“There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane…; it is demonstrably inefficient—and in an age of advanced technology l, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news paper editors and school teachers…
“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater…is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects…totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more efficiently than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative.
“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and participating scientists call ‘the problem of happiness’ —…the problem of making people love their servitude. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence…But security tends very quickly to be taken for granted. Its achievement is merely superficial, external revolution. The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies…”
Huxley then lists four things that this requires:
1) improved methods of conditioning through infant conditioning and, later, drugs
2) fully developed science of human differences (in order to finding your proper place in societal and economic hierarchy)
3) substitutes for alcohol and narcotics that’s less harmful and more pleasurable
4) eugenics to standardize human product/productivity
I was surprised by how accurate this all seems now. Obviously some minor differences but even in 1946 (not sure when the official writing of the foreword was) it was pretty analogous to the issues that r/antiwork faces these days. I could be totally wrong but that’s what I took from reading it.