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Foreword

The soul of wit ant and s, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification Omission and sim­plification help us to understand — but help us, in ; for our compre­hension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly for reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted

But life is short and infor In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to h intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignor­ing tooside issues In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important sub­ject is incoerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought

The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem Each aspect may have been some­what over-simplified in the exposition; but these successive over-siives soinal

O unimportant, but merely for convenience and because I have dis­cussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical and military enemies of freedothened the hands of the world's rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars The chapters that follow should be read against a background of thoughts about the Hungarian uprising and its re­pression, about H-bombs, about the cost of what every nation refers to as "defense," and about those endless colu obediently toward the corave

I Over-Population

In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of tianized society, the scientific caste sys­te, the servitude ular doses of chehtly courses of sleep-teaching — these things were coht, but not in et the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World ; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century AF (After Ford) We ere living in the second quarter of the twentieth century AD were the inhabitants, adhtmare of those depression years was radically different frohtmare of the fu­ture, described in Brave New WorldOurs was a night­mare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century AF, of toofro interval, so I i which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds — the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative

Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century AD, and long before the end of the first century AF, I feel a good deal less opti Brave New WorldThe prophecies ht they would The blessed interval between too little order and the night In the West, it is true, individual e measure of freedom But even in those coun­tries that have a tradition of deovernment, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane In the rest of the world freedoone, or is anization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has e us, just around the next corner

George Orwell's 1984 was a nified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinis of Nazism Brave New World ritten before the rise of Hitler to supreot into his stride In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contem­porary fact which it had becoinary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell In the context of 1948, 1984 see But tyrants, after all, are e Recent developy have robbed Orwell's book of soruesome verisimilitude A nuclear ill, of course,for the mo us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds werelike Brave New World than of so like 1984

In the light of e have recently learned about anieneral, and human behavior in particular, it has becoh the punish run, than control through the rein­forceovernovernh the non-violent hts and feelings of individual men, women and children Pun­ishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behav­ior, but does not pere in it Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has been pun­ished Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the de­bilitating or anti-social consequences of past punish­ments

The society described in 1984 is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishinary world of enerally overnment is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable be­havior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent enetic standardization Babies in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps i ti at randoenetic standardization may be ruled out Societies will continue to be controlled post-natally — by punish extent by the more effective methods of reward and scientific manipulation