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.
