By Aldous Huxley
There are 3 deficiencies people often feel without knowing how to name them: nature, religion, literature.
With no concept of the cosmos behind the immediately human we are denied of the chance to feel awed or alienated.
The messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentments.
Are people brainwashed into being greedy?
“Capitalists search for all possible ways of stimulating the public into consumptions by making commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble of new needs.“
This impulse led to innovation and experiment which Marx dubbed “creative destruction.” It is a means of arousing discontent with the status quo.
The current energy of capital is not compatible with stasis.
“Infant conditioning and narco hypnosis are more efficient as instruments of government than clubs and prisons. The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by agencies of the central government.
“Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for if his prayer was heard all things pass away.”
“Til at last the child’s mind is these suggestions and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too.”
“And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it in a way much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”
“Men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through water—so utterly at home as to be unaware of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being.”
“She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement—for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied: here was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere satiety and nothingness but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium.”
“I’d rather be myself. Myself and nasty than somebody else and jolly.”
“Bernard left room with a swagger, exulting as he banged the door behind him in then thought that he stood alone embarked against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance.”
“Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am”
“If one is different one is bound to be lonely”