Description
This book suggests that we are racing toward the hair-raising worlds envisioned by two Englishmen. I refer, of course, to George Orwell's brutish, all-seeing dictatorship of 1984, and the more distant, far more sophisticated dictatorship of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with its human hatcheries, personality molding and enticing use of drugs.
The People Shapers is about current factual developments worldwide. It is not confined to the strategies of human engineers in America or the Soviet Union; British scientists and technologists are in the forefront in pioneering a number of the new techniques for reshaping man.
This is true, for example, of innovations to modify our biological make-up. It was primarily Britons who broke the genetic code. And it is Britons who are far advanced in test-tube creation of humans, in pre-sexing babies, in transplanting embryos, in freezing embryos, in cell fusion, in greatly extending human life span. The first cloning to create worldwide attention was done at Oxford University.
Just as the Industrial Revolution was especially British so too is today's Biological Revolution. Historian Donald Fleming says that this current Biological Revolution is likely to be as decisive for the history of the next 150 years as the Industrial Revolution has been for the period since 1750.
A number of the innovations for manipulating behavior, however, have been, up to now, peculiarly American. These are described in the early part of this book. I refer to attempts at behavior modification by conditioning techniques, using drugs to pacify school children and prisoners, using electricity to modify our moods and personality, use of surgery to alter personality, use of hidden TV cameras and vast computers to maintain surveillance of the populace, use of subliminal stimulation to sell products, use of drugs to modify intelligence. Possibly Americans would be more likely than the British to make plans to put transmitters on people they want to keep track of.
ISBN:0708813887
