Mending is better than spending

Something I love about speculative fiction is that it looks at trends that were nascent at the time of writing and extrapolates them out to their logical conclusions. Several weeks ago I read Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World. It was…odd, not at all what I was expecting. But there’s one thing that has really stuck with me. I don’t think it’s spoiling too much to say that a key method of social control in the world Huxley envisioned is the use of hypnopedia, playing repeated audio recordings while sleeping, on children in order to condition them to norms the leaders found desirable. (While it’s considered bunk now, presumably it was hot new psychology at the time.) One phrase that was repeated over and over, tens of thousands of times, to children as they slept was, “Spending is better than mending.” The reason, we’re told, is that it’s necessary for industry. Huxley saw that infinite, perpetual growth would demand infinite, perpetual consumption. What he missed was that he…