Aldous Huxley interviewed by Mike Wallace 1958

Overpopulation, manipulative politics, imbalances of societal power, addictive drugs, even more addictive technologies: these and other developments have pushed not just democracy but civilization itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Huxley saw it that way, and he told America so when he appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview in 1958. “There are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom,” he told the newly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.”

Huxley’s best-known novel Brave New World has remained relevant since its first publication in 1932. He appeared on Wallace’s show to promote Brave New World Revisited (first published as Enemies of Freedom), a collection of essays on how much more rapidly than expected the real world had come to resemble the dystopia he’d imagined a quarter-century earlier.