Island

by Aldous Huxley

“And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty per cent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.” “Dangerous?” “Because these people are the propagandist’s predestine victims. In an oldfashioned, pre-scientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty per cent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to re-organize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”