is the assumption that mega corporations which get billions of dollars in tax funds from the government getting away with poisoning the environment due to too little regulation and not too much government power which protects those corporations from being held accountable?
Why is it the assumption that the government is always right and anything else is always wrong? Huxley provides us the answer:
The prevalence of centralization in the contemporary world creates a popular belief that centralization is not what in fact it is—a great evil, imposed upon the world by the threat of war and avoidable only with difficulty and at the price of enormous effort and considerable sacrifices—but intrinsically sound policy. Because in fact political power is being more and more closely concentrated, people have come to be persuaded that the way to desirable change lies through the concentration of power. Centralization is the order of the day; the Zeitgeist commands it; therefore, they argue, centralization must be right. They forget that the Zeitgeist is just as likely to be a spirit of evil as a spirit of good and that the fact that something happens to exist is in no way a guarantee that it ought to exist.
…For ever-increasing numbers of men and women, ‘historicalness’ is coming to be accepted as one of the supreme values. This implicit identification of what ought to be with what is effectively vitiates all thinking about morals, about politics, about progress, about social reform, even about art. In those who make the identification it induces a kind of busy, Panglossian fatalism. Looking out upon the world, they observe that circumstances seem to be conspiring to drive men in a certain direction. This movement is ‘historical,’ therefore possesses value—exists and therefore ought to exist. They accept what is. Indeed, they do much more than accept; they applaud, they give testimonials. If the real is the rational and the right, then it follows that a ‘historical’ action must have the same results as an action dictated by reason and the loftiest idealism.
Ends And Means pgs. 64-68
People assume that state regulation is the answer to the problems of the world because they see regulation and centralization taking place. The world has problems, centralization is taking place, centralization promises to fix those problems, therefore centralization must be good and must be supported against any critics. When you combine this tendency in human thought with the way those in power warp language to hide the exact nature of their actions – hiding growing authoritarianism under the mask of calling it “democracy” for example – and the indoctrination into believing that the only solution to society’s problems is through increasing government power (and the myth that this has worked in the past) that most receive in schools, it suddenly becomes quite clear why so many embrace authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The miracle is that any of us escape such a well laid mental trap.
What Huxley was working his way towards here and in the previous section on language that I quoted is what today is called the illusory truth effect. In the study Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, Drs. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino tested how the frequency of our exposure to a specific bit of information effected our belief in its validity. They wanted to test if humans where more or less likely to believe something is true based on how often they were exposed to it the and being asked to determine if the information was true or false. Their study concludes:
The present research has demonstrated that the repetition of a plausible statement increases a person’s belief in the referential validity or truth of that statement. …In the present experiments, the subjects’ judgments that repeated statements were more probably true than non-repeated statements occurred in a situation in which there was no verifying information available concerning the actual truth or falsity of the statements. Frequency, then, must have served as a criterion of certitude for our subjects. Indeed, the present experiment appears to lend empirical support to the idea that “if people are told something often enough, they’ll believe it” In particular, it should be noted that the increase in validity ratings with repetition was equivalent for true and for false statements, despite the fact that subjects succeeded in discriminating between them. Furthermore, the increase in validity ratings occurred for an extremely diverse set of statements, which suggest that the effect of frequency upon the rated validity of statements is a general rather than a context specific phenomenon.
Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, pgs. 111- 112
The consequences for this study on our understanding on human belief and knowledge is essential to understand. The more you repeat something, the more you have a piece of information repeated to you, the more you assert a belief in it, even if only temporarily, the more you come to believe it is true even if it contradicts something you knew as a fact before being exposed to the repetition. Eventually, even quickly, it becomes part of your schema and you become convinced that it is true and tend to exclude or even forget information that would contradict what you already “know” to be fact. This is the illusory truth effect and it explains the psychological processes that occur when people assume that what they see happening regularly must be true or good, not because it is but because of the way that regularly seeing and hearing something wires our brains to automatically assume it is true. From their our own confirmation biases reinforce these beliefs as we consciously and subconsciously seek to support what we already believe from challenge.
The Way Forward and Upward
Huxley clearly understood what the ultimate goal of all these efforts were:
It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act. …The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
…The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past, free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work — with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
Brave New World Revisited
The goal of the State, of those in power is to create a prison in your mind. If you’re indoctrinated deep enough, early enough, with the most advanced techniques at hand, it may very well be possible to ingrain in you a love of your servitude that it creates within you a servile mind, one trained to love to obey those in power. This abyssal goal is the loftiest dream of those in power. Sure, they disguise it with words like “loyalty,” “duty to country,” “patriotism,” and so forth, but it all amounts to the same thing – you loving your servile position to those in power and doing what you are told.
So what can be done? Is all lost? Is creeping totalitarianism and inevitable autocracy all there is? No! Huxley actually gives us a throughline of hope, a way forward for those in society who wish to truly make things better for all involved so that we can avoid this dreaded future:
A militarily efficient society is one whose members have been brought up in habits of passive obedience and at the head of which there is an individual exercising absolute authority through a perfectly trained hierarchy of administrators. In time of war, such a society can be manipulated as a single unit and with extraordinary rapidity and precision. A society composed of men and women habituated to working in self-governing groups is not a perfect war-machine. Its members may think and have wills of their own. But soldiers must not think nor have wills. ‘Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.’ Furthermore, a society in which authority is decentralized, a society composed of coordinated but self-governing parts, cannot be manipulated so swiftly and certainly as a totalitarian society under a dictator. Self-government all round is not compatible with military efficiency. So long as nations persist in using war as an instrument of policy, military efficiency will be prized above all else. Therefore schemes for extending the principle of self-government will either not be tried at all or, if tried, as in Russia, will be speedily abandoned. Inevitably, we find ourselves confronted, yet once more, by the central evil of our time, the overpowering and increasing evil of war.
Ends And Means pg. 84
As long as nations prepare for and take place in warfare then they will always be doomed to fall into autocracy. This has been the taproot of the growth of the Imperial Presidency in the United States alongside the development of the militant national-security state as a by-product. The only way forward, the only way to regain our liberties and protect our humanity (and the humanity of all the world) is to reject any and all militarism, all preparations for war, and every justification for international slaughter. We must renounce war an proclaim peace. Furthermore, we must decentralize everything, as much as possible as soon as possible. Only when true self-government is restored, when people have the ability to decide for themselves how they will live and what they will spend their wealth upon without the threat of government punishment or violence, can we begin to build an authentically better world. Only then will we have true democracy. Only then will we be able to maximize liberty, peace, and prosperity for all.
Any all steps towards those goals – the total renunciation of war and total decentralization – are worthy steps towards a better society. Not a perfect society, for perfection cannot be built by imperfect people. We are not foolish utopians like those who believe that giving one person or a group of people the power to use violence to force others to obey or suffer will somehow create a better world instead of just magnify all the evils of humanity even more. No, not a perfect world. But a better one. Anything we can do, we should do now. Whether it be great or small, every act of defiance, every act of reclaiming our lost liberty, our stolen humanity, of throwing off the rule of tyranny, we must do now.
As Jefferson wrote, it is not merely our right to rid ourselves of authoritarian governments. It is our duty. Our duty to our ancestors who lived in hope for a better tomorrow for their descendants. Our duty to ourselves to do all we can to improve the world. Our duty to our children and children’s children and all those yet unborn, to provide for them greater Safety, Happiness, Prosperity, and Liberty than any has ever known before. The longer we wait, the longer we extend our own suffering and the oppression and dehumanization of others.
Peace and Liberty stand ready for all those who will but reach out and take them.
Carpe Libertatum!
Love this article!