Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Plan or Prophecy
There have been for some time, esp. from libertarian quarters, accusations that the COVID-19 crisis has led to a state that has been called by some “medical martial law”. I believe the more accurate term and point of departure is “medical social engineering and management”. Martial law sounds more dramatic and seems simpler to understand. Yet we have to get beyond slogans and deal with long-term processes and policies if we are to find adequate responses today. Literary metaphors, like those found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 have been reduced to clichés. While their ideas may in part illustrate what today seems like prophecy, it is not enough just to imagine that there is or might be some underlying or even secret “plan”.
Much of this reporting creates the impression that some base of fundamental liberties (civil or human) is at risk here, only now. Sporadic attention is given to the relationships between pharmaceutical companies, the BMGF and governmental as well as international entities, e.g. WHO. This reporting is easily dismissed by a population that has been immunised to such reporting, pre-emptively since the introduction of such communication concepts as “fake news”. The developments in digital and especially internet-based mass communications have reinforced the belief that technology is independent and that science and what is called knowledge is not only independent but also inevitable in form and substance. We have internalised the beliefs in our own domination so that we cannot conceive it as domination at all. A sentimental reference to lost or endangered liberties is really a distraction from the problems at hand, even if such “liberties” may be part of the heritage we honestly want to save from destruction.
The long-term perspective is missing because it is difficult to render comprehensible. John Maynard Keynes was to have said, “in the long term we are all dead.” Yet by mimicking the news cycle, grasping for some novelty or titillation, and omitting the redundancies of historical context, writers and speakers with ambitions to overcome the propaganda barriers to political activism are unlikely to reach anyone but the converted.
In my February article Re-Orientation, I tried to give the emerging crisis, nominally triggered by the viral incidents in Wuhan, China, some of the historical context which even alternative media in their addiction to the “fear mongering news cycle” are wont to report. The first point is that there is no true, undeniable “origin”. We have to start with a problem and then draw on numerous sources and observations– research– to define the problem by giving it a context into which the history flows. We create a history by the way we define the problem. The origin is in fact the beginning—the value we pursue in uncovering events and translating them into fields of action rather than frustration.
You can read the rest of this article in the below link:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/aldous-huxley-programme/5718117
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