Brave
New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, 1958, Excerpts
Ivan Pavlov observed
that, when subjected to prolonged physical or psychic stress, laboratory animals
exhibit all the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. Refusing to cope any longer
with the intolerable situation, their brains go on strike, so to speak, and
either stop working altogether [the dog loses consciousness], or else resort to
slowdowns and sabotage. Some animals are more resistant to stress than others.
But even the most stoical dog is unable to resist indefinitely.
Pavlov’s findings
were confirmed in the most distressing manner, and on a very large scale,
during the two World Wars. As the result of a single catastrophic experience,
or of a succession of terrors less appalling but frequently repeated, soldiers
develop a number of disabling psychophysical symptoms. Temporary
unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis,
completely unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals
of lifelong patterns of behavior – all symptoms, which Pavlov observed in his
dogs, reappeared among the victims of what in the First World War was called
“shell shock,” in the Second, “battle fatigue.” Every man, like every dog, has
his own individual limit of endurance.
Most men reach their
limit after about thirty days or more or less continuous stress under the
conditions of modern combat. The more than averagely susceptible succumb in
only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist for forty-five or
even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All,
that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only
people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are
psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective
insanity.
The fact that every
individual has his breaking point has been known and, in a crude unscientific
way, exploited from time immemorial. Physical torture and other forms of stress
were inflicted by lawyers in order to loosen the tongues of reluctant
witnesses; by clergymen in order to punish the unorthodox and induce them to
change their opinions; by the secret police to extract confessions from persons
suspected of being hostile to the government.
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