Foreword

For the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, and in the immediate past rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a population predromantly propertyless, have always tended to produce economic and social confusion.

There is, of courser, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely ibhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology is the sin agains the holy ghost. A really efficient totalirian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a populations of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news paper editors and schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific.

Aldous Huxley

1894 - 1963