This Is How PLEASURE is Used to CONTROL Humanity | Aldous Huxley

Описание: Twentieth-century political thought underwent a profound transformation, shifting the analysis of power from visible coercion to the invisible mechanisms of psychological and social adaptation. Within this framework, Aldous Huxley's work occupies a central place. Published in 1931, Brave New World offered an early critique of a model of domination based not on violence, but on the scientific management of life, desires, and emotions. Social stability no longer depended on punishment, but on the production of adapted individuals who accept the existing order because their aspirations have been predetermined.

This insight resonates with an older tradition. In the sixteenth century, Étienne de La Boétie had raised the issue of voluntary servitude, noting that power is sustained by the active cooperation of those who obey. Huxley revisits this question within a context marked by the rise of experimental psychology, behaviorism, and mass communication technologies, where obedience ceases to be based on fear and comes to rely on satisfaction, habit, and educational normalization.

Throughout the 20th century, the expansion of media, the medicalization of distress, and the centrality of consumption transformed the experience of freedom. The control of attention, the artificial elimination of suffering, and social fragmentation produced functional individuals, but ones increasingly less capable of sustained critical reflection. In this process, the figure of the citizen shifted toward that of the consumer, and political participation was replaced by the private management of well-being.

The convergence between these historical dynamics and the figure of the “last man” formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche reveals a form of domination characterized by its silent effectiveness. Freedom does not disappear through prohibition, but through a loss of relevance, when the social order succeeds in making conformity feel like fulfillment and obedience cease to be perceived as such.