Brave New World and UFOs
Copyright 2018, InterAmrica, Inc.
In the anti-Facebook link (for NYRB reviews) I provided the
other day, was a note by reviewer David Oshinsky that David Postman, the author
of Amusing Ourselves to Death, wrote “that Aldous Huxley, not Orwell,
portrayed the dsytopia most relevant to our age”; that is, it’s not censorship
or repression that disturbs society today but distraction and diversion:
entertainment and nonsense like that which engulfs Facebookers.
Of course Oshinsky via Portman is referring to Huxley’s
great, prescient book, neglected by millennials and the rest of us pretty much,
although it has been a mainstay for me since high school. The use of Soma (in
the novel) is like the bane of drugs that my pal Bryan Sentes promotes
one way or another.
And the books genetic engineering plus a lot of other
elements that, written in 1931, show Huxley to have had a better take on where
society was going than Orwell delineated.
What has this to do with UFOs?
It’s my plaint that UFO enthusiasts have supplanted their
interest in UFOs, the phenomenon, in order to grab “Likes” on Facebook and
attention to themselves by exploiting the craziest of ideas about UFOs, such as
the ETH, Disclosure, and the idea that every weird thing that shows up in the
world is connected to one source, a paranormal overlord, as it were.
The interest in UFOs has been supplanted by a need to be
entertained, the phenomenon, itself, a prop in that banal desire.
Books, blogs, Facebook and internet sites are all stuffed
with crazy or whimsical ideologies that don’t explain or elucidate UFOs but,
rather, give the phenomenon an aura of sensory gratification not unlike Soma or
Bryan Sentes’ hallucinogenic Eleusianic bliss.
UFOs are not a serious matter to be discussed or debated.
The phenomenon has become a topic for foolish glee, as when my pal Zoam Chomsky
tries to derail its reality with silly broadsides or Robbie Graham plays with
the fictional depictions of the phenomenon.
Human beings have been seduced by puerile streaming TV shows
and movies. And UFO aficionados (me, included) have abandoned reasoned
discourse for entertaining tid-bits about UFOs.
The subject, while an object or ridicule for most of its
life, has now been relegated to scorn by almost everyone, forcing those who
still appreciate the phenomenon to join in the merryment with presentations to
satiate the need for entertainment that has attained the overwhelming status
that Huxley predicted in his eminent book.
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Saturday, October 13, 2018
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