Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by smallerdemon 843 days ago
"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."

Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.

5 comments

Considering how complacent everyone got in the interwar period about what was going on... I dont think any one at that point in time thought they would do it all over again, 20 years later, with Germany.
This aged fine. Any war eventually ends but the stream of "the effortless pleasures" will be present in each day
It aged very well looking at what was coming 100 years down the line.
Eh, is it a matter of aging? WW1 would be fresh in people’s minds… it seems like a bad quote then, too. I bet, for example, any reader who’d been in a trench for a week long bombardment would take the record player instead.

It seems like a surprisingly weak essay, from an otherwise pretty thoughtful guy.

Incorrect on multiple grounds, the first being that the Nazis were in part a reaction against the kind of society that Huxley sees developing.