It's wild that you can learn more about investing from Aldous Huxley than from any of these chumps who follow Powell's every move and record 1 hour podcasts analyzing his body language.
For example, this quote is great.
What Huxley is saying:
- “Abnormally normal” = perfectly compliant to a sick environment.
If a society’s core incentives reward obedience, consumption, and performative virtue over truth and agency, then adjustment is a pathology: you’re healthy-for-the-system, not healthy-for-yourself.
- Silenced “human voice” = the self that resists harmful incentives.
The child’s curiosity, refusal to lie, intolerance for double standards - trained out early via schooling, media norms, and micro-rewards/punishments until dissent feels wrong.
- No symptoms = no alarms.
The “neurotic” at least shows friction with false incentives; the “normal” runs without error messages. That’s efficient for rulers and lethal for authenticity.
Huxley’s core insight isn’t “future dystopia”, it’s cost curves: pleasure is a cheaper control input than pain, defaults govern better than laws, and language (“safety”, “stability”, “community”) edits reality. If you track incentives, defaults, and word swaps - not ideals - you’ll predict human behavior with embarrassing accuracy.
