Huxley's Tyranny of Pleasure

In the brave new world, the antiquated first amendment is eclipsed. Its fear of the tyranny of terror­­demonstrated, for example, by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Espionage Acts of 1917 and 1918, and the McCarthy era­­is overshadowed by a tyranny of pleasure. The Orwellian constraints on physical liberty and ideological freedom constituted "hands­on"' tyranny, but the Huxleyan conception is a "hands­off"' governmental tyranny. Huxley understood tyranny as the product of those "great impersonal forces now menacing freedom,"' ³¹ the "motivation analyst[s]"' ³² who held out the soma tablets.

In an insightful passage particularly applicable to the first amendment, Huxley questioned the outdated eighteenth­century constitutional ideal:

[T]he early advocates of . . . a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies­­the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main with neither the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. ³³

Huxley's depiction of a tyranny of pleasure accurately forecasts the contemporary American culture of commercial television. Huxley realized the connection between commercial television and his antiutopia: "That so many of the well­fed young television­watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self­government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising."' ³⁴

America's primary information medium is also its most popular source of entertainment, its favorite plaything. Metaphorically, television is the soma tablet of modern society.