“…the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
– Aldous Huxley, from a 1949 letter to George Orwell.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
The book was released on 1985, and its main premise is that the mass-media has a damaging effect in our capacities to understand and elaborate rational arguments. In his opinion, TV was their age soma. I wonder what he would think today...
https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20
And I found I liked thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
But apparently the world wasn't ready for a utopia of Tantric sex and drugs where people are genuinely happy.
That seems like vapid, temporary happiness to me. Like rockstar, Kurt Cobain, type happiness.
I'd say he was pretty damn close.
Since that basic structure of the human condition won't change anytime soon, pray for them profiting from your guilty little pleasures. The time the machine stops, the pain will return.
If someone wrote this book today you would think they have listened to too much talk radio, and I think it's one of the best examples of what Leo Marx called 'the machine in the garden' myth.[1] the anxiety of (predominantly anglosphere) authors that technology and industrialization disrupt their naturalistic and God given, pastoral community.
I think I might be one of the few people who read the book and came away liking the one world government more, because the book completely and utterly failed to convince me how it is anything but fear of modernity, technology and the liberation of women from reproductive obligations. That last part is very important and in that respect the book has aged particularly poorly. The author of the essay at the end calls the book a warning of 'feminine tyranny', and I think that's exactly right. Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good.
While it's not unfair to suspect Huxley of primitivist nostalgia, I don't think his reaction is against progressive modernity, feminism, leftism in general. The fear to my mind is of something like Taylorism/Fordism taken to its extreme [1].
What I've always found more compelling in BNW as compared to explicitly totalitarian dystopias (1984 etc.) is precisely that the dehumanizing, alienating, oppressive nature of the system is hidden. On the face of it it's a utopia, nothing to complain about. The abomination shows itself when you read a bit between the lines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...
It's not a masterpiece of literature. Huxley himself did not believe it was a great work of his. It has, however, become a symbol for an insidious type of tyranny that I have called "feminine tyranny."
> Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good.
These "higher forms of social organization" can only come at the expense of the individual. This is one of Huxley's main anxieties.
Huxley was not a racist, he was not a sexist: he was a creative individual. He saw how collectivization movements were killing his kind. Brave New World is his cry. Given that Huxley was a writer, who names several of his books with the words of Shakespeare -- Brave New World itself is a bit of dialogue from The Tempest, -- I believe John IS Huxley's avatar. And John commits suicide at the end.
I find myself incredibly sad that you've interpreted him this way. I truly don't believe he was the type of individual you claim he was.
What the book boils down to, and you touch on it a few times, is a criticism of manufactured society. But the book never gives this a fair shake. John's experience is authentic because it is 'natural', synthetic desires are not. People choose the brave new world because they're genetically brainwashed, not because Huxley generally considers if there's something to that world that would make people chose it. Individualism is good, collectivism is mindless, driven home by characters who are largely neurotic caricatures without Soma.
The kind of questions I think a work like this needs to deal with are, what if there are collective experiences, more real, more genuine than anything any individual could ever feel, what if John is actually wrong, is he just limited in his perspective? What makes John more authentic of a character, aren't his drives just as biologically determined, but merely by chance rather than by design?
John is a sort of Neo among bluepilled people, everyone else is just an 'NPC' as people would say today. The one thinking guy who has walked into the Borg cube etc. And i think like the Matrix as real social criticism this is kind of trite. It does not take alternatives to individualism seriously.
Huxley's description of a biological determinant (arbitrary or otherwise) as the basis upon which to build a discriminatory caste system for all of humanity is horrifying enough. To then drug the population in order to prevent them from feeling bad about being slaves to their biological betters is the icing on the cake.
Whether an Alpha or epsilon, that's not a world that I would want to live in.
At the top, there will exist a form of altruism so superficial and devoid of substance that only insane people will be able to join the elite class.
The best we can hope for is that the elites will be so insane that they won't last very long; that way we can get enough churn to ensure that no individual ever has enough time to enforce their insanity on the rest of the population.
As a group, we can hope that they will be so insane that they won't be able to agree on anything; their power will be constrained by their heterogeneous irrationality.
The worst case scenario is that we end up with homogeneous irrationality... Sadly we can see some signs of this today. Let's hope it can't sustain itself.
It does sometimes seem that mentally unstable people seek stability by leaning on other unstable people who are afflicted with the same kind of irrationality... Instead of looking to lean on mentally stable people who are different from them.
It seems as if mentally unstable people hate stable people. Maybe there is a deep seated jealousy behind this. Which is kind of ironic because they could probably get there themselves if they surrounded themselves with stable people. But they lack the humility to see this and nobody in their circles will ever point it out to them since they suffer from the same problem.
I've found the novel to be a bit of a Rorschach blot since people read their whole view of current society, and their place in it into the novel. As has been pointed out, Huxley was an artist, so his interpretation of his novel is heavily guided by a creative personality, and for many creative people, individuality is one of the highest goods. Others read their own views into it, and interpret the novel very differently. My personal reading has some sympathies with Huxley's version, but it is not the same. I'm not a fan of the way society (both at the macro and micro level) is structured now (or in 1932), so there are aspects of BNW that appeal to me.
The case he makes is his horrifying depiction of the alternative to the monogamous family. You're correct in identifying his fears, but I personally don't see that they're unfounded. I can't help but feel an instinctual revulsion at "the monogamous family being washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization", its a profound loss of individuality
The only things we agree on are that I like the heads of the one world government as well.
More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).
That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.
Slavery (which is really what it is in the story) you are more likely to enounter in the Antebellum South than in a modern metropolis and high modernity. Limiting the intellectual capacity of your subjects would never be the point of the kind of society that Huxley envisions, and it's one example of how he does not take the thing he aims to critique seriously.
A society so advanced it could realize Huxley's fears is not at the same time going to build itself a medieval army of slaves. Even at the time of Huxley's writing Taylorism was already well past its peak and criticism of mechanized production was everywhere.
It would be rude of me to ask about your family of origin.
This is one of my favorite things to discuss about this book! See, I enjoy making games and having meaningful interactions with other people, and the world is readily granting me all that. Keeping in mind that (1) I'm NOT The Chosen One, (2) I don't have 600 metric tons of plot armor, and (3) people much wiser and knowledgeable than me still find the world perfectly livable, why should I sentence myself to a lifetime of misery to end up changing nothing? How much exactly should I be convinced that I know best in order to do that?
