Aldous Huxley, author of the famous dystopian novel Brave New World, believed that pleasure was a veritable poison brewing quietly in the belly of modern civilisation.
According to the English writer and philosopher, pleasure these days is akin to a sneaky, silent assassin—looking innocent enough, but deadly as a dose of strychnine in your tea.
Mr. Huxley said the modern world’s take on pleasure was a “horror show”—a cavalcade of increasingly idiotic distractions.
Leisure pleasure was once found in activities that required intellectual effort. In the 17th century, entertainment for the royals was listening to heavy-duty sermons and debates on theology.
And the Elizabethans in their pointy-toed shoes, wouldn’t hesitate to burst into song; their lives a continuous musical in the making.
Yet now colossal corporations spoon-feed us our fun. We live in a world where your average Joe or Jane need not lift a finger, save for the arduous task of popping popcorn into one’s mouth.
A million cinemas regurgitate the same content, turning fourth-rate scribbles into worldwide blockbusters. One need only sit back, eyes glazed, brain disengaged, and soak in the tepid porridge of pop culture.
And music?
Forget strumming a lute or belting out a ballad.
Huxley said that in his time, the populous could simply flick a switch on the gramophone or tune into the “fruity contralto” warbling from Marconi House over the airwaves.
It was all served up on a silver platter, no personal effort, no spark—just a passive consumption of pre-packaged, pre-chewed cultural gristle.
Huxley believed that we were poisoning our minds, one pleasure at a time, without even the joy of concocting our own poison.
He said if the masses craved literature, they had the press—its chief task being much like the cinema’s: to occupy the mind with as little strain as lifting a pint.
One could plow through the daily papers for decades, absorbing the mundane drivel, without ever engaging a single neuron or expending more effort than it takes to trace the words with half an eye.
Dancing, too, remains a universal pastime, yet whether in Penrith or Paris, everyone’s flouncing to the same insipid beats. It’s as if the world’s dances have been washed, scrubbed, and sanitised of any flavour more potent than watered-down porridge.
According to Huxley, this uniform menu of brainless delights and pre-cooked entertainment serves up a more perilous threat to our culture than any marauding hordes from across the English Channel.
The bulk of our waking hours are already squandered on mechanical toil of work that, for some, wouldn’t tax the intelligence of a tea cosy.
Then, come quitting time, we switch to leisure pursuits just as devoid of substance.
Stack up such vapid activities against such mind-numbing work, and you’ve got yourself a perfect day that’s about as refreshing as a slap with a wet fish.
Our civilisation, stewing in this home-brewed tedium, might well stumble into a doddering decline.
Our mental muscles may become as flabby as an unused gym membership, making us grow so dreadfully bored with the cookie-cutter distractions that only the crudest jolts will be able to stir us from our stupor.
Future democracies risk collapsing under the weight of such monstrous ennui, perhaps turning to spectacles as gory as those that thrilled the ancient Romans—those emperors of boredom who cheered for bloodier and barmier shows, like tightrope-walking elephants and exotic beasts facing the butcher.
We could take a leaf out of Huxley’s book whose hobbies read like a syllabus from the University of Everything: Greek history, Polynesian anthropology, translations of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and Chinese, and scientific treatises galore.
Not to mention novels, poems, essays, travelogues, political tirades, and chinwags with everyone from starlets to lunatics and tycoons zooming about in Rolls-Royces.
Quite the buffet compared to the thin gruel served up by our modern purveyors of “pleasure.”
In stark contrast, modern television, as EEG studies have pointed out, turns your brainwaves from the lively beta kind to the drowsy alpha sort.
It’s like switching from a sprightly fox trot to a sluggish sloth crawl, where thinking critically becomes as rare as a truthful politician.
This numbing passivity of our beloved box is a grim show of how just sitting and staring can lead to a mind as engaged as a dozing dormouse.
So perhaps it’s time to use it or lose it and invest in some excellent journalism via a subscription to the Epoch Times.
