This book presents a futuristic dystopia of an unusual kind. Huxley’s dystopia is one in which everyone is happy. However, they are happy in only the most trivial sense: the people lives in a caste system based on genetics, conditioned from birth and pacified by drugs, living to consume goods and take soma to forget their troubles.
What impresses me a lot is the embryonic childhood and early adult conditioning. The Director explained: “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (BNW, page 7: line 10) People do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. One of my most unforgettable conditioning scene (in Chapter Two) had a nurse training infants to dislike books and nature, by terrifying them whenever they approached or even looked at a book or flower.
Clearly, technologies such as Bokanovsky’s Process have undo their capacities to think and their love for beauty.
The other means of control was mass addiction to the drug soma, readily distributed to all, more powerful than alchol or heroin, and producing complete bliss.
The world seems stable, people there are well-off. The controller summarized the world this way: “People are happy; they get what they want; and they never want they can’t get… They’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.” (BNW, page 95: line 27)
Like John the Savage, I am an outsider looking in on that world. To me it is just abnormal and to some degree, hellish.
Those people live without art, literature or philosophy. As for religion, Henry Ford is to them what Jesus is to Christians. In short, people live without deeper meaning. Although they are expected to work hard and efficiently during working hours, during off hours they live in an infantile way, never engaging their minds, having no passion or nothing to feel strong about, and satisfying themselves with sex and drugs.
First published in 1932, this book is timeless and as relevant today as when it was first written.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. He feared we would become “a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and centrifugal bumblepuppy” (Neil Postman, Foreword from Amusing Ourselves to Death). I do fear the serious danger in the future is closer to what Huxley envisioned.
Our culture seems to be moving in the direction of Brave New World all the time. Do the rampant consumerism and herd mentality seem a little familiar? Has it become a truth that we tend to get entertainment from the internet rather than read Shakespeare? I’m afraid we are indulged in sensual pleasure, losing curiosity, free minds and belief in good taste.
To sum up, Brave New World is very readable and not at all dense. The ideas are very easy to absorb, especially in this day and age. In these uncertain times, Brave New World is as timely as ever. I highly recommend reading.