Fatherhood Quote by Aldous Huxley

Huxley nails a generational psychology with the cool precision of someone who watched modernity chew through old certainties. The line isn’t really about sons; it’s about inheritance as a trap. To be “charmed” by what charmed your father is to risk living as a copy, a belated understudy. So the rebellious impulse isn’t merely to reject the object of admiration, but to demand its failure firsthand: a “wish to be disillusioned.” Disillusionment becomes a rite of passage, a way to convert received wonder into earned skepticism.

The verb choices do the work. “Charmed” suggests enchantment, spellcraft, something pre-rational; “disillusioned” is the brutal, corrective light. Huxley implies that young people don’t just want different tastes. They want to puncture the mechanism of authority that taste represents. If the father’s idols can be shown to be flawed, the father’s worldview becomes negotiable. It’s Oedipal, but social: the son wrestles not the man but the mythos.

Context matters. Huxley wrote in a century where fathers handed down empires, churches, Victorian morals, and faith in progress, only for sons to meet mechanized slaughter, mass propaganda, and the brittle comforts of consumer culture. In that world, disillusionment isn’t teenage moodiness; it’s an adaptation. The sting is that Huxley also hints at the perversity of the craving: the son wants disenchantment almost as much as the father once wanted enchantment. Rebellion inherits the same hunger for certainty, just flipped negative.