Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as I think it was Metternich said many years ago, ‘you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.’ If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, its exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy (who have always existed and presumably will always exist) to get people to love their servitude. This is the . . . ultimate in malevolent revolutions….
Aldous Huxley, speech,“The Ultimate Revolution,” March 20, 1962.
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Aldous Huxley
