Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920)

https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/364/686/Pleasures.html

by waihtis • 2 years ago

209 111 2 years ago

hackneybooks.co.uk

boomskats• 2 years ago

Note that this was probably written in 1923 rather than 1920, if the second paragraph is anything to go by.

"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."

Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.

zer00eyz9• 2 years ago

Considering how complacent everyone got in the interwar period about what was going on... I dont think any one at that point in time thought they would do it all over again, 20 years later, with Germany.

randomburner992• 2 years ago

Incorrect on multiple grounds, the first being that the Nazis were in part a reaction against the kind of society that Huxley sees developing.

mantas• 2 years ago

It aged very well looking at what was coming 100 years down the line.

tryauuum• 2 years ago

This aged fine. Any war eventually ends but the stream of "the effortless pleasures" will be present in each day

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

Eh, is it a matter of aging? WW1 would be fresh in people’s minds… it seems like a bad quote then, too. I bet, for example, any reader who’d been in a trench for a week long bombardment would take the record player instead.

It seems like a surprisingly weak essay, from an otherwise pretty thoughtful guy.

gatane• 2 years ago

"Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone."

"Kids these days bad, older times good!" - as far as humanity has existed.

randomburner992• 2 years ago

Yes, that is how decline works. Technology constantly makes life easier: does this mean "better"? In a sense, yes. But the mind tends to atrophy.

rexpop• 2 years ago

Have we been in decline for 2,500 years?[0]

0. https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...

stavros2• 2 years ago

Things atrophy for good reason: Because you don't need to use them.

Nothing atrophies when it's needed.

zitterbewegung• 2 years ago

As he population has grown with the respect to the existence of recorded music less and leee people are encouraged to even make their own music than to play songs that are done by the best.

I can play the piano and I can done some improvisation but, everyone doesn’t care about my improv because I’m not good enough but frequently you will get famous song is asked to be played live.

vonjuice• 2 years ago

There should be a collective shift towards making art for art itself, and for one self, in the same way that yoga and meditation are encouraged.

Comparing end products and foregoing the process itself, people don't know what they're throwing out.

empath-nirvana3• 2 years ago

There's more original music released now than ever before.

lm28469• 2 years ago

It's as dumb as saying: everything new is "progress" and "progress" is always good. Which is apparently the main religion for a good 150 years

tasuki• 2 years ago

To be fair, he also mentioned ancient Romans as people who indulged in too much consumptive activities and not enough creative ones.

It's not about old vs new, it's about consumption vs creation.

zer00eyz9• 2 years ago

> Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of "pleasure"; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.

I adore Huxley. Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Those Barren Leaves...

I think the overmedication facet of Brave New World is so very true. We know we have an opioid problem because people are addicted and then dying. I think it would be naive to think that we aren't doing the same with everything in psychopharmacology.

whaleofatw2022• 2 years ago

Agree on some level.

Over my life I have found that some things, yes I do need medication for, but I -personally- do not need anti depressants to be happy...

However people in society increasingly take the view of 'you need medication' rather than "maybe when this person tells me what is bothering them I should reflect on if I'm contributing to the problem"

zer00eyz9• 2 years ago

I begrudge no one their medication.

I have been blessed with some very dear friends over my life. My first brush with the ills of psychopharmacology was with a woman I knew whose mother had just passed. I went to visit her a few days after the funeral and she was rather spry. I, being a man of little regard for my own well being asked the probing question "You seem rather upbeat". It was met with a resounding "I know, and I can't even cry". She removed prozac from her life shortly after, went through a bought of horrid depression (putting off processing things means you pay later). Today she's happy, bright and successful...

I have a current friend who is "suffering from anxiety and depression". Her life is hard, for a number of reasons. Medication makes her "happy" and she does not address the structural issues in her life. You can't help those who wont help themselves, I get that. But if you dont feel the pain how do you know to pull back from the fire.

lannisterstark2• 2 years ago

Eh I don't know. Sometimes people do a lot of what you say "ohyou don't need medication" when in reality, if they did, they wouldn't be here in this condition and it wouldn't get this worse.

There exist plenty of I don't like taking medicine people.

conradev• 2 years ago

Have you read Island? It lays out Aldous’ idea of utopia, and it’s pretty compelling

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

You have to appreciate the chutzpah of Huxley, writing this sort of eutopian novel after his dystopian one. Anybody can complain, it is much harder to suggest something radically different that you think is better.

CTDOCodebases6• 2 years ago

Pleasure does not exist in the absence of pain.

It’s the avoidance of pain that is the problem.

Hit-squad-175• 2 years ago

huytersd• 2 years ago

4 years into my early retirement. It’s goddamn heaven. That saying is for mice.

cassepipe2• 2 years ago

This is nonsense

The main guideline of my thirty years on this earth has been to optimize for least pain and and I have been blessed with much more joy than I believe the average Joe experiences. I can assure you the curious mind, when unencumbered by crippling pain, will find in a lifetime's worth of enthusiasm for life.

reaperman2• 2 years ago

Pleasure and pain are not different directions along the same vector. They are two entirely different vectors.

senthil_rajasek• 2 years ago

"But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of "pleasure" "

I would like to hear that from a real government employee or any employee who has no other choice but to HAVE a job...

Hit-squad-175• 2 years ago

I love not having to work .

Although it sucks to not have a pension

zer00eyz9• 2 years ago

>> I would like to hear that from a real government employee or any employee who has no other choice but to HAVE a job...

I think you missed the point of the essay if this is your response. He calls out actual toil later on.

empath-nirvana3• 2 years ago

I love Huxley, but this essay is just an especially well written example of an old man yelling at clouds, which is funny, because he was still in his 20s when he wrote it.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 2 years ago

On the other hand, maybe it would have been better to devote more effort to pleasure.

In a few years from when it was written, Germany would be devoting the full power of a modern industrial economy, not to pleasure but to wipe out undesirable people.

They would is the newly developing field of electronic data processing, not for pleasure to to better target people for death.

Planes would be built not for people to travel on vacation, but to drop bombs.

Factories would work around the clock, not producing goods for pleasure, but weapons of death.

The greatest group of geniuses ever assembled, would be given an unlimited budget not to develop new forms of pleasure but to develop a weapon that could vaporize an entire city in a few seconds.

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

Store-bought pleasure, the opiate of the elite?

al_borland• 2 years ago

I have to believe there is a middle ground between devoting life to pleasure and trying to exterminate a race of people. That middle ground is most of what we call life today.

cyber_kinetist• 2 years ago

No need for a middle ground; why not both? (ex. the US)

dansiemens• 2 years ago

In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions - distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort

This feels true in some sense for every generation; bemoaning the insolence of the current youth feels like a rite of passage. However, it also seems true that the youth of today have a lower barrier of access to “pleasure” than any other humans in history.

rwasco• 2 years ago

This is a natural conseqence of copyright law. It is hard for local talent to compete against unnatural monopolies. We subsidized mass produced media at the expense of decentralized talent.

zibzob• 2 years ago

I might be missing your point, but I'm not sure abolishing copyright would make much of a difference, in terms of increasing the number of people who can professionally make media. Supply and demand doesn't work properly in mass media, because one movie can supply the demand of everybody in the entire world, pretty much. We don't need a singer in every town, we only need a handful of talented people who can supply the music demands for everybody in the world - it doesn't really matter who they are. I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's how I generally feel about it.

(Having said that, this article is pretty much "old man yells at cloud" for me.)

Super_Jambo• 2 years ago

If you didn't have copyright people could remix stuff I guess?

parentheses2• 2 years ago

Huxley was talking about a time when most work was manual labor (tend the farm, smith the axe). While there was an intellectual element it was imbued into the physical aspect of the work. Today, work is more intellectual. It makes complete sense that pleasures are not so much so.

It's a great abstract discussion. Increases in technology have made it possible to use human intellect to move society forward, but also make pleasure that much easier to attain.

I don't really have a point here but I find the topic very amusing to think about. I feel guilty watching hours of TV during the week to unwind. At the same time, it helps me to relax. Pleasure that comes from physical work seems to always have a greater positive outcome for me. OTOH, mental pleasure sense to leave me depleted even more so. TV is an interesting mental pleasure that does help.

stana• 2 years ago

"menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history"

Any context why 1918 peace would be considered 'stupid'?

ido• 2 years ago

Maybe forcing debilitating repartitions? In retrospect we know it was part of the cause for the rise of the Nazis.

shiroiushi2• 2 years ago

That alone wasn't the cause: what enabled their success (as far as their ability to rebuild their war machine) was the ineffectiveness of the enforcement of those reparations, and the victors simply allowing the German economy to build more war materiel. Debilitating reparations can be done, but you have to maintain military power and use it to prevent the losing nation from refusing to pay, or building up its military again. The victors failed to do this and the result was another war. Honestly, I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's like throwing people in prison with hard labor for a crime, and then leaving the prison doors and gates wide open and firing all the prison guards and expecting the inmates to not escape.

maxilevi• 2 years ago

The intention of the treaty of Versailles wasn’t to make a peaceful Europe

dudul• 2 years ago

2 things come to mind:

The astronomical reparations Germany had to pay.

The lands taken from Germany ended up creating pockets of German speaking areas in surrounding countries. This was an amazing opportunity for the nazis to claim these lands and set up false flags operations.

kosolam• 2 years ago

Here are the key points I took away from the excerpt of "Pleasures" by Aldous Huxley:

- Huxley argues that the real threat to modern civilization is not external dangers like war, but the "auto-intoxication" of mindless pleasures and distractions.

- He contends that pleasures and entertainments have become progressively more passive and devoid of intellectual effort. People now soak up ready-made distractions like movies, radio, and newspapers without thinking.

- Huxley criticizes the sterility and sameness of modern distractions. The same movies and dances are consumed everywhere without local variation.

- He sees the proliferation of effortless distractions as promoting boredom, atrophy of the mind, and decline of civilization.

- The essay ends with a warning that the bored populace may eventually demand ever more violent entertainments, as happened in decadent Rome. Huxley fears we may "live to see blood flowing across the stage."

QuantumG2• 2 years ago

Kill Bill was good actually.

Hit-squad-175• 2 years ago

I tried to watch it a couple times . Thought it Sucked.

Maybe I just was not ready .... I'll give it one more try someday .

Same thing w LOST IN TRANSLATION.... Second try , turned out good.

samplatt• 2 years ago

American Football today is almost as dangerous as the sport in Rollerball (1975). This is probably a better comparison to Roman circuses than Kill Bill.

Hit-squad-175• 2 years ago

Thank you

sixhobbits2• 2 years ago

Thanks GPT

redthrow• 2 years ago

I haven't read it but Steven Johnson wrote a book that argued the opposite:

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non-fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it details Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television programs and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making society as a whole more intelligent, contrary to the perception that modern electronic media are harmful or unconstructive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y...

ceasesurthinko• 2 years ago

Yeah I don't think Mr. Johnson foresaw TikTok.

echtroipolemos2• 2 years ago

"Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility."

This is the Cartesian distinction between understanding and imagination. Imagination requires a peculiar effort of the soul, which AI is unable to exert. Understanding is knowing that a triangle's interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Imagination is understanding that and being able to represent the image in your mind.

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

I was thinking that, perhaps, the better people feel, the more empowered, energetic and ambitious they become.

da39a3ee• 2 years ago

The horrors of modern "pleasure" arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.

Fuck me, imagine what he'd say if he had a silicon valley programming job and had to put up with HR-organized online parties and friends wearing animal onesies at social events.

chapulin• 2 years ago

“No participation”—-spot on. The brain evolved for social learning.

sosodev• 2 years ago

To me it seems like this paper reveals two truths.

1) Many people are happy living life and never exercising their brain.

2) Some people, like Aldous, are not. Instead they choose to more often than not.

I suspect that this has been true for a very long time. It also seems less frightening than he is making it out to be. Assuming the ratio of critical thinkers remains roughly the same then the world should continue to get objectively better, right?

_ea1k• 2 years ago

I find it interesting how accurately this sums up the press. It is a facade of informing, but ultimately just entertainment.

I wouldn't have expected it to have been viewed that way back in 1920.

dkalola• 2 years ago

This essay by Huxley said exactly what I have always felt but never articulated. The problem is far worse today than it was in his time. So much of recreation today consists of binge-watching Netflix. In addition, because Netflix has global reach, the world often watches the same content, devoid of local meaning.

I have realized that active recreation, although requiring overcoming a certain threshold of activation energy, is far more compelling and fulfilling than passive recreation.

jacknews• 2 years ago

"To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open."

lol, still so true.

SergeAx• 2 years ago

Treaty of Versailles turned out to be a real menace to civilization, BTW.

lynx23• 2 years ago

Karl Kraus saw it coming. Huxley apparently not so much.

devilcius• 2 years ago

It reminds me of an advertising sign I once saw outside a store, which read "Movies, Couch, and Ice Cream." It seemed to me like an apt epitaph for our civilization.

justanotherjoe• 2 years ago

Maybe we shouldn't focus so much on predictions made in 1920. Surely living in the future, allows us to have a better understanding than Aldous Huxley ever could?

sixhobbits2• 2 years ago

Interesting that 100 years later I think

has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well

applies to the 'dumb pleasure seeking' he warns about in this article too. Society has not collapsed and in spite of pleasure-at-the-push-of-a-button being more than Huxley could ever have imagined and

the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom

still being an ever-present topic

I think the 'bark worse than bite' still holds, for now..

radiator• 2 years ago

To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.

Wow this is exactly true today, more than one hundred years later.

r0s• 2 years ago

Sports are the metaphor. Regular people intellectualize the game and are derided.

No one needs to fight, we can all see the game happening. We incorporate all the functions of pleasure into our identity.

Huxley cant recognize the social progress, calling it dumb. Smug enough to be funny, oblivious to the irony.

echtroipolemos2• 2 years ago

"There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world."

Not only did Orwell predict the total surveillance state, but his French teacher Huxley foreshadowed the necessity of the opioid crisis in maintaining the existence of such a society.

srid• 2 years ago

‘One summer day, 40 years ago or so, I was walking along a residential street when an rich, earthy scent wafted my way and triggered, as smells are wont to do, a vivid recollection. Like Dorothy, stepping out of her front door into the Technicolor Land of Oz, I remembered another summer’s day when I was 4 years old, playing in a bank of warm, black dirt in the back yard of my home. I had a little red toy car for which I’d made a road slanting up the face of the dirt bank and, in my recollection, I was ‘driving’ the car up this mountain road while making motor noises. That’s all there was, no real action, yet the memory, in the few seconds before it faded away, was redolent with the smell and feel of the warm dirt, the bright colour of the toy, the hot sun – with simple but intensely pleasurable sensory experience. When I read Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience, of his feeling that the colours, shapes, and textures of his books on the shelves across the room were as intense an experience as he could bear and that he dared not look outside at the flowers in the garden, I thought of my brief revisitation of my childhood’.

-- Chapter 1, ‘Happiness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment’; David Lykken.

DavidPiper• 2 years ago

And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought.

Welp, time for a re-read of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Pretty sure Neil Postman quotes Brave New World at least once.

Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920)

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