Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

The line is a sardonic diagnosis of a modern economy that sustains “prosperity” through structurally wasteful or destructive engines: military spending (“armaments”), finance built on perpetual borrowing (“universal debt”), and consumer capitalism that shortens product lifespans to force repeat purchases (“planned obsolescence”). Read this way, Huxley is not praising these pillars but exposing a moral and economic paradox: growth can be manufactured by fear, leverage, and engineered waste. The quote fits Huxley’s broader critique of technocratic mass society—where comfort and stability are purchased at the cost of autonomy, truthfulness, and humane ends—by suggesting that what is counted as success may depend on practices that corrode long-term social well-being.