![]() ![]() We also mustn’t be caught by surprise by those who seek indefinite power over us: to do that requires “consent of the ruled,” something acquirable by addictive substances - both pharmacological and technological - as well as “new techniques of propaganda.” All of this has the effect of “bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery.” “We mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology,” Huxley says in that time before smartphones, before the internet, before personal computers, before even cable television. Some of the reasons behind his grim predictions now seem overstated - he points out that “in the underdeveloped countries actually the standard of living is at present falling,” though the reverse has now been true for quite some time - but others, from the vantage of the 21st century, sound almost too mild. He appeared on Wallace’s show to promote Brave New World Revisited (first published as Enemies of Freedom), a collection of essays on how much more rapidly than expected the real world had come to resemble the dystopia he’d imagined a quarter-century earlier. Huxley’s best-known novel Brave New World has remained relevant since its first publication in 1932. Or at least author Aldous Huxley saw it that way, and he told America so when he appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview in 1958. (You can also read a transcript here.) “There are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom,” he told the newly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.” Overpopulation, manipulative politics, imbalances of societal power, addictive drugs, even more addictive technologies: these and other developments have pushed not just democracy but civilization itself to the brink. ![]()
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