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Theodore Dalrymple on The Dystopian Imagination.

Key passages:

“This passage reminds me of the advertising slogan of a credit card launched in Britain about 30 years ago: it “takes the waiting out of wanting.” The advertisement showed no recognition that immediate gratification usually presents a bill, with extortionate interest.

Huxley surmised that life lived as the satisfaction of one desire after another would result in shallow and egotistical people. True, he had a poor opinion of mankind to start with: “About 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid,” he once wrote, “as the great masses of the English.” But after gratifying their desires instantly throughout their lives, people would cease to carry the divine spark that distinguished man from the rest of creation. They would seek entertainment unto death: at Brave New World’s Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, “at the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box.” I think of my own hospital, where the dying usually depart this world to the sight and sound of driveling television soap operas.

Those who live lives of immediate gratification, Huxley thought, would not be able to bear solitude of any kind. As Mustapha Mond explains, “people are never alone now. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them to ever have it.” A life devoted to instant gratification produces permanent infantilization: “at sixty-four . . . tastes are what they were at seventeen.” In our society, the telescoping of the generations is already happening: the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.”

Re: “It takes the waiting out of wanting.” A perfect description of Obama, symbolic of the credit card immediate gratification mentality - the quintessential man of the times for the times - a man who never had a productive job in his entire life, cossetted and feted by a virtual army of sickening sycophants. The guy who along with his wife amassed $120,000 debt in student loans and took over twenty years to pay it back
( http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/27/its-personal-obamas-carried-120000-student-loan-debt-for-decades/ ). You’d think that two people with Harvard Law degrees could have had productive jobs and paid off that debt earlier.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html