Author and great mind, Aldous Huxley, was the son of Thomas Huxley, the English biologist and advocate of Darwin’s theories in the Royal Society. The Huxleys were a very well-connected family and were most probably privy to the goings-on in the elite inner circles of the day, which are probably the same families that sit on the top of the heap today as well.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is one of my personal favorite classic distopian novels.  The novel is best read in conjunction with Orwell’s 1984 .  This is essential reading regarding the psychological underpinnings of the corporatist hegemony we all live under today, which makes abundant use of propagandist techniques in advertising, television and film.  In this interview, we can see that he was one of the first to recognize the menace of "subliminal advertising", a "device" which very few even know about nowadays.

I keep going back to the 1950s, a period that seems to have been pivotal in the formation of all that was to come even until now. Late ‘53 and ‘54 in particular seem worth ruminating over a bit: covert, CIA-funded Operation Ajax installated the Shah in Iran;  CIA-orchestrated Operation PBSUCCESS removed democratically-elected Arbenz from Guatemala; the first Bilderberg meeting in the Netherlands; continued hydrogen bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, in the Soviet Union and in the Nevada desert; RCA’s first TV; first transistor radio; McCarthyism and the Red Scare etc. etc.

This interview distills the best of what was being publicly debated about technology at that time. He is still relevant today due to his insights with respect to how new technologies present a danger to individual freedom.  He was also a pioneer of thoughtful experimentation with hallucinogenic substances, and rightfully saw a connection between them, technology and modern society.  That connection never seemed to be carried all the way to fruition, however.  Even in this interview, he seems to sense the importance of psychotropic drugs without being able to clearly state what that importance signifies, only that it may have some positive relation to individual freedom.  In this conversation, they are addressed as "devices", like technologies, that in some way hold the key to either serving to repress freedom or enhance it.

Here is the 1958 Mike Wallace interview: