general

Just some great quotes/passages from a book I ought to have read years ago.

“Hux­ley and Orwell did not proph­esy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be over­come by an exter­nally imposed oppres­sion. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive peo­ple of their auton­omy, matu­rity and his­tory. As he saw it, peo­ple will come to love their oppres­sion, to adore the tech­nolo­gies that undo their capac­i­ties to think.”

and some 40 pages later…

“… As Richard Hof­s­tadter reminds us, Amer­ica was founded by intel­lec­tu­als, a rare occur­rence in the his­tory of mod­ern nations. “The Found­ing Fathers,” he writes, “were sages, sci­en­tists, men of broad cul­ti­va­tion, many of them apt in clas­si­cal learn­ing, who used their wide read­ing in his­tory, pol­i­tics, and law to solve the exi­gent prob­lems of their time. A Soci­ety shaped by such men does not eas­ily move in con­trary direc­tions. We might even say that Amer­ica was founded by intel­lec­tu­als, from which it has taken us two cen­turies and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions rev­o­lu­tion to recover.”

– Neil Post­man, “Amus­ing Our­selves to Death” 1985