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Thoughts

I really enjoyed it. Those Huxley’s sure have, for better or for worse, a way with words. This was written by Aldous’ brother, Julian Huxley, and has the same “I’m warning you, but with the blueprints of what I’m working on mentality of Brave New World.”

In a mere 9 pages there are a plethora of topics covered, vaguely disguised in a darkest Africa story.

!! SPOILER ALERT !!

The first things we see, that are noteworthy at least, are the genetic engineer animals. This gives way, at first through allusion and later explicitly, to engineered humans: babies injected with hormones to make them dwarfs or giants.

Next, through a series of experiments, the narrator reveals that a kind of mass telepathy had been discovered. Initially this is used to induce a simple hypnosis in individuals, causing them to take parlor trick commands: dance like a chicken and the like.

Eventually it is found that the hypnosis can be more effective with groups, leading to a super-consciousness among the tribe. As the process is improved the range increases to subsume the entire nation.

These experiments are conducted under the guise of religion. Tissue-cultures allow for a closer ancestor worship and hypnosis can allow the entire population to engage in a collective prayer.

The scientists doing these experiments discover that tinfoil hats provide protection from the mass hypnosis. Noting this they attempt an escape, putting everyone to hypnotically induced sleep before running away. One of them does not make it. After discarding their tinfoil hats he is overcome by a hypnotic message to return to the tribe. The other, now back in London ends the tale with a warning of how the pursuit of science may lead to disastrous unintended consequences.

!! END SPOILERS !!

If you are either aware of the manipulation that occurs through the hypnotic medium of television, Internet, and the like, or are a naive Aldous Huxley fan, you’ll enjoy this story.

Table of Contents

• 01: The Tissue-Culture King

• Republished Amazing Stories Volume 02 Number 05 in 1927.

• Originally published in Yale Review in 1926.

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· 01: The Tissue-Culture King

page 39:

• Rockefeller Institute

page 40:

• according to the law, once children were twenty-five years of age, they were not only assigned the duty of worshiping their ancestors, alive or dead, but. were also given complete control over them,

page 41:

• by repeated injections of pre-pituitary, I could make an ordinary baby grow up into a giant.

page 42:

• experiments which most excited his imagination were those he was conducting into mass telepathy.

• collective hypnosis

• He soon established that the people were, as a race, extremely prone to dissociation, and could be made to lapse into deep hypnosis with great ease

• the hypnotized minds were reinforcing each other. “I’m after the super-consciousness," Hascombe said, “and I’ve already got the rudiments of it.”

• we found that with increasing reinforcement, we could get telepathy conducted to greater and greater distances, until finally we could transmit commands from the capital to the national boundary, nearly a hundred miles. We next found that it was not necessary for the subject to be in hypnosis to receive the telepathic command. Almost everybody, but especially those of equable temperament, could thus be influenced.

page 43:

• Haseombe, with the old Tibetan prayer-wheel at the back of his mind, suggested that eventually he would be able to induce hypnosis in the whole population, and then transmit a prayer.

• through this mental machinery, planting such ideas as he wished in the brain-cases of his people. He saw himself willing an order; and the whole population rousing itself out of trance to execute it. He dreamt dreams before which those of the proprietor of a newspaper syndicate, even those of a director of propaganda in wartime, would be pale and timid.

• “…You can then get a battery of two hundred men, and after you have tuned them, the reinforcement will be so great that you will have at your disposal a mental force big enough to affect the whole population. Then, of course, one fine day we should raise the potential of our mind-battery to the highest possible level, and send out through it a general hypnotic influence. The whole country, men, women, and children, would sink into stupor. Next we should give our experimental squad the suggestion to broadcast ‘sleep for a week.’ The telepathic message would be relayed to each of the thou- sands of minds waiting receptively for it, and would take root in them, until the whole nation became a single super-consciousness, conscious only of the one thought ‘sleep’ which we had thrown into it.”

• caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves.

page 44:

• I was tormented by doubts as to whether the knowledge of mass-telepathy would not be a curse rather than a blessing to mankind.

• Besides, old men like sermonizing and you must forgive, gentle reader, the sermonical turn which I now feel I must take. The question I want to raise is this: Dr. Haseombe attained to an unsurpassed power in a number of the applications of science— but to what end did a-U this power serve? It is the merest cant and twaddle to go on asserting, as most of our press and people continue to do, that increase of scientific knowledge and power must in itself be good. I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power which is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work.