At The Edge

"The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope...we no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige." ~ Vance Packard  Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World Revisited: "Most cosmetics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up to an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, does not become rancid and mildly antiseptic. But commercial propagandists do not speak of the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some voluptuous name, talk misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. Cosmetic manufacturers do not sell lanolin, they are selling hope. For this hope, propagandists have so skillfully related to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish - the wish to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. W...

I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair -- how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes -- or was it several centuries? -- not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them -- -or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. - Aldous Huxley thought this up after ingesting psychedelic Mescaline and these words found their way to his 'The Doors of Perception' (1954) whose title comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:  "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all thin...

The Machiavelli of the mid-20th century will be an advertising man; his Prince , a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time. - Aldous Huxley -0- Any trace of literariness in an advertisement is fatal to its success. Advetisement writers may not be lyrical, or obscure, or in any way esoteric. They must be universally intelligible. A good advertisement has this in common with drama and oratory, that it must be immediately comprehensible and directly moving. - Aldous Huxley, Essays New and Old -0- Aldous Huxley once tried his hand at writing advertisements. Charles Lamb and Byron also did so. So did Bernard Shaw , Hemingway, Marquand , Sherwood Anderson , and Faulkner – none of them with any degree of success. -0- Recommended read: J G Ballard reviewing Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual by Nicholas Murray

It is not the dark authoritarian vision of Orwell’s 1984 that is coming true but that of chilling indulgence adumbrated by Huxley's Brave New World. In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history; people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared no one would want to read one. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us; Huxley feared it would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance; Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared we’d become a trivial one. In Orwell’s prophecy, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Huxley’s by inflicting pleasure.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. ~ Aldous Huxley, Foreword to Brave New World