Reading the forward to the 1947 edition of Brave New World. Aldous Huxley writes:
"To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world's governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place."
"unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia."
Both of these sections of the nearly 80 year old forword are strikingly prescient. They describe the increased authoritarianism we see (overt in places like China, but more insidious in the West - the supranational welfare-tyranny of the EU) that can only be reversed by a movement of decentralisation.
#nostr #bitcoin #FOSSAI
gunson / Gunson
npub1pn…t2xn0
2024-09-01 08:52:34
Author Public Key
npub1pn9xyqt934wesguuz5g77sp9vtlh6ujyd7eqr2x3s47rncmfe8aqxt2xn0Published at
2024-09-01 08:52:34Event JSON
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"content": "Reading the forward to the 1947 edition of Brave New World. Aldous Huxley writes:\n\n\"To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world's governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.\"\n\n\"unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.\"\n\nBoth of these sections of the nearly 80 year old forword are strikingly prescient. They describe the increased authoritarianism we see (overt in places like China, but more insidious in the West - the supranational welfare-tyranny of the EU) that can only be reversed by a movement of decentralisation.\n\n#nostr #bitcoin #FOSSAI",
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