A Brave New World
A recent move forced me to confront a long overdue purging of my book collection. I paused when Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World found its way to the top of the stack. Although I hadn’t thought about it since high school, I had the intuition that some of Huxley’s concerns for the future might resonate with my own. The excerpt shared below is from an updated 1946 foreword written to revisit and critique his original vision of the future in a world that had experienced significant political and technological changes since the original publishing in 1932:
“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 predominant property-less, 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 the present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.
There is, of course, no reason why new totalitarian regimes should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass incarceration and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane, it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news paper editors and school teachers. […] The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but from refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about the truth. By simply not mentioning subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an ‘iron curtain’ between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.”
-Aldous Huxley, Foreword from A Brave New World 1946
Huxley proposed that chaos and uncertainty make society vulnerable to the siren song of centralizing power. Fear of the unknown inevitably drives people to place faith in a perceived savior often at the helm of an increasingly autocratic organization hoping it will bring stability and order. In the foreword, Huxley’s focus was on technological innovation as the catalyst for this instability. For better or worse, the rate of change of technological disruption has indeed provided a new world for all of us to come to terms with. Innovation, efficiency, access, wealth and comfort come hand in hand with power concentration, censorship, wealth disparity, privacy violations, widespread propaganda, and cyber threats.
While the net effect of technology is perhaps positive, the primary driver of social instability is modern monetary policy within a technologically driven deflationary world. Keynesian economics has turned over the keys to centralized decision makers, where credit creation has been largely politicized. When observed within the context of history, modern western governments possess control comparable to the autocratic and totalitarian governments of the 20th century. Imperial China, CCP, USSR, wartime Germany and Japan to name a few. Our inability to cope with natural market volatility events has programmed us to look to centralized solutions. These policy responses have enacted a feedback loop; ballooning asset prices, incentivizing excessive leverage, socializing risk while privatizing reward, all further eroding market stability. This conspires to create more problems to which we only have one answer: more of the same. The second order social effects of this inequality have expressed themselves in the cultural movements of the past few years. Tragically, capitalizing on fear and frustration often proves too tempting for politicians looking to ensure voter loyalty and further consolidate their base.
Unlike Huxley, who wrote this at the dawn of the computational revolution in 1946, we have the luxury to see how technology can also offer hope in the fight against the slow drift toward authoritarianism. Certain applications of the computational revolution may ensure freedom and individual sovereignty to the people who are curious and brave enough to embrace them. Blockchain enables us to participate in Huxley’s vision of a “decentralized popular movement”, prototypical as it may currently be. A movement that enables transparency, accountability and immutability within economies and communities. A world with pre-established monetary policy, where all participants are held accountable to its rules, and equal in the eyes of its codification. A world where money has a cost of creation in the form of the most basic economic input: energy. Natural monetary policy is expressed by connecting the cost of monetary creation and transmission to the foundational input of inflation. Where cryptography allows people to own and protect their own data. Privacy no longer needs to be sacrificed for convenience. Revealing your identity is no longer required to verify credit scores or KYC/AML procedures.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, the protagonist is brought to trial by its leader, Mustapha Mond. There Mond admits his world is not perfect, and that to ensure stability things like individuality and freedom had to be sacrificed. While the recent trajectory of our world seems to inevitably drift closer to Huxley’s dystopian vision, we know how to change it. His decentralized movement does exist, and along with it the potential salvation of individual sovereignty and freedom. It only comes down to us being brave enough to embrace it.