Time & Perspective Quote by Aldous Huxley

Huxley needles the Enlightenment fantasy that history is a clean tutorial and humans are diligent students. He’s arguing the opposite: experience is abundant, recorded and personal, and yet learning is rationed by desire and doctrine. The bite comes from the phrasing "allow them to learn" - not "want" or "choose", but "permit", as if passions and prejudices are bouncers deciding what truths get into the club.

The intent is less to scold ignorance than to diagnose its mechanics. "Passions" aren’t just emotions; they’re investments - status, identity, fear, libido, ambition. They create incentives to misread reality. Pair that with "metaphysical prejudices", a deliberately highbrow jab at the ideas people treat as sacred furniture: assumptions about human nature, providence, progress, the inevitability of markets or empires. Those aren’t opinions so much as operating systems. Once installed, they determine which facts feel "real" and which feel like noise or heresy.

Context matters: Huxley writes in the long shadow of World War I and amid the ideological churn leading to World War II, when "never again" quickly became "again, with better slogans". As a novelist who dissected modernity’s seductions, he understood that narratives don’t merely reflect belief; they manufacture it. History, in this view, isn’t a neutral archive waiting to educate us. It’s raw material we selectively process to protect the self and sanctify the tribe. The cynicism is surgical: humans don’t fail to learn because the lessons are unclear. They fail because the lessons threaten what they already worship.