ecos dos becos: propaganda in a democratic society

Aldous Huxley ficou certamente conhecido como o autor da obra-prima "Brave New World" (Admirável Mundo Novo, em tuga) que descreve uma sociedade futurista, extremamente estruturada, onde a ausência de guerra e conflitos (mas também a ausência de liberdade) é conseguida à custa da implementação de um sistema de castas e ao controlo da população pelo uso de drogas.
Para quem ainda não leu aqui fica o link para o romance on-line (não deve ser uma transcrição legal, mas se há livros que deviam ser do domínio público, este é seguramente um deles):

http://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html

Huxley é um daqueles indivíduos com uma capacidade analítica excepcional, e - brave new world é o exemplo último disso - capaz de construir universos em torno da sua perspectiva do mundo ao ponto de ser condiderado um visionário. Talvez porque mais que novelista e romancista Aldous Huxley foi também um pensador e filósofo social, um acérrimo crítico da sociedade sua contemporânea, nomeadamente da "generosa extravagância" da vida aemericana.

Encontrei um ensaio de Huxley intitulado "Propaganda in a Democratic Society". Não faço a mínima ideia em que ano foi publicado ou em que contexto, por isso qualquer contribuição para completar esta informação é bem vinda...
Ficam aqui apenas uns excertos, o texto completo (?) pode ser encontrado em:

http://deoxy.org/huxley1.htm

Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western Europe and America, these devices have worked, all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth century optimists were not entirely wrong. Given a fair chance, I repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensible prerequisite. No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically. Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects. Over-population and over-organization are two conditions which (...) deprive a society of a fair chance of making democratic institutions work effectively.
[...]

There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. Were the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exhalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least credible passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguements based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.
[...]

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not forsee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
[...]

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.