STEPS TO TYRANNY

 1932 saw the publication of what many consider a masterpiece of literature and that book is still with us today. It's a science fiction novel of a new world, a totalitarian world, and hence the title, "Brave New World." In the introductory chapters, Aldous Huxley describes the various ways the totalitarians produced the brave new world and kept it under their control. We'll examine some of them..

The book begins in medias res; in the middle of things: the totalitarians are firmly entrenched and in control. One of them is showing a group of his students the ropes of how they keep the society under their iron fist. He takes them to a place where there were a large group of very, very young children. In front of the children were many, many books, all of them just lying there in no particular order or organization. 

The children, being children, start to do what children do: they crawl over to the books and begin to touch, handle, pick them up, open them, then crumple or tear the pages. Something suddenly hits them. What the children don't know is that beneath their feet is a broad strip designed to convey an electric current and when triggered, the children experience an unpleasant pain of voltage, just enough to inflict pain.

The children drop the books and recoil, moving away from them. This procedure is repetitive, day after day. The purpose is to ingrain in the children a life-long aversion to books.

Another means of control was to abolish anything familial. In the brave new world, the word and concept of a father was unknown. Over time, nobody had ever known heard of a father. The people were taught that there used to be fathers, the world was full of them and therefore, full of misery. 

There used to be mothers, brothers, and sisters along with uncles and aunts. But families were deemed obscene so the words, mother, father, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister were removed from the dictionary and therefore from memory. Now everyone belonged to everyone else.The government had classified monogamy as evil, a relic in the used-to-be, that is, "BF." Those are two letters that bring us to another totalitarian tool.

In the brave new world, the totalitarians developed a new dating system in which every event was BF or AF. Gone were BC and AD. BF stood for "Before Ford" and AF meant "After Ford." These were references to Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile. Along with no more BC or AD, the one copy of the Bible in the brave new world was locked away in the headquarters of the supreme controller.  

Going back to the children, there was another thing the controlling class of elites did: they encouraged hedonism along with erotic play. When these and other tools were combined, the brave new world was born. It was a world in which they viewed any difference as a threat to society and so, everybody must be conditioned to conform by a thousand and a thousand more repetitions of slogans and experiences. 

The repeated motto of the brave new world was, "Community Identity Stability." Community is the first word because the good of the community was more important than anything else. Identity is important because you are allowed to be an individual within the community guidelines. Stability is what makes you happy in the brave new world.

You'll find "Brave New World" in the fiction section of your local library. But does any of the above sound familiar in 2021?