From the Reagan era on, materialism has been our raison d'etre in the West, and we are living the dubious and highly destructive results today. Huxley's vision was prescient in this respect, in that we experienced a temporary wholesale return to the empty promises of materialism post WW2 in the 1950's, and then re-committed to it entirely in 1980.

Although Huxley was definitely concerned with the dangers and seductions of authoritarianism, eugenics (which was gaining in popularity at that time), and the imposition of social controls, he was also concerned with the loss of the indefinable something we call 'the human soul' through the wholesale adoption of a materialist philosophy and an approach to life which embraced the pursuit of self-centeredness at the expense of anything and everything else. In 1931, the extremes of the so-called 'Red Scare' of the Truman administration, administered predominantly by Roy Cohn and Senator McCarthy, had not yet occurred in the United States, and people generally weren't experiencing a propaganda-generated overwhelming fear of the idea of sharing wealth as the basis of an economy (socialism). That the novel spoke to the dangers of authoritarian collectivism (Communism) was predominantly a projection of the times in the 60's. By the 1960's, the book was considered a classic - a cautionary tale of the consequences of a society based on the pursuit of materialism. His prescient vision of a future society was extrapolated at the time from the excesses of the 1920's ('Roaring Twenties), at the dawning of the Great Depression. Aldous Huxley wrote his socially dystopian novel 'Brave New World,' in 1931.

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