I am listening to Huxley’s Brave New World while painting this afternoon and was compelled to stop and comment on dystopic visions. I for one often project hopes and mental constructions of utopia, a place where there is little dissention and disorder, rampant happiness and freedom of consciousness. But in all of mysterious ponderings of how any of these possibly positive evolutions of human existence I have to remember the variable that makes it so difficult, what also renders any tyranny based utopias inherently and perpetually disastrous, is that humans need free will. We need options, choices, and cannot, ultimately, be forced by other people into anything. Any attempt to indoctrinate through mandates and absolutes, without the consideration of each and every individual consciousness, even if benevolently intended and practiced, is counterintuitive to the nature of consciousness itself.
However, it does not mean that we are helpless to enact large social change aimed towards individual growth and social harmony together. Peaceful influence, patience, understanding, forgiveness. If humanity is meant to flourish beyond the tyrannies that keep a tiny percent clinging for dear life to hoarding the world’s resources, we need to do so be encouraging as much good behavior and lifestyle choices as possible, and by treating those who could be perceived as our enemies with love. If we use tyranny and violence against the tyrannical and violent we are not changing anything, we are just continuing the cycle which has damned the human legacy.
We can envision a distant utopia where children are raised collectively and indoctrinated with codes and mores but in a way that fosters each child’s connection to consciousness. To make a direct reference to Brave New World, instead of playing hateful and suggestive stimuli to children while they sleep, why not discover the stimuli which most positively and un-invasively stimulates their sleep and dreams? Maybe the evolution and even assimilation of people into a harmonized symbiotic organism comes from a greater connection to the subconscious and dream realms.
Maybe, instead of worrying about classes and segregation, we can give all children a collective chance and nurture each of them in to their best selves while they develop. I believe in Utopia, but I also believe it as an aspiration, a lifestyle. The ends do not justify the means, they are the means. Freedom via murder is murder. Freedom via freedom is freedom. Ok, enough of this for now. Thanks, Aldus…