Amusing Ourselves to Death Tuesday, Jul 27 2010
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell… who was right?
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Kill your TV!!! Chop mickey mouse’s head off!! Don’t you see he’s controlling your braaaaaaaaiiiiiin???!!?!
But seriously, what exactly did people used to do with their spare time that was so important to the foundation of a free society? If memory serves me, they just got drunk all the time.
I completely agree with that assertion. I am glad you said it.
You’re not wrong. The point is that we’re creating spare time where it should be useful.
I think, before radio, they mused to sit around and play music together. Read books. You know, self improving type things… well except in America where they used to have sex with animals and drink, ahhhh, the “wild west” ;-)
Candycane is to some extent right, the gutter press and streams of mindless distraction have always been with us.In many ways the average worker is more informed and engaged than they were in 1900, when the only meaningful outlet would be something like trade unionism.
However, it may be that the middle class has had a trivialisation of culture to some extent. Where public lectures, learning of musical instruments or technical topics, and discussion of important political issues used to be of importance among the lower ranks of professionals, now there is a certain dumbing down of public discourse, made worse by the massive growth in this demographic.
I can’t honestly say, though, that twitter commentary is worse than any offhand remark at a dinner gathering, or that the Political commentary of Assassins Creed 2 is worse than the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan. We must remember that to a great extent only the very best works of the previous decades survive.
The belief that the things that entertain us will lead to our destruction is basically misanthropy in a fancy hat.
The idea that the observer knows far more about what’s good for society than the “stupid,” “deluded,” or “unenlightened” masses themselves is basically the seed of tyranny itself. I’ve never read Brave New World, but if this really is Huxley’s conclusion, then he favors tyranny. Orwell hated people like that. So do I.
That which brings mankind joy will never be its downfall. Those who despise mankind for their worldly pleasures have historically been enemies of freedom.
I’m not sure I understand where you’re coming from, Ryan. You’re saying nothing people enjoy could ever be harmful?
“That which brings mankind joy will never be its downfall.”
You can’t be serious. What mankind are you living in?
You’ve obviously never lived in a Casino town. Or watched a friend flunk out of college because he partied instead of studied. Or seen a teenage pregnancy wreck her life and her family’s life. Or known people who took to crime to support their drug habit.
Naive hedonist is naive. Equating joy to entertainment is … sad.
hey now that ive got your attention
(softer) hey… he said man, teenage pregnancy is not a factor muhuhahaha >:D
Remember the Roman Empire and the Colosseum and the gladiator games?
Anything that dumbs down people is bad, whether it is pain or pleasure.
Yeah dude, I hear you! I invested in these things that only sorta kinda existed and I was totally ROLLING in dough! And then I wa—OHSHI-
“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In defense of Ryan’s aphorism. There is a difference between man and mankind. Drink may be the downfall of a man, but it will not be the downfall of mankind. Nor will gambling, drugs, television, the internet, etc.
Have you never heard of heroin? Or alcohol?
Yes, once or twice
Unfortunately both were right: In USA/EU we have fascist surveillance society which is hidden beneath overflowing amounts of entertainment.
Why settle on one worst case scenario when obviously both are true?
As the Aussies say: TOO RIGHT!
If one could quit allowing the negativity to over power and cloud their thoughts and focus on a solution instead of what is perhaps we could advance our civilization.
[...] Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. Cartoon comparison of Huxley and [...]
@Candycane Man;
Great observation. Read this well-documented opinion by Clay Shirky. http://bit.ly/3vYPt9
One thing that isn’t mentioned above – people today have more free time than ever before. What do people do with their free time? They seek out distractions. What are we going to do when all of our time – thousands and thousands of post-human years – is basically free time?
Also, the idea that the masses are somehow more ignorant today than they were hundreds of years ago doesn’t really hold water.
Excuse me, but what PLANET do you live one where modern humans have ‘more spare time than ever before’? Your ancestors from before the industrial revolution would laugh at such a notion.
We must be kept distracted, kept in line, yes, but most of all, we must be kept WORKING ourselves to death, running our bodies and minds into the ground until the very wheels fall off. This is why the average wage has been dropping, not rising, and why places like the US have no universal health care – you aren’t educating yourself, or organizing, or what have you, so long as you’re working fingers to the bone from dawn ’til dusk just trying to survive. A TV or a car is not ‘quality of life’.
Of course, if we use slave labor to put cheap iPhones in the pockets of such people, and give them all manner of cheap toys and trinkets, then they’ll come up on the internet making claims about how great it is to be alive in this time, about how much ‘spare time’ they have. I think both Huxley and Orwell would be going ‘SEE??!!’ right now.
I agree with what you are saying Mettaya, in most respects.
However, “supposedly” back in the beginning of the industrial revolution starting in America, people worked 12 – 14 hours a day, now they work 8.
In an ideal situation, we would work 8 hours a day. But last I checked, single mothers, poor families and people too poor or uneducated to work in well paying jobs will not be able to live off of just that. That’s why they work in multiple jobs almost 16 hours a day. Plus, what free time the middle class has is spent worrying about bills and mortgages, insurance, etc. Here in Connecticut, the state gov’t has said that to rent a small apartment with a kitchen, bedroom and living room; with electricity and water, plus furniture and food for the week would require one to work 8 hours a day every day of the week with a salary of $20 an hour. If you’re working minimum wage, you’d have to work at least 16-18 hours a day every day to make that much.
I don’t think it was that bad in the Industrial Revolution.
it was pretty bad or thats what ive heard ..from history. really its funny how thinks that make our lives simpler actually make them more complicated so we never really improve. really this whole argument is silly since there is no such thing as free time. Your always doing something.
There are mistakes to be made in either direction. Authority and community need each other to survive.
I figure the culture will lurch back into a more authoritarian mode sometime in the next 50 years. People have been killing themselves and each other for as long as there have been people. Today we just do it on a far grander scale.
Where have you been? Like we don’t live in an authoritarian country right now? Yeah, we don’t have a fascist system which forces us to act the same way but we’ve given up a ton of freedom and nearly all our privacy. Examples:
the new TSA screening policy,
the PATRIOT ACT,
our propaganda filled garbage media which doesn’t report anything. Seriously, if you turn on Al-Jazeera/Russia Today/PressTV for 30 seconds and compared it to CNN/MSNBC/FOX, you will feel like you’re watching news from different planets,
Guantanamo Bay/issuing CIA kill orders on US citizens/imprisoning whistleblowers indefinitely without trial,
the list goes on…
Good question from Arnie. My thought is that when all of our time is free time, distractions will cease to exist.
Actually, Kurt Vonnegut was right — check out the book Player Piano. The smartest people have their ideas productized by capitalists and built by robots while everybody else slums along in effective serfdom. (See also: http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-ou%20t-here%27s-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html)
Beyond that, one point that Orwell was right about is that the continued focus on increasing worker productivity necessitates the destruction of wealth in order to allow productivity to be consumed, even if it isn’t effectively utilized. For as much as I didn’t like 1984 (it wasn’t that well written and taught even worse), chapter 9 (iirc) was astonishingly lucid in the limits of economics.
Beyond that, Huxley was right in that control of an empire relies more on bread and circuses to distract the masses than on military might to oppress them. (Though even Orwell had some of that with the continual orchestrated anger against The Other; it’s just difficult to maintain is all.)
In the words of Frank Zappa:
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
(“The Slime In the Video”)
[...] imagens ora divulgadas apareceram originariamente no blog Accelarenting Future e o autor utiliza como título o nome de uma obra de Neill Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death, [...]
[...] via Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. [...]
I would propose that there currently exist a third reality: a combination of the two scenarios described in the comics. An authoritarian state which restricts materials that are hazardous to the state’s health, but also encourages huge debt taking/mindless consumption that zombifies the majority of the population.
Case in point: US. It restricts information that would undermine its authority as the world’s dominant power, such as BP spill, bankruptcy of its banks/cities/states, ineffectiveness at resolution in afghanistan, etc. The government offers discounts/low rates for large home mortgages, expensive cars, and big student loans that would shackle the majority of the population in debt chains. It also condones mindless consumption such as reality TV, sports, celebrity news, and facebook games by not taxing them as addictive hazards.
Case in point: China. It restricts, well, pretty much anything it doesn’t want the people to know with the great internet firewall and state news programs. It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income. It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don’t realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads.
I further propose that this will continue as long as these governments worldwide can keep feeding its citizens at a minimum (food stamps, unemployment benefits, carb/sugar loaded cheap food), while offering cheap, mind-numbing entertainments to keep people at home, so they don’t go out and riot on the streets.
Until oil is at $150/Iran is attacked/North Korea attacks/US defaults on SS and medicare/Japan defaults on its bonds/food prices double/Israel is attacked/automation renders most of population useless, anyways.
My thoughts exactly. Thank you for posting this.
You consider sports addictive hazards? Someone was picked last in gym class…
I concur: Pretty much spot-on!
I think u did a thorough analysis concern with the currently peculiar circumstances existing in chinese society.Bejing never stop its attempt to divert public attention through strengthening tertiary industry and clamouring for economic development since 1989 turmoil.There is a intangible veil between truth and silent which has muzzled expression for a long period of time.
Nice article on disconnecting distraction: http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html somewhat related to this topic
Well, it is interesting to see things only as black or white, literally in the case of this comic.
Perhaps they both had legitimate concerns, and one can be right without the other being wrong?
What’s ironic, that that all this is just an intellectual talk without any action. Maybe some of you are “doing” something to change the situation, it is nearly irrelevant without having leverages..
Proof that Huxley was right: This blog.
Not all dystopias are equal. If I was limited to choosing only between the two of them, the “brave new world” scenario is far preferable to the “1984″ one.
i dont know man…victory coffee seemed pretty best.
To be honest, I fail to see why this “brave new world” as presented in this comic strip is even a problem. As long as the freedom and tools (computer based engineering, DIY biology) are available to those who do want to accomplish “great things” (cure aging, fusion power, space colonization), I fail to see what the problem is with the rest of humanity just wanting to party all the time.
Perhaps the real fear of the “brave new world” scenario is that all of those party people may turn into the “marching morons” problem.
I, for one, am perfectly comfortable with a world consisting of transhumanists and party people.
But you said it: Many if not most “party people” (as that is meant as contentually-implied, anyway) R (more-or-less) Marching Morons!
[...] this an invitation to do so. Stuart McMillen’s cartoon provides a superlative window (h/t Michael Anissimov) into the central theme of Neil Postman’s classic [...]
[...] Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. [...]
I glanced at the headline and looked at the nice comic strip pictures, but Entertainment Tonight is coming on soon so I didn’t bother to read any of the text or comments. Nevertheless, I’m sure this is important, and that everyone made very cogent points. I’ll just leave it to you guys to figure out who was right. I’ll go along with what everyone thinks.
I agree with 4. Thomas, both where right.
[...] via acceleratingfuture.com Comments RSS feed [...]
[...] a Brave New Reality Jump to Comments I think this is a pretty interesting little editorial cartoon about how the future was envisioned by both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Orwell’s paradigm [...]
rofl. that is funny.. but at least in Huxley’s reality we have the option of not being totally distracted…
You can go live on a farm in the middle of nowhere…
You can go back-packing for 3 months…
and so on and so forth. :)
I think we have to consider that Orwell inoculated us against the future he feared.
i think this has missed the vital metaphoric subtleties in the work of orwell – particularly the notion of DOUBLE THINK . which, brings forth an argument relating to truths and the distortion of truths through double think, that really disembowels the premise of the above theory. its dangerous to trifle with generalisations of such seminal works. Perhaps Orwell has the last laugh, LOVE IS HATE AND HATE IS LOVE , so no one is right. They’re but reflections of the same essential idea.
[...] Amusing Ourselves to Death [...]
[...] news less amusing Posted on July 29, 2010 by Emily For anyone who’s been a J201 TA, this comic (thanks to Hans for sending me this link) speaks to what we spend the first few weeks of the course [...]
Ironically, I would never have read this had it not been presented in cartoon form.
[...] is awesome, so I’m stealing it – from here, originated here. Turns out, they were both [...]
I think the real threat is and will always be “1984″. People will whine and whinge about how awful it is that too many people are wasting their lives on “frivolous stuff” and will argue that some sort of top-down paternalism is necessary to prevent this. This, of course, leads to the “1984″ scenario.
The “brave new world” scenario is a red herring.
[...] to Accelerating Future for the heads up! Amusing Ourselves to [...]
Orwell and Huxley both were writing about dystopic conditions that they foresaw to come about. Both talk about conditions that are like the two sides of the same coin. Orwell’s nightmarish vision of Stalinist world of Thought Police, Big Brother and Newspeak etc. consisted in throttling free flow of information and , while Huxley’s revisionist notion of Brave New World ( à la Shakespeare’s sanguine Renaisance pronuoncement) foretold the state of affairs of the post-capitalist, contemporary so called information society, where the profusion of irrelevant knolwedge and information would silence the voice of reason and truth. No wonder, the the media rule us and their copius stream of news and views that are trivial and irrelevant create a smoke screen to hide the truth. To me the later conditions of living, from which we suffer in the contempprary world, are more insidious and tyrannical than the Stalinist ones, and therefore more hopeless. Hence perhaps Habermas and Jean Baudrillard are so important for us.
[...] An interesting comparison between Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 – in comics form [...]
[...] your endless debate of choice, how about who was right about the nature of our future dystopia? Huxely or Orwell? Recombinant Records provides the key talking [...]
Awesome. I’ve read 1984 but not the Brave New World. Its instantly entered my “to read” list.
Thanks for this immensely entertaining cartoon strip.
[...] Accelerating Future ÉrdekesJövő, Kép, Utópia ← Fejlődik az világ… Leave a comment0 [...]
WOW. I just found an old paper I did in college on Amusing Ourselves to Death, and realized I should read it again. How weird that I saw this on the same day. Love it. Very, very cool!
[...] Amusing Ourselves to Death What Orwell feared was those who would ban books… What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one. (tags: comics culture media politics books book) [...]
[...] http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSFx0yntuY#t=5m53s
[...] Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death Aug 1st, 2010 by NPTO. via acceleratingfuture.com [...]
[...] Interesting comic adaption by Stuart McMillen of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death posted on Accelerating Future: [...]
Orwell and Huxley describe the two main methods of controlling populations. Brave New World describes the carrot method (control by trivial desire), while Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts the stick method (control by fear).
This blog is fails to point out that in Western society both methods of population control complement each other in order to be effective. The terms “government” and “cybernetics” both come from the Greek kybernan, “to steer” or “to control”. Cybernetics deals with maintaining an equilibrium in systems, often by applying two opposing forces.
If you attempt to control by trivial desire alone, the control subject eventually becomes distracted and bored, wanting to focus its desire on personal matters that do not benefit the controller. If you attempt to control by fear alone, the control subject eventually breaks down, becoming too emotionally crippled to benefit the controller.
For the two control methods to work effectively, the control subject (on a micro scale the individual, on a macro scale the combined populations of states that share common values) needs to be aware of the existence of its alternative and to be able to find some degree of middle ground between the opposing forces. Finding that middle ground between desire and fear is precisely what defines the acclaimed freedom of Western civilisation in the context presented to us by the powers that be.
In the post-communist brave new nineties the attention of the Western consumerist population started to drift too far away from matters that benefited the controllers. Thus people needed to be made aware again of the alternative to desire. Enter the PNAC with its disaster spectacle of 9-11.
[...] Huxley was right: “Amusing Ourselves to Death“ [...]
[...] 2. “Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell” [...]
[...] – I’m not going all Brave New World on you. I don’t think that we should amuse ourselves to death. But I do think that there’s merit in doing what you love, even if it has no real purpose. If you [...]
The (so-called) Power Elite(s) are deploying BOTH Huxleyan & Orwellian methods of keeping the “masses” “in their place”.
So true. Both the white and the black, the alpha and the omega, have the same effect.
Aristotle said we should live our lives at the halfway between satisfaction and need.
[...] Huxley vs. Orwell (via John Cook). Do not miss. Related: Too Much Information. [...]
Both were right and we are currently living it. But what would be the alternative?
More widespread conscience of it? Better education? A smaller gap between rich and poor? More democracy?
[...] If Neil Postman had been a cartoonist, we’d be even more amused than we already are. (Hat tip to [...]
Very nice. We gave up TV a long time ago. Still are some pining for the “normal”. Thanks for your site.
Sherman
The author of this article was right in showing everyone what two different authors foresaw in our future. His assertion at the end is erroneous though. We are going both ways simultaneously and he’s blinded himself to the realist of both outcomes occurring consecutively because of his desire to pick on over the other.
We ARE distracting, and allowing ourselves to be distracted, through a government and the media controlled by those with money.
The other side of the coin is easily apparent in an ever increasing police state… once again controlled by those with money.
When are you people going to wake up? Police are MURDERING citizens DAILY and getting off scott-free under the phony call of “doing their lawful duty”. Unarmed citizens are being MUR-DERED by the very people SWORN to protect YOU!! Murdered because they had the effrontery to question these tax-trough swilling, power-tripping, government-costumed crusaders for their own self-aggrandizement!! Murdered because they believed THEY were the people being wronged by the Judicial System’s Armed Military!!
A policeman can murder a citizen, then claim a “right” that protects him from being tried and convicted as a murderer. His testimony is only used internally to find out what happened and then gets “lost” when the officer’s actions are called to account. EVERY STINKING TIME!!!! Police should be as suseptible to the laws of the land as citizens are. THAT’s ALL they are is citizens given the J O B of keeping the PEACE!! Not enforcing the law like “Dirty Harrys”!! At least Dirty harry didn’t MURDER anyone. He had a legitimate excuse of defending himself. He didn’t carry a throw-away weapon to plant on an innocent, unarmed citizen’s dead body!!
My friend pointed this tremendous comic strip out after reading a recent article I’d written:
Gaming for Survival
http://technorati.com/entertainment/gaming/article/gaming-to-survive/
Anyway, very well done.
Dr L
[...] to Accelerating Future for this one; how has life changed towards that of these two prophets? 1984 and Brave New World [...]
Sorry for enquiring you this question on this post, but I couldn’t find a contact page on first sight so I reckoned I ask here. What is the hosting provider you use, mine will not care wordpress for some cause and I for one want to change to wordpress from blogengine since wordpress has so many more features and themes existing for download. I on the contrary hope you can help me out on this one, this is a wordpress blog right? Sorry for my English btw. Best regards, James
Very entertaining and insightful, especially the part about the truth not being denied us, but buried in a sea of lies…the schizophrenic and sensationalistic popular media leaves us wondering what the truth is until we give up and go play Xbox or something. Y’all may disagree, but I get the idea that most of the previous commenters are reasonably intelligent and thus not representative of the masses who these designs may be targeted at…no one can quell a thinker’s curiousity and willingness to question anything but him. I almost shared this on Facebook, but then realized nobody wants to hear this shit…no offense, it just proves your point.
Bold statement I’d say personally in their own respects they were both right.
t의 생각…
오웰/헉슬리. 오웰은 책을 출판못하게 하는 세상을, 헉슬리는 책을 아무도 읽고싶어하지 않는 세상을 경고. 오웰은 정보를 통제하는 이를, 헉슬리는 정보의 홍수속에 정보자체가 무의미해지는 현상을 경고. 오웰은 진실이 숨겨진, 헉슬리는 진실이 중요하지 않은 세상을 경고….
These are presented as if they are diametrically opposed to each other. They are, in fact, happening at the same time but on different levels.
Liberty is lost through the tyranny of control AND the tyranny of stupidity and complacency. Power and control is gained by both methods.
Fascism is an excellent example of both methods being used for control. The Huxley method is called “propaganda” and is used to distract the public. The Orwell method is what is being done underneath it all. Nevertheless, the Orwell method is dominant as it dictates the direction the Huxley method takes in its dumbing down and numbing society. In layman’s terms it’s called “telling the people to go to Hell and making them look forward to the trip.”
Good article.
It seems that somewhere in between monarchies and “decadence” was this lost civilization in which all people were informed and involved.
This blog mourns it, as well as so many others like it.
Where was it?
…Ancient Greece?
I’m so sick of this apocalyptic bullshit. People have always been idiots (literally, look the root of idiot up) with a fortunately informed few. The world might be bigger, that doesn’t make people any dumber. In fact, if we should be scared of anything, it should be the fact this world is overpopulated.
Lolz I forgot that war and propaganda were invented as iphone apps…
Orwell vs Huxley, Amusing Ourselves to Death…
In his ZaCon talk, Haroon Meer worked in a fascinating comparison, by Michael Anissimov, between the fears that drove George Orwell when writing 1984, and those that drove Aldous Huxley when writing Brave New World.In summary; Orwell feared censorship …
[...] cartoon comparison of Huxley and Orwell Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books, for there [...]
Has anyone posting here read the Postman book? The drawing merely illustrates the intro to a provocative and illuminating book. While many of these comments are also provocative and illuminating, the opinions seem to be only about the intro/illustration, and not about the entirety of Postman’s book. (Actually, in a way this very conversation seems – to me anyway – to support Postman’s thesis that people today tend towards quick hits of entertainment, or anything other than spending time thinking deeply about matters.)
I have not read Neil Postman’s book but in looking at the world around us it seems that perhaps we are going both ways simultaneously as Mr. Carter remarked back in August when he was talking about the country being run by people with money. I have heard estimates of the Rothschild/Rockefeller combined wealth to be something greater than 100 trillion dollars. I think that this makes them more than just “people with money.” If those figures are reliable then these people own the world or enough of it to constitute controlling interest. The rest of us are at best multi-generational renters. Nothing will happen that the controllers do not decree. Of course we’re not talking about a handful of powerful men. We’re talking about powerful families with dynastic dreams of continued succession. I wonder if there is any recourse better than to learn to love the world just as it is and let the angst and the indignant fight it out with their overlords. Martyrdom is very attractive to some people. For the simple minded, like me, it is truly better to find my niche and make it a better place for those who live in it and are associated with it. I can think globally but it is best for some of us to let more sophisticated minds ACT globally. Here in the rural south, “Neighborhood Watch” works really well.
[...] HQ com texto do livro “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, de Neil Postman. | Crédito: Blog Accelerating Future [...]
OK, it is the rich who believe they are the proper management. Ie., all that dosh gone to their heads and they BELIEVE they own planet Earth and all the species and us. They do not! Their belief is a delusion and admittedly a dangerous one because absolute power brings absolute corruption.
The spend a big part of their money which is robbed from all of us on PROPAGANDA. Checkout Edward Bernays about this and you see how they depend on this propaganda being secret. it doesn’t work when you become aware of it!
So all these distractions is that propaganda. If say you include–of course–adverts, the Italians (obviously ‘propaganda’ is an Italian term)actually call adverts propaganda.
So to know this. To also know about the myth of mental illness is VASTLY important. This is their central controlling myth. In pre-scientific times the central controlling myth was the religious indoctrination, but when ‘God’ was presumed dead science came to the fore as the saviour, and the pseudoscience of psychiatry has teamed up with the profit-pyschotic drug companies and all obvious body and soul reactions to the oppression we are in which affect all our lives, our guardians lives, the ways we have to live, the ‘education’ system we HAVE to attend from being tiny—all of that takes its toll, and if we ‘rebel’ via whatever form and are seen to be defective we become ‘mentally ill’.
Now the myth underlying that can be seen to start with Descartes –who claimed animals were machines–and he was followed next century by psychologist Wilhelm Wundt who claimed humans were machines—-so ‘soul’ was ‘scientifically’ explained away. So now when we are not ‘productive’ for the ‘State’ we are ‘defective machines’ which need treatment.
These rich and their lackies spend MILLIONS and rake in BILLIONS pushing their toxic pills (which they abuse captive animals with beforehand) YET wage a war against entheogens. Entheogems are the original sacred medicine for body and soul, and taking them can also help us directly see directly through their propaganda. But like everything they want to CONTROL them.
Their plans now are to control the very seeds and food we eat.
So stop already with those stupid fukin vid games, and crap TV etc and wake the fuck up!
To summarize. They use propaganda–for their wars, and for our very worldviews.
A big part of this propaganda is that we are machines, and that animals are machines, and nature is a machine.
That the only meaning is therefore grab what you get now, consumerism.
Sacred medicine understood to be so (ie., you have to have an inkling that nature is sacred) helps us to see through their propaganda, and rigid worldviews, and see directly what matters. Sacred experience IS enlightenment, and from there you integrate these insights into daily life.
THINK–if not for yourself–for children who depend on our responsibility to see through the propaganda/sorcery which is eating up and making planet earth toxic, and disempowering us and our children.
Do not allow your child be put on psychiatric medication!!
Great work. I hadn’t read Huxley until just recently with the Lazy Side Book Club and I have to say that this rings true. Seems like we’re between these two extremes but definitely skewed more toward the Huxley side. So sad… Time for a few grams of soma…
[...] American Idol or Snowdrift Snookie’s latest idiotic political pronouncements. Either way, we’re amusing ourselves to death.For the past few weeks, regular, working-class people in Wisconsin have been staging mass protests [...]
[...] As a side note, to those who read and enjoyed both Brave New World and the previous post about 1984, I suggest taking a look at this: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ [...]
Interesting analogies…
Whats more interesting is that it was all summarized in a cartoon!
Forgot what we were talking about… oh well, American Idol is on!
I have begun to think about bankruptcy as my personal onle option at this point. I am just a little confused about The difference between chapter 7 and Thirteen bankruptcy. I live in Florida and also own a family house but We’ve no earnings to generate any type of payments now. I would love a few expert advice if perhaps anyone could share some insight based on my scenario.
A Brave new world stressed the question of freedom of choice, and most in the book didn’t even think to question their options [or lack thereof]. It’s nice to have a couple candidates to vote for but when one of the candidates running cant even explain the role of the vice-president in congress is it really an option?
[...] [...]
[...] Amusing ourselves to death (Stuart McMillen via Accelerating Future): we are still navigating between to rather ugly scenarios, put forth by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. [...]
I am comparing both for my final project in my second year of A Level English Literature, by choice. I think all 18 year olds should read them, hey, maybe there’s the solution!
Orwell’s dystopia is already upon us, it was only yesterday I read that CAMERAS and VOICE RECORDERS were to be put in the back of TAXIS in Oxford, the reason given was to protect the drivers safety….. Hilarious, I know. A school in Manchester has ONE camera for every SEVEN students attending. They are even attempting now to manipulate our language through ‘Political correctness’, but since when were politicians correct anyway?
In my opinion it is Huxley’s Brave New World which really scares me. I can see us inching closer towards his dystopia, and since reading the book I find myself becoming more alarmed by the day. The majority of the kids I know havn’t read more than five books (aside from Harry Potter). They are much more distracted by the latest episode of X Factor, or the newest Modern Warfair game to open a book now and again.
Sex SELLS, it is EVERYWHERE. Taking into consideration this massive change in the past hundred years, imagine a few decades from now and orgie-porgie doesn’t seem so far off, does it? Not to mention the sexualisation of children which seems to be in the media frequently now a days.
We are all hardcore CONSUMERS. Cars, phones, shoes, clothes, ipods, ipads, walking around like living advertisements covered in ‘designer’ lables and Nike ticks. Not batting an eyelid to child slavery overseas – most of us not even aware.
SOMA seems to be rearing it’s head in the shape of fancy ‘over the counter’ drugs such as valium, antidepressants, anti-anxiety, etc etc etc… oh how the list goes on. Numbing brains to the extent my poor Mum barely remembers to put the kettle on, let alone question the state of man kind.
If something we fear is attempting to ruin us, we will always have the instinct of survival. If something we love is ruining us, we will not even realise we need saving.
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[...] Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - being a fan of George Orwell, I had always intended to read 1984′s “twin” Brave New World, but read the first chapter a year ago and wasn’t captured. However, this time I read it in a couple of days. An interesting and frightening take on humanities future when Catholic teachings are ignored!! Anyone interested in a comparison of this and 1984 should check out this comic contrasting the two. [...]
It has long been looking for an article on Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death .