Brave New Newsday

Long Island's Newsday, the thriving (circ. 272,441) suburban tabloid that ordinarily gives itself mostly to news, conventional features, and a fat assortment of advertising pages, last week handed its readers something new in its 18-year history: a thick supplement containing a new, brain-twitching book by a famed writer. The book's title: Tyranny Over the Mind. Author: English-born Novelist Aldous (Brave New World) Huxley, 63.

Newsday's essay grew out of an idea hit upon last November by Editor-Publisher Alicia Patterson. She asked Huxley for a series on subliminal advertising as a hidden persuader in television. Excitedly, Huxley proposed a wider investigation of new means of molding minds.

Birth Boom. What Newsday's readers got was Huxley's pessimistic opinion that his fearful Brave New World is indeed close at hand. It was not until the Year of Our Ford 632 (according to the 1932 novel) that babies were to be grown in laboratories like fungi, happy citizens were to be conditioned by sleep teaching and there was to be no pain, no disease and--theoretically--no independent thought. Now, says Huxley, "The nightmare of total organization . . . has emerged from the safe, remote future." Main factor: the birth boom that has jumped the world's population from 700 million at the time of the American Revolution to 2.8 billion today.

The crowding of the planet means authoritarian rule because "the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare." Wrote Huxley: "It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world's overpopulated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule." While man is cluttering the earth with his birth rate, he is also following a "Will to Order," the fundamental wish for harmony that softens him for the propagandists of authority.

Guided Thinking. Huxley cites such opinion-forming techniques as brainwashing, subconscious communication, drugs, sleep teaching. But when he discusses propaganda, Huxley begins to advocate it. The champion of laissez-faire in the marketplace of ideas becomes the proponent of guided thinking for the masses--along the proper lines, of course. Individuals, he says, "should be taught enough about propaganda analysis to preserve them from an uncritical belief in sheer nonsense, but not so much as to make them reject outright the not always rational outpourings of the well-meaning guardians of tradition. That which is merely irrational but compatible with love and freedom, and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be provisionally accepted for what it is worth."

Huxley ends with the familiar recommendations to cut the birth rate, boost the food supply and decentralize urban life. But his recommendations seem perfunctory. Watching his stereotype of the satisfied American teen-ager pleasurably floating in a television world, Huxley sees little real hope for the future. And when the brave new world comes, he concludes, it will likely stay forever: "Men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown."

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