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Sunday, October 16, 2011

"It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done."

"I think this has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now... It looks as if the totalitarian regimes of the future will not be based on terror, because they will have other means... which will be much more efficient... and more pleasurable for those who undergo them."

ADDED: That Aldous Huxley quote, from a video at the link, sent me back to my Kindle copy of "Brave New World," whence I've lifted this for you:
"Work, play — at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking — thinking!...

"Now — such is progress — the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think — or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to …"

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