World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent “World Encyclopaedia” that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00 – Preface
19:44 – I. World Encyclopaedia
1:06:59 – II. The Brain Organization of the Modern World
2:05:46 – III. The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia
2:14:28 – IV. Passage from a Speech to the Congres Mondial de la Documentation Universelle, Paris, August 2oth, 1937
2:17:16 – V. The Informative Content of Education
3:01:57 – Appendix I. Ruffled Teachers
3:09:57 – Appendix II. Palestine in Proportion
3:22:17 – Appendix III. The Fall in America 1937
3:44:56 – Appendix IV. Transatlantic Misunderstandings
Appendix V. The English Speaking World, As I See It
“Between the extremes of right and left hysteria, there remains a great under-developed region in the world of political thought and will, that we may characterize as “do-nothing democracy.” Out of the sudden realization of its do-nothingness arise these psychological storms which give gangster dictators their opportunities. It is only gradually that people have come to realize that current democratic institutions are a very poor, slow and slack method of conducting human affairs which need an exhaustive revision, and that when one has declared oneself Anti- Fascist, Anti-Communist or both, one has still said precisely nothing about the government of the world. One is brought back to the unsolved problem of the Competent Receiver. It exercised Plato. It has been intermittently revived and neglected ever since…”
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