Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920)

>> Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of "pleasure"; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.

I adore Huxley. Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Those Barren Leaves...

I think the overmedication facet of Brave New World is so very true. We know we have an opioid problem because people are addicted and then dying. I think it would be naive to think that we aren't doing the same with everything in psychopharmacology.

"Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone."

"Kids these days bad, older times good!" - as far as humanity has existed.

"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."

Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.

Huxley was talking about a time when most work was manual labor (tend the farm, smith the axe). While there was an intellectual element it was imbued into the physical aspect of the work. Today, work is more intellectual. It makes complete sense that pleasures are not so much so.

It's a great abstract discussion. Increases in technology have made it possible to use human intellect to move society forward, but also make pleasure that much easier to attain.

I don't really have a point here but I find the topic very amusing to think about. I feel guilty watching hours of TV during the week to unwind. At the same time, it helps me to relax. Pleasure that comes from physical work seems to always have a greater positive outcome for me. OTOH, mental pleasure sense to leave me depleted even more so. TV is an interesting mental pleasure that does help.

Here are the key points I took away from the excerpt of "Pleasures" by Aldous Huxley:

- Huxley argues that the real threat to modern civilization is not external dangers like war, but the "auto-intoxication" of mindless pleasures and distractions.

- He contends that pleasures and entertainments have become progressively more passive and devoid of intellectual effort. People now soak up ready-made distractions like movies, radio, and newspapers without thinking.

- Huxley criticizes the sterility and sameness of modern distractions. The same movies and dances are consumed everywhere without local variation.

- He sees the proliferation of effortless distractions as promoting boredom, atrophy of the mind, and decline of civilization.

- The essay ends with a warning that the bored populace may eventually demand ever more violent entertainments, as happened in decadent Rome. Huxley fears we may "live to see blood flowing across the stage."

This is a natural conseqence of copyright law. It is hard for local talent to compete against unnatural monopolies. We subsidized mass produced media at the expense of decentralized talent.

To me it seems like this paper reveals two truths.

1) Many people are happy living life and never exercising their brain.

2) Some people, like Aldous, are not. Instead they choose to more often than not.

I suspect that this has been true for a very long time. It also seems less frightening than he is making it out to be. Assuming the ratio of critical thinkers remains roughly the same then the world should continue to get objectively better, right?

Note that this was probably written in 1923 rather than 1920, if the second paragraph is anything to go by.

> In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions - distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort

This feels true in some sense for every generation; bemoaning the insolence of the current youth feels like a rite of passage. However, it also seems true that the youth of today have a lower barrier of access to “pleasure” than any other humans in history.

On the other hand, maybe it would have been better to devote more effort to pleasure.

In a few years from when it was written, Germany would be devoting the full power of a modern industrial economy, not to pleasure but to wipe out undesirable people.

They would is the newly developing field of electronic data processing, not for pleasure to to better target people for death.

Planes would be built not for people to travel on vacation, but to drop bombs.

Factories would work around the clock, not producing goods for pleasure, but weapons of death.

The greatest group of geniuses ever assembled, would be given an unlimited budget not to develop new forms of pleasure but to develop a weapon that could vaporize an entire city in a few seconds.

> ‘One summer day, 40 years ago or so, I was walking along a residential street when an rich, earthy scent wafted my way and triggered, as smells are wont to do, a vivid recollection. Like Dorothy, stepping out of her front door into the Technicolor Land of Oz, I remembered another summer’s day when I was 4 years old, playing in a bank of warm, black dirt in the back yard of my home. I had a little red toy car for which I’d made a road slanting up the face of the dirt bank and, in my recollection, I was ‘driving’ the car up this mountain road while making motor noises. That’s all there was, no real action, yet the memory, in the few seconds before it faded away, was redolent with the smell and feel of the warm dirt, the bright colour of the toy, the hot sun – with simple but intensely pleasurable sensory experience. When I read Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience, of his feeling that the colours, shapes, and textures of his books on the shelves across the room were as intense an experience as he could bear and that he dared not look outside at the flowers in the garden, I thought of my brief revisitation of my childhood’.

-- Chapter 1, ‘Happiness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment’; David Lykken.

This essay by Huxley said exactly what I have always felt but never articulated. The problem is far worse today than it was in his time. So much of recreation today consists of binge-watching Netflix. In addition, because Netflix has global reach, the world often watches the same content, devoid of local meaning.

I have realized that active recreation, although requiring overcoming a certain threshold of activation energy, is far more compelling and fulfilling than passive recreation.

"To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open."

lol, still so true.

I find it interesting how accurately this sums up the press. It is a facade of informing, but ultimately just entertainment.

I wouldn't have expected it to have been viewed that way back in 1920.

"There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world."

Not only did Orwell predict the total surveillance state, but his French teacher Huxley foreshadowed the necessity of the opioid crisis in maintaining the existence of such a society.

> And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought.

Welp, time for a re-read of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Pretty sure Neil Postman quotes Brave New World at least once.

> To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.

Wow this is exactly true today, more than one hundred years later.

I was thinking that, perhaps, the better people feel, the more empowered, energetic and ambitious they become.

It reminds me of an advertising sign I once saw outside a store, which read "Movies, Couch, and Ice Cream." It seemed to me like an apt epitaph for our civilization.

Maybe we shouldn't focus so much on predictions made in 1920. Surely living in the future, allows us to have a better understanding than Aldous Huxley ever could?

> The horrors of modern "pleasure" arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.

Fuck me, imagine what he'd say if he had a silicon valley programming job and had to put up with HR-organized online parties and friends wearing animal onesies at social events.

Treaty of Versailles turned out to be a real menace to civilization, BTW.

“No participation”—-spot on. The brain evolved for social learning.

"menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history"

Any context why 1918 peace would be considered 'stupid'?

Karl Kraus saw it coming. Huxley apparently not so much.

Interesting that 100 years later I think

> has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well

applies to the 'dumb pleasure seeking' he warns about in this article too. Society has not collapsed and in spite of pleasure-at-the-push-of-a-button being more than Huxley could ever have imagined and

> the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom

still being an ever-present topic

I think the 'bark worse than bite' still holds, for now..

Sports are the metaphor. Regular people intellectualize the game and are derided.

No one needs to fight, we can all see the game happening. We incorporate all the functions of pleasure into our identity.

Huxley cant recognize the social progress, calling it dumb. Smug enough to be funny, oblivious to the irony.