Ikke noen omarbeidelse av 1931-romanen:

Here, ..Aldous Huxley uses his knowledge of human relations
to compare the modern-day world
with his prophetic fantasy.
He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation,
propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains
why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them.

Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind
should educate itself for freedom before it is too late.

Brave New World Revisited (first published in 1958) is not a
reissue or revision of 0060850523 'Brave New World'.
Brave New World is a novel, whereas 'Brave New World Revisited'
is a nonfiction exploration of the themes in Brave New World.

/

This book is a small political essay that is just as relevant
today as it was at the time of its writing (1958),
some twenty-five years after the publication of Huxley’s
masterpiece. What the author is trying to do here is to assess
the validity of his novel’s predictions,
about the socio-political situation of the 1950s and forward.

Interestingly, Huxley also compares his predictions with that of
Orwell’s 1984.

Huxley mainly focuses on two significant problems of our
present time: overpopulation, and over-organization or
“Will to Order”, i.e. the control — and even despotism —
of “Big Business” and “Big Government”
over the whole of society,

and the subsequent waning of individual freedom, creativity
and happiness.
But how these big controlling powers are expressed in Brave
New World is almost the opposite of that of 1984:
“In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain,
in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating
pleasure.”

Essentially, Brave New World depicts a society where power is
exerted in the most despotic way, by feeding the people an
evolved version of the Romans’ panis et circenses
(feelies and orgy-porgy).
This is an entirely accurate description of our occidental
civilisation, ruled under the vast mass communication networks
(TV and the Internet),
manipulated in many ways as instruments of conditioning
and as social intoxicants.

Huxley provides a few — sometimes humorous — insights into
our present political situation, by analysing the use of
propaganda technology under the Nazi regime,
in part inspired by the indoctrination machinery of the
Holy Office, and in part inherited by the advertisement
industry in later times.

Today’s popularist politicians use the same tactics
and have the same disdain for honesty and objectivity.

In this regard, Huxley’s essay would help understand a
widespread, mostly non-violent, yet totalitarian, style
of government.
“A dictatorship, says Huxley, maintains itself by censoring
or distorting the facts,

and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-
interest, but to passion and prejudice,
to the powerful ‘hidden forces’, as Hitler called them,
present in the unconscious depth of every human mind.”

( fra goodreads )
( tekst av Huxley >