Friday, November 03, 2017
Lovely all the time
I was reading this ZH piece on experiments to eliminate normal human emotions. Everything in ZH is sensationalized, but this is unfortunately sober and serious, though peculiarly translated.
One paragraph:
These experiments were apparently famous 'stunts' published in the London Daily Mirror by T. Thorne Baker. The girl is Baker's daughter Yvonne.
Transcribing part of it verbatim:
Little Yvonne, after the experiment, gave her impressions to the photographer. ... "I felt lovely all the time. It made me feel very happy. I should have liked to go to sleep there, it was so comfortable. I love having 'lectric currents."
Huxley also transcribed this form of speech verbatim. (Roof! Oh Roof!) Considering the popularity and the location and time, I'll bet this was part of his inspiration. The assembly-line irradiation of babies also sounds mighty familiar.
Oxytocin suits this purpose very well as this hormone raises the emotional well-being, it so to say oh-so humane. Like Aldous Huxley’s soma in his book Brave New World. The human being with his biologically-driven likes and dislikes is not to be tolerated, he must be changed. By ideological interaction or by chemistry. He must not be left alone. He must accept what he does not like not merely passively. He must be made to like what he previously disliked.Then I opened an issue of American Radio History's latest find, Popular Electricity, June 1912, and immediately hit this:
These experiments were apparently famous 'stunts' published in the London Daily Mirror by T. Thorne Baker. The girl is Baker's daughter Yvonne.
Transcribing part of it verbatim:
Little Yvonne, after the experiment, gave her impressions to the photographer. ... "I felt lovely all the time. It made me feel very happy. I should have liked to go to sleep there, it was so comfortable. I love having 'lectric currents."
Huxley also transcribed this form of speech verbatim. (Roof! Oh Roof!) Considering the popularity and the location and time, I'll bet this was part of his inspiration. The assembly-line irradiation of babies also sounds mighty familiar.Labels: defensible spaces, switchover
¶ 11:28 PM
