The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. But security tends very quickly to be taken for granted. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence for the sake of brevity, I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers will succeed in solving the problem of permanent security. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call "the problem of happiness" - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. 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. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.
And the modern pedagogue is probably rather less efficient at conditioning his pupils' reflexes than were the reverend fathers who educated Voltaire. The old Jesuits' boast that, if they were given the schooling of the child, they could answer for the man's religious opinions, was a product of wishful thinking. But their methods are still crude and unscientific. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news- paper editors and schoolteachers. 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 be coerced, because they love their servitude. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. The general concept of "A system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, slaves would love their servitude" dates back to Juvenal, back in Roman times:
The word "dictator" does not appear in the actual text, but in my edition it does occur in the end material:īut if this were so, I'd suspect the usage of "The perfect dictatorship" would still date back to Vargas Llosa It is quite possible that it appears in a modern edition in the introduction or notes written by someone else. We know the Huxley quote is fake because it does not appear on the internet before 2014, and of course does not appear in Brave New World. Here's a more detailed account of what Vargas Llosa said in 1990, in Spanish: I suspect the fake Huxley quote is a corruption of that.
"It may not seem to be a dictatorship, but it has all of the characteristics of a dictatorship the perpetuation, not of one person, but of an irremovable party, a party that allows sufficient space for criticism, provided such criticism serves to maintain the appearance of a democratic party, but which suppresses by all means, including the worst, whatever criticism may threaten its perpetuation in power."” “ IN 1991, PERUVIAN NOVELIST MARIO VARGAS LLOSA scandalized the Mexican political establishment by describing Mexico as "the perfect dictatorship." "The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba, but Mexico, because it is a camouflaged dictatorship," he argued.