Huxwelled - Part 2
The Flood of Fear – Bezmenov and the Method of Three Generations
How Huxwellism Occurred
In the Huxwelled essay I outlined how control evolves through a sequence. Orwell’s boot is needed first – the stick, the force, the visible stamping down of resistance. Once that has done its work, the system shifts to Huxley’s carrot: seduction, distraction, endless entertainment. In time, direct coercion is replaced by voluntary compliance. The boot becomes a threat rather than a daily act. People reshape themselves around fear, and then around pleasure.
That is the rhythm of Huxwellism – stick first, then carrot, until the population polices itself without realising it. The apparatus of control becomes invisible, accepted as the natural order.
This article will hit each generation differently. Those who came of age around 1970 will remember how far we have drifted in just fifty-five years. Their children will see, often for the first time, why their world turned out as it did. And the youngest will feel the shock of realising that they are the sleepwalkers – living inside the very system Orwell and Huxley warned against.
Each generation has been shaped and steered - sometimes brutally, sometimes by seduction since the days of the ancient empires - and most comprehensively by the Roman Empire. Revolutions and the Enlightenment have rekindled coherence at moments, pushing back the tide, but they never erased the machinery that seeks to control. At every turning there have been those trying to Huxwell the public - some eras more successfully than others - and now we stand at a precipice. The concentration of infrastructure, surveillance and narrative power makes a consolidated Great Reset and a coup by other means a realistic danger: not a single, sudden overthrow, but the culmination of an elite Great Work of ages, enacted slowly and normalised by convenience.
Who Yuri Bezmenov Was
Yuri Bezmenov was not an outsider speculating about communism – he was inside it. Trained as a journalist and cultural operator for the KGB, he served as a propaganda specialist in India before defecting to the West in the 1970s. Once free, he spoke openly and repeatedly about what he had seen.
His warnings were clear: the Soviet Union had a deliberate, long-term plan to subvert the West, not primarily through tanks or missiles but through cultural and psychological warfare. The aim was to demoralise, destabilise, manufacture crises, and then normalise the new conditions. He explained that it was not only possible but already underway, and that whole generations were being reprogrammed.
He was largely ignored. His interviews survive, though, and they are blunt. They do not read like academic speculation but like a manual. For our purposes, they provide a rare overt testimony of the very process of Huxwellism. The Soviets called it “ideological subversion.” We can see it now as part of the same pattern that has been imposed since the Church in the Dark Ages – only updated with modern tools.
The Method Yuri Revealed
Bezmenov set out four phases:
Demoralisation – the long erosion of values, confidence, and memory. It takes 15 to 20 years – the time to re-educate a generation.
Destabilisation – targeted attacks on institutions, family, law, and economy. Structures wobble.
Crisis – a rupture, engineered or opportunistic, that justifies exceptional powers. This is the boot moment.
Normalisation – once the crisis passes, the extraordinary measures stay. The system hardens into a new normal.
Map that against the three-generation cycle and the picture is sharp. The first generation endures imposition and is broken by it. The second inherits the system and rationalises compliance. The third no longer remembers an alternative. At that point Orwell’s boot is redundant, because Huxley’s seduction is enough.
"FULL INTERVIEW with Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984)"
The Flood of Fear
This is where the flood motif enters. You do not need a new flood if the story of the last one is powerful enough. Fear of disaster, fear of boot, fear of collapse – the memory or the threat is enough to enforce compliance. In Rome and in the early Church, the violence itself was visible. In the modern West, after two world wars and the shadow of nuclear annihilation, the mere possibility of violence or crisis became sufficient.
Fear itself becomes the medium of control. The flood does not recur, but everyone lives as if it might. That is how populations surrender without needing to be struck.
Wells and the Destination
H.G. Wells gave the starkest vision of where this leads. A society divided into Morlocks and Eloi – one class reduced to machinery and predation, the other to helpless consumption. Elites who can do nothing but press the button of control. Masses who can do nothing but comply. Predator and prey locked in a symbiosis where survival is the only remaining reality.
That is the ultimate fall of empire. Not conquest from outside, but hollowing from within until only survival remains. Dignity, skill, culture, and memory vanish. People forget they ever lived otherwise.
Bezmenov’s testimony is valuable not because it was unique to the Soviets but because it made the method visible. The pattern is older and wider – Roman, medieval, modern. Three generations are enough to transform coercion into custom. The boot falls once, the next generation complies, the third forgets. Huxley takes over from Orwell. The flood is not repeated, because fear of the flood is enough.
The only defence is to keep the comparator alive – to remember, to preserve skills, and to resist sedation. Without that, Wells’ vision is no longer allegory but destiny.
Why Three Generations?
The claim that control can be consolidated in just three generations might sound abrupt, but lived experience proves it.
In the early 1970s, most households in Britain did not even have a telephone. Privacy was assumed. Surveillance was a concept for dictatorships and dystopias, not for daily life. The idea of cameras in every street or microphones in every room was still unthinkable, and openly recognised as Orwellian.
By the second generation, that had changed. Cameras appeared in towns and cities. At first, people resisted and felt the intrusion. Many recognised the jar – that this was exactly what Orwell had warned of. But within a decade or two, the presence of cameras became normalised. The second generation rationalised them for safety and convenience.
By the third generation, there was no comparator left. What once would have been seen as intolerable became invisible. Carrying a telescreen in one’s pocket, broadcasting one’s location and thoughts all day, no longer seemed like an imposition. It was simply life. Surveillance was no longer imposed from above; it was volunteered.
The same pattern applies to earlier ages. When the Bible was redacted or religions imposed, the process was simpler still. Information was local, communication slow, and memory easy to overwrite. One generation endured the imposition, the second grew up under the new order, and by the third there was no memory left of what had been replaced.
That is why three generations are enough. One to impose, one to inherit, one to forget. After that, the structure sustains itself, and resistance looks like madness.
Structural necessity - how normality became dependency
Normalisation is only half the story. The more dangerous shift is that the tools of surveillance and data-driven administration have become functionally necessary to ordinary life. It is no longer simply that people accept cameras, smartphones and online services; in many cases we cannot run our lives without them. Governments and corporations have restructured interactions around digital platforms: taxes, benefits, health records, transport, identification and even local councilling depend on apps and online accounts. That dependency turns convenience into coercion.
Two consequences follow. First, the digital platforms reveal far more than users intend. Every interaction - a message to a doctor, a benefits application, a payment, a route on a mapping app - contributes to a long, searchable record. When those records are collated they create a near-total lifestyle profile: habits, health, social networks, vulnerabilities. Second, those profiles are vulnerable. Databases can be hacked, rented, bought, or handed across borders. Once a profile is built it can be monetised by legitimate firms, weaponised by political actors, or abused by criminals. The result is not only loss of privacy but a new vector of power over people who can no longer opt out without losing access to essential services.
Put plainly: in the past you could refuse certain technologies and still function. Today refusal is often an option only for the privileged. That structural necessity amplifies normality into compulsion. Where earlier generations once debated the presence of the camera in a town centre, our children carry an all-day telescreen on which their lives depend - and state and market architectures expect that dependency.
From imposition to craving - how the dialectic finishes the snare
Control rarely finishes with force. The true mastery is to convert resistance into desire. The pattern is dialectical: an imposed thesis provokes an antithesis, and the synthesis that follows appears natural, even when it has been engineered. Rome modelled this in early form. Public spectacles and handouts first pacified, then rewired civic expectation; bread and circuses replaced direct coercion as a mode of governance. The coup de grâce was their new universal religion. Christianity, imposed at first on pagan and indigenous cultures, was resisted. Yet what the Romans once had to take by force was later handed to them by a devotional flock. The Orwellian method became the Huxleyan. That is Huxwellism.
In modern terms, the Huxwellian sequence works like this: the state or elite introduces an imposition or crisis; a social reaction pushes back in predictable ways; the next stage of policy or technology is presented as the compromise or improvement; over a generation the compromise becomes the preferred normal. By the third generation the supposedly liberating gadget or institution is demanded by the populace itself. That demand is the final lock - Orwell’s boot is no longer necessary because Huxley’s carrot has been internalised and actively sought.
This is not merely normalisation - it is structural capture. Infrastructure, convenience and market incentives create an environment where opting out becomes costly. The populace does not simply acquiesce, it coerces itself through preference. The Hegelian frame helps explain why: each reaction is folded back into the system as evidence that the new solution was necessary all along. The synthesis therefore hides the mechanics of design inside the language of progress and desire.