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Updates: May 25, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mike+wallace+aldous+huxley+interview

Video – Mike Wallace Interview with Aldous Huxley, May 18, 1958. Harry Ransom Center: The University of Texas at Austin

“Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation [elitist bunk], bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.”

Other Mike Wallace interviews with various personalities:
https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll90
https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll90/search

Transcript of Interview at CuttingThroughTheMatrix.com

Some quotes:

Huxley: … But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, 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: …you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracies, either the bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of big government…

Huxley: … I think it’s quite on the cards that we may have drugs which will profoundly change our mental states without doing us any harm. I mean, this is the pharmacological revolution which is taking place, that we have now powerful mind-changing drugs which physiologically speaking are almost costless…

Huxley: … I think this kind of dictatorship of the future, I think will be very unlike the dictatorships which we’ve been familiar with in the immediate past…  That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in “Brave New World,” partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy….

Wallace asked him about the individual:

Wallace:  Well, you asked this question yourself in “Enemies of Freedom.” I’ll put your own question back to you. You ask this, “In an age of accelerating overpopulation, of accelerating over-organization, and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual?” …

Huxley:  … I think it’s terribly important to insist on individual values, I mean what is a…there is a tendency as a…you probably read a book by White, the organization man, a very interesting, valuable book I think, where he speaks about the new type of group morality, group ethic, which speaks about the group as though the group were somehow more important than the individual…

Asked if freedom is necessary for a productive society:

Huxley: Yes, I should say it is. I mean, a genuinely productive society. I mean I think you could produce plenty of goods without much freedom, but I think the whole sort of creative life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom of … that initiative, creation, all these things which we value, and I think value properly are impossible without a large measure of freedom…

Huxley: … I mean, this is a very interesting fact about the new Soviet regime, and I think that what we are going to see is … a people on the whole with very little freedom but with an oligarchy on top enjoying a considerable measure of freedom and a very high standard of living…

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