Aldous Huxley | 'I think this is the danger…'

'...that people will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy.'
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Aldous Huxley, after starting out at a kind of comedy novelist, wrote in 1932 "Brave New World", a book often compared to Orwell's "1984" but in which people are conditioned into docility by childhood indoctrination and a culture of taking mild sedatives.
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In 1958 he wrote "Brave New World Revisited", in which he checked in on the 20th century's progress towards realising his nightmare. He was calmly alarmed by his findings:
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'That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising.'
'‘In the end,’ says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s parable, ‘in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, “make us your slaves, but feed us.’’’
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He concluded the work with a very simple statement:
'Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.'
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He lived out his days in California, experimenting with, and analysing his experiences of, peyote. The Doors took their name from "The Doors of Perception", one of Huxley's 2 peyote books.
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He is also the 10th most frequently cited author in my Commonplace Book.
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