Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British writer and philosopher. His masterpiece, Brave New World, written in 1932, is a dystopian novel depicting a grim picture of a future society controlled in a mechanistic manner by a totalitarian government with the aid of modern technology. He also wrote a utopian novel. Island, based on a fusion of Western science and Eastern wisdom. His philosophical ideas are outlined in the book Perennial Philosophy.

Huxley was also a proponent of experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and his experience with them are recorded in The Doors of Perception. The name comes from a line by William Blake. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Due to his warnings of the dangers of unrestrained technological development and the loss of human dignity, as well as his experiments with psychedelic substances, he has been an icon of the counterculture movement of 1960s. The influential 60s band The Doors took their name from Huxley and Blake.

His grandfather, Thomas Huxley, was a biologist and is known for his support of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. His brother was Julian Huxley, the first Director of UNESCO. Andrew Huxley, his half-brother, was a biophysicist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.