Huxley formulated his dystopian world after observing the excessiveness of Americans during the Roaring 20s. If he thought things were decadent and Americans were self consumed in the 1920s, Huxley's head would explode at the debauchery, ignorance materialism, and shallowness of Americans today. Our landfills contain more wealth than entire Third World countries. We throw away over 100 billion pounds of edible food per year. In his Brave New World Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley clearly laid out the dangers of consumerism:
Consumerism requires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propaganda by any and every means is absolutely indispensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings.
Consider a simple example. Most cosmetics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial propagandists do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some picturesquely voluptuous name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. "The cosmetic manufacturers," one of their number has written, "are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope." For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish -- the wish to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true.
Our economic advancement has been marketed to Americans as true happiness from consumption. Every need can be realized through material gain. Success as a society is measured by GDP growth and the facade of prosperity. In Brave New World children are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as "ending is better than mending," which means buy a new one instead of fixing the old one. America has become the definitive throwaway society. Product waste has grown from 92 pounds per person per year in 1905 to 1,242 pounds per person per year in 2005. American human beings are lumped into the category of consumers by the mainstream media. Consumerism and consumer debt have been the contaminated lifeblood of the United States for the last three decades. Government actively promotes gambling by the poor, offering them false hope for riches. Americans squander $160 billion per year on lotteries and in casinos. Our society has become even more extreme than the Brave New World as we have outsourced our production to foreign countries, thereby gutting our economy. Even at the dawn of television Huxley realized the immense power for propagandists:
Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children.
United States advertising expenditures, 1920-2007 in constant 2007 dollars (billions)*
The mass media is owned and controlled by mega-corporations run by the Alphas of our society. Colleges graduate thousands of people with the skills to manipulate the uninformed masses through advertising and propaganda. What passes for news organizations are just propaganda machines for a particular point of view. The public is distracted by the seemingly major differences between the two main political parties. The reality is that both parties are controlled by banking and corporate interests who pay for the laws that benefit their interests. Huxley's description of political candidates in 1958 is even truer today:
The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.
News people must be beautiful and entertainment is indispensable. They provide the people what they want 24 hour coverage of Tiger Woods' sex life, weeks of reporting about Michael Jackson's death, and 10 seconds about the $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities we are leaving future generations. Truth is an inconvenience in the consumer society.
Incompatibility of Happiness & Truth
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Aldous Huxley
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