A few recent comments and reblogs have taken issue with the idea that the works of Aldous Huxley are an important defense against the propaganda challenges of our time.
"Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us" is terrifyingly relevant to the mid 2020s.
We're not living in Orwell's nightmare of enforced ignorance and pain, we're living in Huxley's nightmare of voluntary distraction and pleasure.
Infinite scroll and algorithmically optimized engagement which has made propaganda more effective and widespread than ever before
Complex policy reduced to memes and hot takes
Complex peoples reduced to black-and-white moral caricatures
The transformation of citizenship into spectatorship and team sports
"Discourse" that's really just performance
What makes this particularly insidious and aligned with Huxley's warning is that nobody is forcing us to watch TikTok for hours, let it reprogram our brains, or reduce politics to team sports. We're doing it willingly because it feels good, because it's easier than sustained attention, because trivial culture is more fun than serious engagement.
That's how we know we're living in Huxley's Brave New World.
The Huxley-deriding replies and reblogs fixate on his coming from an elite, well-off, British, intellectual family, but those who dismiss him as an elite snob are doing exactly what he warned about, using a simple, emotionally satisfying dismissal (eg. priviledged white guy = bad/wrong) to avoid grappling with uncomfortable truths about how we've all become complicit in our own intellectual infantilization.
Why do people reach for this particular class-based line of attack when I make an argument about Huxley's prescience regarding media and propaganda?
Ad hominem deflection: It's easier to dismiss ideas by attacking the messenger than to engage with whether Huxley was actually right about soma-like escapism, entertainment as distraction, or technological control. If they can make Huxley seem unsympathetic or out-of-touch, they don't have to grapple with how his warnings apply to our current media landscape. Thinking too hard is scary.
Academic Class Bias: Many online fat-left critics see Huxley as a stand-in for a kind of British paternalism or condescension. They aren't necessarily responding to what he wrote, but to the archetype they've constructed. A soft-spoken Oxbridge intellectual wringing his hands about pleasure while ignoring material injustice.
Discomfort with cultural self-critique: Huxley's critique lands hardest on us. Our appetite for distraction, our complicity in choosing comfort over thought, our thirst for spectacle. That makes some readers bristle. Dismissing Huxley lets them redirect attention away from their own eager participation in the system which is actively manipulating them.
It's easier to dismiss Huxley as a privileged pessimist than to ask what he actually saw coming and examine how close we are to living in it.
It's more comfortable and satisfying to mock the man warning us that this comfort will be our undoing. It's unsettling to realize the undoing is already underway.
If Huxley was right, they have to face that we didn't lose our freedom, we traded it willingly for dopamine, for distraction and for emotional resonance.
That's hard to protest and feel righteous about because there's no villain to topple...just thousands of tiny daily choices we're already making...and making poorly.
For some, taking that much responsibility for themselves is both too frightening and too much work.
kianamaiart
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