Aldous Huxley, Soothsayer Extraordinaire

While watching this video of an interview with Aldous Huxley by Mark Wallace, I took notes.  They were really standard and I only paraphrased what was said.  Nevertheless, the bees living in the beehive that is my brain crawled out of their honey hot tubs and pollen picnics to decipher and collect all the good bits of the dialogue.  What I wrote afterward made me proud.  So proud, in fact, that I decided to copy-pasta my comment here(with a few choice edits).


Over twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union and its tyrannic, misanthropic infrastructure, there still exist arguments that the world, or rather its human population, has fallen prey to the dictatorial society of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
In his 1958 interview with Mark Wallace, the political and social zeitgeist of the period foster direct comparisons between Huxley's fictional society and that of the Soviets or Communist China. He notes two main impersonal forces of freedom diminishment: overpopulation and hyper-organization. Essentially, these factors persuaded and prepared the populations of the communist societies to welcome a political regime devoted to increased productivity and removal of consent from the governed, just as the government of the Brave New World had accomplished through express deification of Ford and the assembly line. Huxley also stated that the devices such societies will use to achieve this goal are propaganda, terror, and "a chicken in every pot." Just as soma is consumed under suggestion of the government to increase happiness, the communists promised their public enough to eat and fair labor.
Re-analyzing today's society presents similar conditions to fear. There are certainly more assembly line industries, including those we buy our food from and more people use drugs than in the 1950's. Are we in a position to deny that we have avoided the Brave New World? Considering the frequency and intensity of the aforementioned devices' of individual restraint use, we have moved closer towards a puppet society. The natural human desire for power stands timeless and the technology, as Huxley warned in the video, seems to be passing us by. Soon, or perhaps now(in secret), 3-D printers will be used to create anything from writing utensils to weapons. Coping with the unemployment and resource consumption such a revolutionary technological development would cause appears to draw closer the likelihood of the Brave New World as well as a curtain on the final showing of individual thought.