Enjoying the view from Limbo
The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...
The Polish Ministry of Education has removed a passage from a new school textbook related to sexuality in modern times, due to public criticism of its offensiveness. Here (and I apologize in advance for assaulting your innocence with such smut) is the offending passage: Increasingly sophisticated methods of separating sex from love and fertility lead to the treatment of sex as entertainment and...
Once, while discussing Brave New World with a Korean student, I introduced Alexis de Tocqueville’s incisive warning of a new political danger simmering within the age of modern liberalism, a tyrannical form of democratic paternalism which he evocatively named “soft despotism.” The aptness of this contextual discussion was obvious, for at its best, Huxley’s dystopian novel is little more than a progress report...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 30, 2021
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.” “But I like the inconveniences.” “We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.” “But I...
Dr. Fauci admits to having radically shifted his publicly declared threshold of the percentage of Americans that would need to be infected or vaccinated in order to achieve “herd immunity.” Fauci, with the help of his media backers, is out on television these days trying to rationalize that change as the result of insufficient knowledge — a completely untenable explanation in light of...
A few hours ago, I concluded an e-mail reply to a reader about COVID-19, experts, “flattening the curve,” and the abuse of statistics, with this exhausted summary: “I’m getting tired of this story, since there is nothing left to save here, no one left to persuade, and no benefit to be had from muttering common sense into the ether. Slaves want to be...
Just a simple musing, courtesy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Chapter 16. The speaker is Mustapha Mond, World Controller for Western Europe. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of...
I am sometimes accused of exaggerating the threats to modern civilization, or of engaging in hyperbole in discussing today’s political trends. I am certainly not one inclined to feel self-deludedly sanguine about the current state of things, or blind to rising evils and dangerous follies. I note this merely to preface an anecdote that demonstrates the extent to which we are all, even...
Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 10, 2019 · Last modified February 17, 2019
A few weeks ago, New York legislators passed a new state abortion law essentially declaring open season on all living fetuses up to the moment of birth. (I wrote about it here.) In celebration of this triumph of the religion of death, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, apparently in symbolic honor of the needles used to exterminate life, had the World Trade Center...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 19, 2018 · Last modified April 3, 2021
As of October 17th, 2018, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, fulfilling the Canadian-style vote bribe to beat all vote bribes, has “legalized” the sale and consumption of cannabis. In a country in the midst of a slow-boiling communist takeover, of course, “legalized” must be written and understood in scare quotes, because what it really means is that the government has decided to allow Canadians...
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