Bill Wilson

In its May 13, 1957 issue, Life ran a feature called "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." R. Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan Vice-President, and his wife, recounted their 1955 visionary adventures among "psilocybe cultists in darkest Mexico."

Huxley called Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA " the greatest social architect of our time." Syanon, a revolutionary rehabilitation program using AA, was founded in Ocean Park, California by Chuck Dederich in 1958 and spread as drug use expanded.

In his Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley in 1958 described a society in which war had been eliminated and where "the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble." He described a likely future: "The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep teaching . . ." He predicted non-violent tyranny: "Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; and quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

In 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote a diatribe against overpopulation and overconsumption. His comment about Aryan drug use as part of an elite religious ceremony seems to be historic in nature. There was a priesthood that was very knowledgeable about the effects of drugs. The Isis cult seems to have also used drugs in its productions. Hitler thought he talked to "the evil one" while on a mescaline trip. When alone or with his inner circle, did he engage in religious ceremonies, evocations or incantations? Or did they use drugs to get "high?" The Huxley quote does suggest drugs and religious worship were connected as early as the Aryan conquest of India. The word "Iran" derives from "Aryan."

In Brave New World Revisited Huxley contested Orwell: "George Orwell's 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931, systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984."

Bill Wilson

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