Born on July 26, 1894, Aldous Huxley belonged to one of the most learned families in England at the time. He had already published several short stories in the 1920s. But it wasn't until 1932 that he would write a work, in just four months, that would make him a universal figure: Brave New World.

Although initially influenced by H.G. Wells's novel The Sleeper Awakens (1910), in which a small elite controls the masses through technology and propaganda. And Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), which presents a futuristic society characterized by strict government control, uniformity and the suppression of individuality. Huxley's novel becomes somewhat more profound as he develops the narrative structure.

The rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe during the 1930s, in Italy and Germany, provided material for the first two titles by portraying prison-like and oppressive states, but Huxley's clairvoyance allows him a different perspective, even though the ends are the same.

If in Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, control is achieved through repression and suffering, in Brave New World that domination is achieved through hedonism, consumerism and pleasure. Without the citizens realizing it, they live in a dictatorship, in a dystopia where everyone is genetically conditioned and enjoys sex and entertainment without restraint. And therefore cannot appreciate the absence of freedom.

And to maintain the system, the government induces them to a planned consumption of "soma", a drug supplied by the State in case they are assailed by nonconformity, anguish or anxiety. At the same time, advertising and entertainment prevent the people from being aware of their own enslavement, creating a society of docile, complacent and harmless citizens. The work is considered one of the great classics of the genre, along with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell's 1984.

Twenty-six years after that masterpiece, in 1958, Huxley himself published "Brave New World Revisited" In this alarming essay, the author undertook an exercise in self-criticism and sociopolitical analysis to assess how quickly the real world was approaching his fictional nightmare. And his conclusion was devastating: democratic societies were transforming into the totalitarian order of his novel much faster than he ever anticipated.

Huxley warned that future dictators would no longer need Orwell's physical violence, but rather subtle techniques of psychological manipulation, subconscious persuasion and emotional propaganda that would treat "voters" as mere consumers.

He denounced how the excess of irrelevant information and banal entertainment would act as a modern "soma", burying the truth in a sea of ​​distractions and completely nullifying the capacity for political resistance and critical thinking of the citizenry.

Today, in 2026, the warnings of Brave New World Revisited have ceased to be a theoretical prophecy and have become our harsh practical reality. The "hypnopedia" or silent indoctrination that Huxley described is carried out every second through social media algorithms and generative artificial intelligence, which clearly shape our desires, language, perceptions and opinions without us even realizing it.

We live anesthetized by a "digital soma": an endless scroll designed to release immediate dopamine. Where mixed reality headsets and immersive environments allow us to pleasantly evade the crises of the real world. Even the biological conditioning of the novel is being debated today in medical ethics committees, where gene-editing technologies like CRISPR open the real door to "designer babies" and a possible biological division of society. Politics in 2026, reduced to fifteen-second videos and emotional meme battles, confirms the definitive triumph of distraction over reason.

His message remains absolutely relevant for our anesthetized and dystopian societies, which have reduced their sense of transcendence to a survival based on artificial comfort, sometimes at any cost. As he himself stated with chilling lucidity: "Doctrines can be true or false, they can be good or bad, that doesn't matter. If the indoctrination is well conducted, everyone can be converted to anything"

But to do this, of course the elites who crave control and power over their fellow men first have to erase the past. Eliminating and disappearing from the face of the earth the past, their past, your past, the history, antecedents, backgrounds, facts, logs, legacies and any written testimony of what happened before you were aware of its existence. Only then could they begin to erase culture, rewrite the past and try to control your destiny.

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