Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast

9. Billionaires

9. Huxley and Billionaires Power, technology, artificial intelligence, and the danger of falling asleep at the wheel of civilization. In this episode of Themes and Variations, we return to Aldous Huxley’s novels, as well as Ends and Means, to ask a question that feels urgently contemporary: what would Huxley have made of today’s billionaires? Toby is joined once again by Robin Hull, curator of the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich and author of Aldous Huxley for Beginners, for a wide-ranging conversation about wealth, technology, war, artificial intelligence, and the moral responsibilities of people whose private ambitions can shape public life. The discussion begins with Huxley’s own uneasy relationship to capitalism. As Robin explains, Huxley moved from a youthful, lightly-held Fabian socialism towards what he later called “philosophic anarchism”. He did not reject private property altogether, but he regarded the concentration of “big capital” (such as oil fields, steel plants, heavy industry, weapons production) as a profound danger to humanity. At the same time, he was equally suspicious of state control when it produced bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and the centralised power of the modern war-making nation. This gives us a characteristically Huxleyan tension: capitalism is dangerous when it concentrates power in the hands of plutocrats, but nationalisation and statism can also become dangerous when they concentrate power in the hands of governments. Huxley’s preferred direction, Robin suggests, was towards decentralisation, small-scale organisation, and forms of social life less prone to war, domination, and mass manipulation. The episode then traces what Robin calls a whole “genealogy of billionaires” across Huxley’s work. These figures range from Lord Badgery in “The Tillotson Banquet” and Lord Tantamount in Point Counter Point, to Jo Stoyte in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Henry Ford in Brave New World, Cardinal Richelieu in Grey Eminence, and Joe Aldehyde and Colonel Dipa in Island. Some are self-made empire-builders; others are heirs, patrons, eccentrics, aristocrats, or would-be benefactors. But again and again, Huxley returns to the same psychological problem: enormous wealth tends to magnify the ego. Robin draws on Huxley’s interest in constitutional psychology to describe many of these billionaire figures as “mesomorphs”: power-loving, energetic, dominating, bodily people who relish control. They may not always intend harm. Some of them believe themselves to be improving society, saving nations, advancing science, or making humanity more efficient. But because they remain spiritually “asleep”, or imprisoned within the ego, their dreams become nightmares for everyone else. Huxley’s warning around extreme wealth is subtler than simply condemning billionaires as morally bankrupt. The issue is not merely wealth, but the form of relationship that wealth creates with society. When one person’s vision is backed by enough money, technology, and political leverage, it can become the compulsory reality of millions. Rather than their bad intentions, the problem lies in the dangerous innocence of powerful people who believe their private idea of progress should be imposed on the world. The episode also explores the connection between wealth, technology, and war. Toby links Huxley’s reflections in Ends and Means to the rise of the military-industrial complex, the story of Thomas Watson and IBM, and the role of large-scale technological systems in modern conflict. Robin connects this to Island, where the utopian society of Pala is ultimately destroyed by the combined forces of oil, dictatorship, militarism, and international power politics. Alongside this discussion, Emily and Toby experiment with a Huxley-inspired AI chatbot built using retrieval augmented generation, asking the AI-Huxley what the real Huxley might have said about artificial intelligence, generative AI, and large language models. Its answer is strikingly cautious. It suggests that Huxley would not reject such technologies automatically, but would ask whether they help produce free, conscious individuals, or whether they encourage passivity, dependency, and the mechanisation of human experience. This leads to one of the episode’s central questions: can artificial intelligence be used as a tool for thought without becoming a substitute for thought? Emily and Toby consider both sides. On the one hand, AI can help researchers search across large bodies of text and generate starting points for discussion. On the other, it can tempt us to offload judgement, creativity, and understanding to systems owned by vast corporations whose aims are not necessarily educational, spiritual, or humane. By the end of the episode, Huxley begins to look less like a prophet of one particular dystopia and more like a thinker of systems: systems of money, war, technology, production, communication, bureaucracy, and belief. His deepest concern is not simply that billionaires might be selfish, but that technological civilization might place immense power in the hands of people who have not awakened to themselves. The result is a conversation that brings Huxley directly into dialogue with our own moment: tech billionaires, artificial intelligence, billionaire space fantasies, corporate power, environmental cost, information control, and the strange recurrence of the question Huxley asked throughout his career: do our inventions serve human freedom, or do human beings become the servants of their inventions? Works Mentioned By Aldous Huxley * Ends and Means [https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.12377] (1937) * Mortal Coils [https://archive.org/details/mortalcoils030972mbp], including “The Tillotson Banquet” (1922) * Antic Hay [https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.09670] (1923) * Point Counter Point [https://archive.org/details/pointcounterpoin0000huxl] (1928) * Brave New World [https://archive.org/details/ost-english-brave_new_world_aldous_huxley] (1932) * After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [https://archive.org/details/aftermanysummerd00huxl] (1939) * Grey Eminence [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.237134] (1941) * Ape and Essence [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.182583] (1948) * Island [https://archive.org/details/island0000aldo] (1962) Other works and references * Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.118834] * Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine [https://archive.org/details/b21270557] * Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day [https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1888730M/The_remains_of_the_day] * Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address [https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address] (1961) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com [https://themesandvariations.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

8. Huxley and Pain

In this episode of Themes and Variations, we explore the topic of pain in Huxley’s work, bringing his literary and philosophical reflections together into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience. Emily interviews Ryan O’Shea, a PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, whose work explores religion and pain in literary modernism. The conversation traces how pain shifts across Huxley’s career—from a social and psychological discomfort in his early satirical novels, to a civilizational problem in Brave New World, and ultimately to a potential site of spiritual insight in his later religious writings. Along the way, Toby and our other guest, Dr Sam Hughes, a Senior Lecturer in Pain Neuroscience, provide a striking confirmation of Huxley’s intuition that suffering cannot be understood solely as a physical sensation. The episode opens by framing pain as a complex and unstable category: pain can be physical, emotional, psychosomatic, or even “phantom”. Modern pain theory increasingly defines it as a sensory and emotional event, which is also informed by cultural attitudes. This framework illuminates Huxley’s writing, which often blurs bodily suffering, psychological distress and spirituality. In his early satirical novels, Emily notes, pain appears mainly as wounded vanity, jealousy, embarrassment, or social awkwardness, exposing the absurdities of modern intellectual life. By Brave New World, however, pain becomes central to Huxley’s critique of civilization, as a traumatized society attempts to abolish suffering through comfort, pleasure, and technological anaesthesia. The discussion then situates Huxley among modernists such as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. Drawing on Woolf’s On Being Ill and the argument that pain “destroys language,” Ryan highlights the paradox that pain is both difficult to express and urgently needs to be shared. Huxley’s response is to make pain communicable and intellectually examinable, which we can link to Huxley’s final novel, Island, where naming pain becomes the first step toward healing. Finally, the conversation explores pain in relation to war, psychology, and religion. In Brave New World, pleasure culture represents an overcorrection after mass trauma. Yet Huxley does not simply valorize suffering: while he becomes increasingly interested in religious mortification, he also warns of its slide into masochism. By the time of The Perennial Philosophy, he seeks to restore a sacred framework for suffering, suggesting that pain can prompt spiritual transformation. At the heart of this discussion lies a question that feels unmistakably contemporary: what happens to a society that treats all pain as meaningless and all comfort as good? Huxley’s answer, as this episode shows, is not simple asceticism. Rather, it is a warning that a culture devoted entirely to convenience, distraction, and anaesthesia may end by dulling itself intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Bringing Huxley into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience, Toby and Sam connect Huxley’s ideas to contemporary pain science, virtual reality, chronic pain treatment, environmental psychology, and psychedelic research. The result is one of the podcast’s richest episodes so far: a wide-ranging discussion of pain as biology, culture, theology, politics, and prophecy. Chronic pain impacts roughly 28 million people in the UK alone, and the emerging approaches discussed in this episode suggest that the future of pain treatment may lie not only in new drugs, but in new ways of understanding consciousness, environment, and the human mind. Remarkably, many of the questions that researchers are now asking were anticipated decades ago in Huxley’s work. These conversations reveal that, as researchers today develop new therapies for chronic pain (drawing on psychology, environmental design, and even psychedelics) Huxley’s work offers a surprisingly relevant framework for thinking about why pain matters and how it might be transformed. Reading Huxley is not simply an exercise in literary history; it is a way of engaging with ideas that are shaping the future of medicine, psychology, and our understanding of the human mind. About our guests Ryan O’Shea is a PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. His doctoral project, Sacred and Profane: From Mortification to Masochism in Modernist Writing, examines how early twentieth-century writers represented religious practices of mortification and how these were increasingly interpreted through psychological concepts such as masochism.His research explores the intersections of modernist literature, religion, sexuality, and the sensory experience of pain, drawing on global religious traditions and modernist experimentation in literary form. Alongside his academic work, he is also a writer, editor, and teacher. You can read more about his project here: https://www.lahp.ac.uk/student/ryan-oshea/ [https://www.lahp.ac.uk/student/ryan-oshea/] Dr Sam Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Pain Neuroscience at the University of Exeter whose research focuses on how the brain modulates both experimental and clinical pain states. His work examines endogenous analgesic systems in the central nervous system and uses neurophysiological and psychophysical methods to develop new, mechanism-driven therapies for chronic pain. He also leads interdisciplinary research initiatives, including the Exeter Pain Group, which brings together experts in neuroscience, psychology, data science, and clinical medicine to improve understanding and treatment of pain. You can find out more about his work here: https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/39853-sam-hughes [https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/39853-sam-hughes] Works Mentioned By Aldous Huxley * Brave New World [https://archive.org/details/ost-english-brave_new_world_aldous_huxley?utm_source=chatgpt.com] (1932) [https://archive.org/details/ost-english-brave_new_world_aldous_huxley?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Time Must Have a Stop [https://archive.org/details/timemusthavestop0000huxl?utm_source=chatgpt.com] (1944) [https://archive.org/details/timemusthavestop0000huxl?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * The Perennial Philosophy [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.236471?utm_source=chatgpt.com] (1946) [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.236471?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Grey Eminence [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.237134?utm_source=chatgpt.com] (1941) [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.237134?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Island [https://archive.org/details/island0000aldo?utm_source=chatgpt.com] (1962) [https://archive.org/details/island0000aldo?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * The Doors of Perception [and] Heaven & Hell [https://archive.org/details/doorsofperceptio0000huxl?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Jacob’s Hands [https://archive.org/details/jacobshands00huxl?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Novels * Mrs Dalloway [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.475974?utm_source=chatgpt.com] by Virginia Woolf [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.475974?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * A Passage to India [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445?utm_source=chatgpt.com] by E. M. Forster [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * On Being Ill [https://archive.org/details/onbeingill0000wool?utm_source=chatgpt.com] by Virginia Woolf [https://archive.org/details/onbeingill0000wool?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Scholarly works * Christian Asceticism and Modern Man, translated by Walter Mitchell and the Carisbrooke Dominicans (Blackfriars Publications, 1955) * Ryan O’Shea, ‘‘the Self which underlies [...] separate individuality’: pain and the transcendence of selfhood in the work of Aldous Huxley’, Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English, No. 42 (2021), doi: https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/281 [https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/281] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com [https://themesandvariations.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

7. Huxley and the Difficulty of Being Good

In this episode of Themes and Variations, Toby and Robin turn to Grey Eminence, Aldous Huxley’s 1941 historical study of the monk-statesman Father Joseph and the Thirty Years’ War, and use it as a lens for Huxley’s wider philosophy: spirituality versus organised religion, distraction versus consciousness, and why political reform fails without inner transformation. The central question discussed is one that Huxley posed throughout his career: Why do sincere, intelligent and even spiritually serious people help produce catastrophic political outcomes? Father Joseph attempts to bring contemplative spirituality into the centre of power. The result, for Huxley, is the opposite of redemption. Mysticism sharpens his perception and discipline, but those powers are directed toward diplomacy, manipulation, and the prolongation of war. In their discussion, Toby and Robin explore Huxley’s distinction between two kinds of religion: institutional religion that operates through hierarchy, doctrine, and authority; and mysticism, the direct experience of reality beyond the self. Huxley would later develop this idea fully in The Perennial Philosophy: genuine religious experience requires the suspension of ideas, identities, and even theology itself. Yet Father Joseph tries to keep both worlds: the contemplative life and the machinery of state. His failure becomes Huxley’s argument that spirituality cannot morally purify power structures. Indeed, large-scale political movements inevitably corrupt spiritual insight. Huxley contrasts this with small voluntary communities such as the Religious Society of Friends, whose relative moral consistency derives precisely from remaining outside power politics. The discussion connects Grey Eminence to Brave New World through the topic of unconsciousness. Human beings do not become cruel primarily through hatred, but through unconsciousness. Distraction in the forms of appetites, entertainment, ideology, and emotional noise blocks awareness. A society organised around comfort and stimulation (such as the World State in Brave New World) produces obedience more efficiently than tyranny. Political evil therefore originates in psychology before ideology. Writing in 1941, Huxley saw the early modern religious wars as prototypes of ideological wars. Nationalism, centralised power, and crowd psychology reappear across centuries. The lesson of Grey Eminence is not historical but anthropological:civilisation collapses when consciousness does. Political reform without inward change reproduces the same catastrophe under new banners. In this episode’s speculative segment on ‘What would Huxley think about…?’. Emily and Toby consider Huxley’s recurring interest in bodily discipline: asceticism, self-inflicted pain, and the relationship between sensation and consciousness. In a word, BDSM. From Father Joseph’s mortifications to John the Savage, bodily suffering can interrupt conditioning and restore autonomy. Yet ritualised suffering can also become another distraction if detached from inner transformation. Huxley never simply condemns pleasure or sexuality; instead he asks whether experience awakens awareness or numbs it. Emily and Toby also spend a few minutes reviewing a new piece of Huxley scholarship: Uwe Rasch’s Aldous Huxley and the Enemies of Freedom, which will be the subject of a forthcoming episode. Works Discussed * Uwe Rasch, Aldous Huxley and the Enemies of Freedom, available here [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-57609-6] * Grey Eminence – https://archive.org/details/greyeminencestud00huxl * The Perennial Philosophy – https://archive.org/details/perennialphiloso00huxl * Ends and Means – https://archive.org/details/endsmeansinquiri00huxl * Brave New World – https://archive.org/details/bravenewworld00huxl [https://archive.org/details/bravenewworld00huxl] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com [https://themesandvariations.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

6. When Huxley met Mansfield

In this episode, we are delighted to interview Dr Gerri Kimber who is a world authority on Katherine Mansfield, a central figure in literary modernism. Gerri is the author of a brand new biography - Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life [https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/katherine-mansfield], now available from Reaktion Press [https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/katherine-mansfield]. This episode focuses on Huxley’s early years as a writer. While most people are more familiar with his later novels, such as Brave New World, his earlier works remain less explored, and perhaps less valued. This discussion aims to shed a little more life on Huxley’s early writing and his relationship with Katherine Mansfield and the Garsington Set. In 1917 at Garsington Manor the young Aldous Huxley, met Mansfield, a tantalising New Zealander who wore scarlet stockings, sported fashionable short hair and wore French perfume unlike the rest of the Blooms Berries (as she named them). Virginia Woolf called her common. In fact, Mansfield was the daughter of the Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, educated at Queen’s College London, and as we learn in this podcast, had lived an astonishingly racy life before meeting John Middleton Murry. The interview in this episode paints a picture of the world that Huxley and Mansfield co-inhabited and explores the friendship that might have been. Both were acute observers of human nature, socially aware, and psychologically sophisticated modernists. Huxley immortalized Mansfield in his early novel as part of the inspiration for Anne in Crome Yellow and the self-conscious Mary Thriplow in Those Barren Leaves. For her part, Mansfield captured Huxley in her story “Bliss” as the affected, dandyish Eddie Warren with his “strange accent on certain syllables.” In 1918, facing serious health problems, Mansfield married John Middleton Murry. Gerri Kimber is blunt: “He was the worst possible man she could have married.” When Murry became editor of The Athenaeum in 1919 and hired Huxley as a subeditor, Huxley saw through him immediately. The friendship with Mansfield collapsed as collateral damage. By 1920, she was calling Huxley’s work “bilge” in capital letters. In 1922 she refused to read Crome Yellow: “The idea bores me so terribly.” After Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, Murry launched what might be seen as “the Mansfield cult”—publishing her posthumous writings and writing poems about her. By the 1930s, Murry was “the most hated man in English letters.” Huxley took revenge on Murry depicting him as the odious Dennis Burlap in Point Counter Point, a manipulative editor with a dead wife named Susan, whom he canonizes to boost his own cultural image, exploiting her suffering, sentimentalizing her pain. Alongside Gerri’s scintillating interview, in its ‘aphorisms’ segment the episode picks out a sentence offered by the garrulous philosopher Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow: ‘One is also alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world’. We also turn to the ways in which depiction of the emptiness of Mrs Viveash’s experiences of leisure in the postwar London of Antic Hay anticipates the sophisticated critique of consumer culture. Here are the links to the works discussed in this episode: By Katherine Mansfield: * Bliss and Other Stories [https://archive.org/details/blissotherstorie0000mans_j8d0] (1920) [https://archive.org/details/blissotherstorie0000mans_j8d0] - Collection including “Bliss” featuring Huxley as Eddie Warren * The Garden Party and Other Stories [https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000mans_p8p3] (1922) [https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000mans_p8p3] - Her most famous collection By Aldous Huxley: * Limbo [https://archive.org/details/limbo00huxlgoog] (1920) [https://archive.org/details/limbo00huxlgoog] - First collection of short stories that Mansfield reviewed harshly * Crome Yellow [https://archive.org/details/cromeyellow00huxlgoog] (1921) [https://archive.org/details/cromeyellow00huxlgoog] - First novel, set at Garsington, featuring Mansfield-inspired character * Those Barren Leaves [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.125274] (1925) [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.125274] - Features Mary Thriplow, based on Mansfield * Along the Road [https://archive.org/details/AlongTheRoad] (1925) [https://archive.org/details/AlongTheRoad] - Essay collection with critical assessment of Mansfield’s work * Point Counter Point [https://archive.org/details/pointcounterpoin00huxl] (1928) [https://archive.org/details/pointcounterpoin00huxl] - Features Dennis Burlap, a portrait of Murry This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com [https://themesandvariations.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

5. Special Episode: Huxley Now!

In this very special episode to commemorate the third annual Huxley Day, and in collaboration with the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich, Toby and Emily speak to some of the teenagers involved in a recent cinematic adaptation of Brave New World. The film, Follow Me, provides a fresh and incisive take on Huxley’s classic dystopia, speaking to contemporary manifestations of paranoia and control in our digital age today. We are lucky to be able to share a snippet of the film with you, as well as bring you some insightful discussion from the next generation of filmmakers and thinkers. In this episode, we discuss social media, the role of technology, control through pleasure, and surveillance, among other topics. Bringing young people directly into conversation with Aldous Huxley, we also share a snippet from Huxley’s interview with Mike Wallace (1958), in which he discusses his thoughts on technology’s power to control and surveil. Back then it was radio, today it is the algorithm. Huxley’s warnings about ubiquitous technologies that fall into the wrong hands prove evergreen and as urgent as ever. Describing people sleepwalking into technologies that encourage us to do things we didn’t foresee or intend, he questions the value of achieving convenience and comfort at the cost of our own agency. These very thoughts are still being voiced by teenagers today, almost 70 years later. The link to the full film is below, and we wish you a very enjoyable Huxley Day, however you may choose to celebrate it. Follow Me (Film): https://www.filmkidsplus.ch/video/BDbD1m5dl2/ [https://www.filmkidsplus.ch/video/BDbD1m5dl2/] Huxley’s interview with Mike Wallace (1958): E M Forster - The Machine Stops: https://share.google/Ze8emannX52Bam5RO [https://share.google/Ze8emannX52Bam5RO] Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited: https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited.pdf [https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited.pdf] Triumph of the Will (Film): https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxohCX-PyVLIJ_tHvzsQHpJlFECdakZuJt [https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxohCX-PyVLIJ_tHvzsQHpJlFECdakZuJt] Peter Kreeft - Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Heaven_and_Hell_(novel) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Heaven_and_Hell_(novel)] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com [https://themesandvariations.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]