Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was born in Surrey, attended Eton and Oxford and was a gifted, articulate student. His writing career began in 1921, with the publication of ‘Crome Yellow’. It is his fifth book, ‘Brave New World’, published in 1932, for which he is best known.

The title is taken from a Shakespeare play and the theme has been likened to the foretelling of the ‘New World Order’ attributed to the elite ‘secret societies’. People are brainwashed from birth (in a test tube), genetically modified, cloned, denied family connections, euthanised at age sixty and coerced into dependency on their  ‘happy pills’ (hallucinogenic drugs). Huxley took such drugs himself, even on his death-bed.

Huxley was influenced by the anti-establishment D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and by seeing the typical lifestyle in the USA and by a period he spent working at a chemical plant in England.  He believed that the population could be unwittingly guided into slavery to a world-state if there were aspects of that slavery that they enjoyed. In his time, television became the mesmerising sweetener, and today it is the smartphone. His friend, George Orwell, took the scenario further, with ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’. Huxley turned down as inappropriate an offer of a knighthood in 1959.

 (Image: Thierry Ehrmann at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)