that when every thing works out right the old cultural models and stereotypes
break down and we get a glimpse of what it would be like to live in a culture in
which people are high on ecstasy, and open to life and each other. They are
temporary because they have a short duration in time. They are set up by
entrapenurs to make cash basicly just like a grateful dead concert.
What we really want is a Permanent Autonomous Zone, in which we create not a
counter-culture but a real new culture free from violence and fear. Island Group
is dedicated to the creation of such a psychedelic culture.
By the way, the search for community, for utopia, for a break out of the
adolence of our species is not new. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in Island and
Plato tried to create a rational PAZ in The Republic. What we need to do is go
somewhere away from the dominant culture and experiment. It will take
responsiblity and work. But in the end, we can party without the hangover of a
sick culture."
Bruce Eisner - exstasym@aol.com (Exstasy M) - 13 May 1994
Island is the final book by English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1962. It is the account of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala. Island is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 novel Brave New World, itself often paired with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ideas that would become Island can be seen in a foreword he wrote in 1952 to the 20th anniversary edition of BNW:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Quoted from Wikipedia
Aldous Huxley's Island (1962) - PDF
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