It Is Important Not To Confuse Freedom

Our Society Tends To Regard As A Sickness Any Mode Of Thought Or Behavior That Is Inconvenient For The System And This Is Plausible Because When An Individual Doesn't Fit Into The System It Causes Pain To The Individual As Well As Problems For The System. Thus The Manipulation Of An Individual To Adjust Him To The System Is Seen As A Cure For A Sickness And Therefore As Good.

It Is Important Not To Confuse Freedom With Mere Permissiveness

To Those Who Think That All This Sounds Like Science Fiction, We Point Out That Yesterday's Science Fiction Is Today's Fact. The Industrial Revolution Has Radically Altered Man's Environment And Way Of Life, And It Is Only To Be Expected That As Technology Is Increasingly Applied To The Human Body And Mind, Man Himself Will Be Altered As Radically As His Environment And Way Of Life Have Been.

Imagine A Society That Subjects People To Conditions That Make Them Terribly Unhappy, Then Gives Them The Drugs To Take Away Their Unhappiness. Science Fiction? It Is Already Happening To Some Extent In Our Own Society... Instead Of Removing The Conditions That Make People Depressed, Modern Society Gives Them Antidepressant Drugs. In Effect, Antidepressants Are A Means Of Modifying An Individual's Internal State In Such A Way As To Enable Him To Tolerate Social Conditions That He Would Otherwise Find Intolerable.

The Industrial-technological System May Survive Or It May Break Down. If It Survives, It May Eventually Achieve A Low Level Of Physical And Psychological Suffering, But Only After Passing Through A Long And Very Painful Period Of Adjustment And Only At The Cost Of Permanently Reducing Human Beings And Many Other Living Organisms To Engineered Products And Mere Cogs In The Social Machine.