Huxley's Island and Consumer Society #078
Aldous Huxley's Vision of an Ideal Society
Aldous Huxley, a famous writer of the mid-20th century, wrote a book called "Island" in which he describes his ideal society. One thing that this society does is it has solved all its material problems. It has also solved the problems of pollution and environmental destruction.
The person who is shipwrecked there comes as a guest and is welcomed into the society. People explain to him how it works. He asks, "How does this work? How did you solve all these problems?"
And the local explains, "Solving them was not difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. We've managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to overconsume. We don't give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don't hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally, we don't spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War II armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence. These are three pillars of wisdom: prosperity if war, waste, and money lenders were abolished, you would collapse. And this is very true in a way, right? That our capitalism has given us many great things and has given us a life that's very easy, but it comes at a cost. And we often don't see the cost, and we often tend to forget the cost. And the cost is all this environmental destruction that we cause to the world of our children.
The Dangers of Planned Obsolescence
One thing that is particularly dangerous, of course, and Huxley already mentions it in the 1950s or 60s, is planned obsolescence. This is the idea that we buy something and a short while later, the company that makes it does not support it anymore, like an iPad or iPhone that after 3 years is not supported. Or these lamps, these light bulbs that burn out after a few hundred uses, while we know actually there is a light bulb that burns now for over a century, and you can look it up in Wikipedia—the Centennial Light Bulb. And so we know that we could make things that last longer, but we don't want to for the sake of profit. But most of us are not profiting; who is profiting are very few people, and we are all paying the price for that.
