Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern.
Assuming, then, that we are capable of learning as much from Hiroshima as our forefathers learned from Magdeburg, we may look forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited and only partially ruinous warfare. During that period it may be assumed that nuclear energy will be harnessed to industrial uses. The result, pretty obviously, will be a series of economic and social changes unprecedented in rapidity and completeness. All the existing patterns of human life will be disrupted and new patterns will have to be improvised to conform with the nonhuman fact of atomic power. Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn't fit- well, that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation--the same sort of stretching and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science really got into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past. These far from painless operations will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian governments. Inevitably so; for the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, and in the immediate past rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to produce economic and social confusion. To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world's governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley
Above quoted from Foreword
"A Brave New World"
interesting how we need so many things now a days. how we are still a product consuming, throw it away driven "mass" of sheep.
how we bury ourselves in "stuff" distracting us from the truly important issues of the care of our hopefully long term existence as a living organism on this planet.
i am not anti-techno, anti-progress in the least. i think Huxley used his extreme imagery to convey his thoughts and fears for our future as a race if we were to allow government and science to dictate how we utilize resources.
my fears are for the ones i meet day in and day out that are so wrapped up in "buying what the "Madison Ave" folks keep pumping out in front of them and the "hiding behind "drugs, alcohol, sex, non-stop rush rush" yet on the other hand rant about the state of our being. how much gas costs yet driving gas hogging vehicles, on and on. they are so clueless.
i have no clue where i am going with this but i do have enough of a clue that sometimes, just sometimes i read something written and am struck by the thought ... well. indeed.
