One of the most influential eugenicists of all time, Huxley was secretary of the Zoological Society of London, the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association.

Thomas Henry Huxley - Wikipedia

In 1926, Leonard Huxley published his “Progress and the Unfit,” which was subsequently used to promote the eugenics movement, to which H.G. Wells and Leonard’s son Julian were outspoken avid supporters. Leonard also wrote favourably of his father T.H. Huxley’s views and that of Charles Darwin.

He goes on to state that modern society has too long tolerated the proliferation of the feeble-minded and so creates an ever-lasting burden for itself. He claims that mental defectiveness – which ranged from criminal behaviour, insanity, physical deformities and forms of mental retardation to addictions such as alcoholism and gambling, homelessness, owing massive debt etc. etc. – were all to be considered heritable qualities.

Aldous Huxley is best known for his 1932 book ‘Brave New World’ which became a model for much dystopian science fiction that followed. Brave New World was written between World War I and World War II, the height of an era of technological optimism in the West. Huxley picked up on such optimism and created the dystopian world of his novel so as to criticise it,

But what exactly were Aldous Huxley’s views? Did he in fact believe in the need for a scientific dictatorship? A scientific caste system? Was he actually warning the people that such a dystopia would occur if we did not correct our course or was it all part of a mass psychological conditioning for what was regarded as inevitable and that Huxley’s role was rather to “soften the transition” as much as possible towards a “dictatorship without tears”?