From the dust jacket:
When the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future.
Today the science of thought control has raced far beyond the dreams of Hitler or Stalin. Methods for destroying individual freedom are being rapidly developed, and the pressures to adopt them are becoming increasingly powerful. Now, in one of the most important, fascinating and frightening books of his career, Aldous Huxley scrutinizes these and other threats to humanity and demonstrates why we will find it virtually impossible to resist them... unless..
The first threat is overpopulation. Penicillin, DDT and clean water–cheap commodities supply effective death control. It is highly unlikely that practical birth-control measures will be adopted in time to avoid widespread misery and regimentation.
More sinister is the threat that comes from the power of propaganda through the use of radically new laboratory discoveries to control the mind. Many of these methods are being used today by the Communists. Some are now used experimentally in America. But all are within the reach of any group which is in a position to soften up and manipulate society, without our knowing it.
Dictatorship by drugs is no longer a fantasy. The "soma" of Brave New World forecast the Miltown of today, the possible Iproniazid of tomorrow. These, with other inexpensive tranquillizers or stimulants still to be developed, will make ideal weapons for the state-operated "psychopharmacopeia." Other weapons for the dictator are subliminal projection, hypnopaedia (a method of "teaching" a person while he sleeps), and all the chillingly successful arts of brainwashing. With a combination of these forces at its command, the state would have little difficulty blotting out even the memory of liberty in most of its subjects. It would have far less difficulty than Hitler in brutalizing them and arousing the pleasurable emotions of hatred and enmity. Red China has already shown the way.
Brave New World Revisited is not fiction. It is a shocking, yet calm, estimate of what has been done, what is being done and what may very soon be done to turn men into compliant robots. The enemies of freedom are subtle, often unobserved, and far more numerous than we suppose. Mr. Huxley reveals them with the lucidity and scientific insight for which he is famous. With overpowering impact, the book is a challenge to complacency and a plea that mankind should educate itself in freedom before it is too late.
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