9. Billionaires

Playback speed

Share post at current time

Share from 0:00

0:00

Generate transcript

A transcript unlocks clips, previews, and editing.

9. Billionaires

We have more billionaires than ever before, how do the works of Huxley speak to this?

Themes and Variations

Jun 28, 2026

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?