Aldous Huxley was a man of boundless curiosity about things around him. His brother Julian remarked that Aldous thought about how things were strange and that his talent lay in probing every aspect of knowledge. Renowned for his vast erudition, he had quite a few insights into human nature and society. We will examine a few of his quotes, treated under specific themes.
On War
Aldous Huxley was a known pacifist, who was so opposed to warfare that he retrieved his application for US citizenship because he was required to pledge to bear arms on behalf of the United States. Living through two World Wars revealed to him how monstrous and destructive war is.
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
Some writers have made the remarkable connection between inventing dull and inoffensive words for the horrible acts of war and the ease with which these horrors are executed. Huxley points out here that by doing this people are made to think of their enemies in terms that remove their existential weight. A term like “liquidate” makes mass murder sound innocuous. One who thinks about these while processing war is prevented from imagining the actual carnage involved.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
In contrast to animals, who commit acts of violence for their own needs—in defense of territory or food or mating opportunities—men in warfare commit to killing each other for no identifiable individual need.
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
To buttress the point made in the earlier quote, Aldous Huxley points out how odd it is that the people who, by the conventions of our society, are mentally unbalanced thrive well in the enterprise of war. This suggests that war is fundamentally irrational.
On The Oppressive State
Almost contingent to Aldous Huxley’s aversion to war was his hostility against oppressive governments, and he believed both were related. The threat of violence is often a feature of such a government, against its people and other nations.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
The Caesars and Napoleons are men of outsized ambition and power-hungry to the point of bloodthirst. Such is their ambition that they become tyrants, turning the people they rule into mere instruments for their goals. And yet, these tyrants gain popularity rather than censure, and are made into objects of worship and models to emulate. Aldous Huxley believed that those who worship them are blinded by the tyrants’ larger-than-life image to see the human cost of their oppressive rule.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of the political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
It was Aldous Huxley among other dystopian writers of his time who first explored the idea of a government that oppresses not through violence and threat, but through creating a culture of indulgence and passivity. The citizens are thus conditioned with pleasure to conform with the government’s dicta without question.
Openness to Experience
Aldous Huxley had a history of intense intellectual curiosity. He even went as far as using psychedelics to push the boundaries of his perception, and recorded the results of this experiment in his book, ‘The Doors of Perception‘.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Consistency in intellectual exploration and spiritual practice may be valuable, up to a point. But this makes a person, gradually, lose sensitivity to the changes that happen around them, as they become too comfortable with the familiar and fail to perceive truths different from what is expected.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley’s insight captures how blind we become to the wonder and miracle of things we witness often and routinely. These things dissolve into the background and lose the ability to thrill us, and all that is special about them are ignored. As a result, we treat casually the things that support what is of value to us.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries
The things we believe about people from afar are usually different up close, and hardly anyone but the traveler knows this intimately. When the opportunity comes to visit a new place and to experience life in the skin of these strangers with their strange customs, habits, and attitudes, we see how erroneous our first impressions have been, provided we are open-minded enough to truly absorb the novel experience.
On The Individual
From all his writings, Aldous Huxley makes clear that he values individual autonomy over any social benefit that may accrue from restricting a person’s freedom. The self-actualization of the individual is non-negotiable in Huxley’s philosophy, and a government that interferes with this has no legitimacy in his opinion.
No social stability without individual stability.
Very often we see instances of societies founded on the restriction or exploitation of the individual for “the common good.” Such structures are by design parasitic, and they begin by taking small liberties and graduate into massive institutions of oppression. But because they grow fat by diminishing their subjects, they make the citizens psychologically unhealthy. These societies are therefore always at risk of collapsing.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
In this way, Huxley depicts how our memory is all we truly have to ourselves. Books in our libraries are only books and when we read a particular book, everyone has a different version of the book that is shaped by the person’s own experience.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
Reformers too often wish to reform others. However, there is no guarantee they know others well enough to change them for the better. They may very well end up destroying others in the quest to improve them. It is only oneself that one knows well enough to take on the delicate process of improving.
