6 ms·

Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

85 points by WriterGuy2021 5y ago

raintrees 5y ago
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Alekhine 5y ago
This was a good essay. Covers the entire book perfectly. When I was 11 years old I asked my brother for a book to read, and he gave me this. I read it at summer camp. It was the first book that made me really and truly THINK. And I found I liked thinking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
peakaboo 5y ago
We are literally living inside that world but people don't see it. :)
- WriterGuy2021 5y ago
  What motivation do people have to see the world as it is? Billions of people believe they will never die because Heaven is on the other side of this world. As Nietzsche wrote: "Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!" It's nothing new that humanity has a will-to-blindness. In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
  - tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
    > In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life... 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?
    - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
      Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice. If you fit well into your social role, then you aren't going to seek "the truth." Bernard is more aware of his surroundings because he is not suited to his role. Helmholtz is more aware because he exceeds his role. The way they are and what is expected of them preordained their awakening and its character. As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder. When you're naturally predisposed to be an outsider, the self-preservation matrix of the collective does not capture one's libido. One is freer psychically, but free like a starving man on the hunt for food as opposed to a sated man lounging on a couch. To not be hooked into some preservative frame induces great motion within...but is energetic motion superior to sated stillness? A question I've been trying to answer myself...
      - superduperuser 5y ago
        >>As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder. This is directly on target with how I felt as a kid to late teens. Is this something you talked with others about or maybe read somewhere? I have never came to grips on why it took me longer to understand people. My siblings close my age did well socializing where I felt out of touch.
        WriterGuy2021 5y ago
throwawaysea 5y ago
A perfect life can be dystopian. Stability, convenience, distraction, and safety seem like the pillars of Huxley’s dystopia. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the last bit, safety. In today’s modern world some notions of safety - like crash testing cars - are very sensible. When focus on safety and elimination of risks is taken to an extreme however, it can lead to unbearable limits on people. Suddenly free expression, personal choice, experimentation, and adopting a different calculation of risks than others might be not allowed. The notion of safetyism was popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind (https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-generation/ https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g...), and I see the concept creep mentioned in that book continuing today. It’s always with the best of intentions, in pursuit of a perfect world, but I worry that we are veering towards Huxley’s nightmare.
- WriterGuy2021 5y ago
  In Huxley's dystopia, all friction is eliminated. Friction is what makes people wake up. These "unbearable limits," i.e., friction, would not exist in Brave New World.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    It sounds a lot like the Netherlands. It’s so damn nice and functional here — more freedom than the US, even — but there is a gnawing sense that it will lead to a very dulltopian world, where needs are fully satisfied and life becomes rather unimportant.
    - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
      > dulltopain Huxley ultimately believes, as all artists believe, that a creative life is the only life worth living. Suffering and conflict is the fuel of all higher pursuits. In Brave New World, people are drained of this fuel. Life is easy. People just go along with the flow. But this means they create nothing. This is a horrifying prospect to Huxley. "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." -- Nietzsche
1cvmask 5y ago
The money quote from the article: “…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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- imglorp 5y ago
  It turns out they were both approximately right about dystopia.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    We are in a world of Orwell's surveillance devices, lovingly toted by the proles as Huxley suggested.
    - 0des 5y ago
      It seems a lot of literary dystopias have merged and manifested into our current reality. At this point I'm just waiting for someone harpoon at my car as I approach an onramp.
      - f00zz 5y ago
        I look forward to applying for citizenship in Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong
      - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
        Despite all the insightful intellectual back and forth on this thread, this is my favorite comment.
        rjbwork 5y ago
        Right over my head. Is this just a snarky Moby Dick joke?
Isinlor 5y ago
Our bodies are this type of utopia. Some billions years ago individual cells evolved to live in collectives. Then they evolved to form specific castes or as we call them tissues. Cancer is a disease where some cells are loosing their caste and multiply. Auto-immune diseases are when the army caste of a body does not serve the collective.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  So the next step of evolution might be a hive, Locutus?
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    Nono Not a hive, slime, slime is the final form https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20 https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20
jcynix 5y ago
And then there's Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" published about 30 years afterwards, with twelve essays to look at the world in 1958. He concludes (iirc) that a lot of the changes he expected to appear in a hundred years after "Brave New World" took shape already.
- WriterGuy2021 5y ago
  If he had predicted that the primary means of conditioning the public would be T.V. instead of hypnopedia, there would be no doubt that we're living in something like BNW -- or at least one of its spiritual progeny.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Hypnopedia was really just continuous repetition of "facts" until they were an autonomous response. I'd say he was pretty damn close.
    - jl2718 5y ago
      We don’t use repetition. We use behavioral thought control by giving rewards (good grades) for demonstration of belief (test taking) at early ages. These are nearly impossible to reverse at any age once embedded. Kids believe in the tooth faerie, but can reconcile this belief later because it never showed up on a test. Now I’m going to piss off everybody. Try to reconcile your beliefs with observable facts about King Leonidas or Helen Keller. Or if you went to a fundamentalist school, try any religious figure. Those are minor beliefs that have little consequence for society. There are major ones too. At some point, you should realize that you live in a fictional belief system. And I mean you, not just people who you think have been brainwashed. If you’re really truly brilliant and skeptical, you may reconcile 0.1% of these beliefs, but even then subject to “Murray Gell-Man” amnesia for 99.9% of your beliefs. The only people who can possibly escape this are those who are labeled as imbeciles for their inability to convert between memory of fact and assumption of belief. For instance, there are ‘idiot savants’ that can memorize an entire book just for fun, but will never assume that anything written in any book is actually true. These people are completely unable to assimilate culturally, and we institutionalize them for that reason. A a side note, just as soma (and nearly all popular drugs) create suggestibility, I think it should be possible to reverse this and become more like an idiot savant. An example might be an antagonist of dopamine, serotonin, or opiate receptors, but I’m not sure. If anybody has any other ideas or experience with currently-available compounds, I would like to hear them.
bleuchase 5y ago
If you find all this interesting, look into Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley sometime. Infamous eugenicist and architect of a few institutions that are still influential today.
Borrible 5y ago
Demons to some. Angels to others. There is a time for everything. A time for pleasure, a time for pain. Nonetheless they decide, not the others. 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.
dustintrex 5y ago
It's a real shame that Huxley's final novel Island, written after his first exposure to actual psychedelics, gets so little press compared to Brave New World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel) 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.
- WriterGuy2021 5y ago
  Brave New World has become more than a novel now...it's a symbol in the cultural lexicon. Another example is the use of "orwellian" as an adjective by people that have never read 1984. I agree that his other works demonstrate his skills as an artist much better.
- nickstinemates 5y ago
  Island is an amazing book. I highly recommend it. I read it at least once a year and its just as moving the 10th time as it was the first.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I quite like the idea in “The Island” that there is a desire to dominant within all people, but for those who have a strong compulsion to dominate, we must provide a productive outlet. In the novel, this outlet was rock climbing in which the desire to dominate is turned inward upon the self rather than outward upon other people.
- Jibbedeyeah 5y ago
  >Tantric sex and drugs where people are genuinely happy That seems like vapid, temporary happiness to me. Like rockstar, Kurt Cobain, type happiness.
  - svrourke 5y ago
    Kurt Cobain isn't typically who I would think of when prompted with the phrase "Rockstar Happiness"
  - 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a guy called John the Savage who reads Shakespeare in the redneck reservation and is the real woke one compared to all the sheep on soma and sex. 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. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  I felt likewise.
- drw85 5y ago
  I agree, i also found the writing to be very "try hard" and pretty unpleasant to read. That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.
- antihipocrat 5y ago
  I wasn't too impressed with the writing, especially after hearing so much about the book. However, I think it provides an interesting alternative to the fear based absolute authoritarian control used by governments to varying effect currently and throughout history. 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.

85 points by WriterGuy2021 5y ago

You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

This was a good essay. Covers the entire book perfectly. When I was 11 years old I asked my brother for a book to read, and he gave me this. I read it at summer camp. It was the first book that made me really and truly THINK. And I found I liked thinking.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

peakaboo 5y ago

We are literally living inside that world but people don't see it. :)

WriterGuy2021 5y ago
What motivation do people have to see the world as it is? Billions of people believe they will never die because Heaven is on the other side of this world. As Nietzsche wrote: "Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!" It's nothing new that humanity has a will-to-blindness. In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  > In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life... 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?
  - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
    Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice. If you fit well into your social role, then you aren't going to seek "the truth." Bernard is more aware of his surroundings because he is not suited to his role. Helmholtz is more aware because he exceeds his role. The way they are and what is expected of them preordained their awakening and its character. As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder. When you're naturally predisposed to be an outsider, the self-preservation matrix of the collective does not capture one's libido. One is freer psychically, but free like a starving man on the hunt for food as opposed to a sated man lounging on a couch. To not be hooked into some preservative frame induces great motion within...but is energetic motion superior to sated stillness? A question I've been trying to answer myself...
    - superduperuser 5y ago
      >>As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder. This is directly on target with how I felt as a kid to late teens. Is this something you talked with others about or maybe read somewhere? I have never came to grips on why it took me longer to understand people. My siblings close my age did well socializing where I felt out of touch.
      - WriterGuy2021 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

A perfect life can be dystopian. Stability, convenience, distraction, and safety seem like the pillars of Huxley’s dystopia. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the last bit, safety. In today’s modern world some notions of safety - like crash testing cars - are very sensible. When focus on safety and elimination of risks is taken to an extreme however, it can lead to unbearable limits on people. Suddenly free expression, personal choice, experimentation, and adopting a different calculation of risks than others might be not allowed. The notion of safetyism was popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind (https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-generation/ https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g...), and I see the concept creep mentioned in that book continuing today. It’s always with the best of intentions, in pursuit of a perfect world, but I worry that we are veering towards Huxley’s nightmare.

WriterGuy2021 5y ago
In Huxley's dystopia, all friction is eliminated. Friction is what makes people wake up. These "unbearable limits," i.e., friction, would not exist in Brave New World.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  It sounds a lot like the Netherlands. It’s so damn nice and functional here — more freedom than the US, even — but there is a gnawing sense that it will lead to a very dulltopian world, where needs are fully satisfied and life becomes rather unimportant.
  - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
    > dulltopain Huxley ultimately believes, as all artists believe, that a creative life is the only life worth living. Suffering and conflict is the fuel of all higher pursuits. In Brave New World, people are drained of this fuel. Life is easy. People just go along with the flow. But this means they create nothing. This is a horrifying prospect to Huxley. "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." -- Nietzsche

1cvmask 5y ago

The money quote from the article: “…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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
imglorp 5y ago
It turns out they were both approximately right about dystopia.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  We are in a world of Orwell's surveillance devices, lovingly toted by the proles as Huxley suggested.
  - 0des 5y ago
    It seems a lot of literary dystopias have merged and manifested into our current reality. At this point I'm just waiting for someone harpoon at my car as I approach an onramp.
    - f00zz 5y ago
      I look forward to applying for citizenship in Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong
    - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
      Despite all the insightful intellectual back and forth on this thread, this is my favorite comment.
      - rjbwork 5y ago
        Right over my head. Is this just a snarky Moby Dick joke?

Isinlor 5y ago

Our bodies are this type of utopia. Some billions years ago individual cells evolved to live in collectives. Then they evolved to form specific castes or as we call them tissues. Cancer is a disease where some cells are loosing their caste and multiply. Auto-immune diseases are when the army caste of a body does not serve the collective.

dotancohen 5y ago
So the next step of evolution might be a hive, Locutus?
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Nono Not a hive, slime, slime is the final form https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20 https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20

jcynix 5y ago

And then there's Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" published about 30 years afterwards, with twelve essays to look at the world in 1958. He concludes (iirc) that a lot of the changes he expected to appear in a hundred years after "Brave New World" took shape already.

WriterGuy2021 5y ago
If he had predicted that the primary means of conditioning the public would be T.V. instead of hypnopedia, there would be no doubt that we're living in something like BNW -- or at least one of its spiritual progeny.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Hypnopedia was really just continuous repetition of "facts" until they were an autonomous response. I'd say he was pretty damn close.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    We don’t use repetition. We use behavioral thought control by giving rewards (good grades) for demonstration of belief (test taking) at early ages. These are nearly impossible to reverse at any age once embedded. Kids believe in the tooth faerie, but can reconcile this belief later because it never showed up on a test. Now I’m going to piss off everybody. Try to reconcile your beliefs with observable facts about King Leonidas or Helen Keller. Or if you went to a fundamentalist school, try any religious figure. Those are minor beliefs that have little consequence for society. There are major ones too. At some point, you should realize that you live in a fictional belief system. And I mean you, not just people who you think have been brainwashed. If you’re really truly brilliant and skeptical, you may reconcile 0.1% of these beliefs, but even then subject to “Murray Gell-Man” amnesia for 99.9% of your beliefs. The only people who can possibly escape this are those who are labeled as imbeciles for their inability to convert between memory of fact and assumption of belief. For instance, there are ‘idiot savants’ that can memorize an entire book just for fun, but will never assume that anything written in any book is actually true. These people are completely unable to assimilate culturally, and we institutionalize them for that reason. A a side note, just as soma (and nearly all popular drugs) create suggestibility, I think it should be possible to reverse this and become more like an idiot savant. An example might be an antagonist of dopamine, serotonin, or opiate receptors, but I’m not sure. If anybody has any other ideas or experience with currently-available compounds, I would like to hear them.

bleuchase 5y ago

If you find all this interesting, look into Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley sometime. Infamous eugenicist and architect of a few institutions that are still influential today.

Borrible 5y ago

Demons to some. Angels to others. There is a time for everything. A time for pleasure, a time for pain. Nonetheless they decide, not the others. 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.

dustintrex 5y ago

It's a real shame that Huxley's final novel Island, written after his first exposure to actual psychedelics, gets so little press compared to Brave New World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel) 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.

WriterGuy2021 5y ago
Brave New World has become more than a novel now...it's a symbol in the cultural lexicon. Another example is the use of "orwellian" as an adjective by people that have never read 1984. I agree that his other works demonstrate his skills as an artist much better.
nickstinemates 5y ago
Island is an amazing book. I highly recommend it. I read it at least once a year and its just as moving the 10th time as it was the first.
germinalphrase 5y ago
I quite like the idea in “The Island” that there is a desire to dominant within all people, but for those who have a strong compulsion to dominate, we must provide a productive outlet. In the novel, this outlet was rock climbing in which the desire to dominate is turned inward upon the self rather than outward upon other people.
Jibbedeyeah 5y ago
>Tantric sex and drugs where people are genuinely happy That seems like vapid, temporary happiness to me. Like rockstar, Kurt Cobain, type happiness.
- svrourke 5y ago
  Kurt Cobain isn't typically who I would think of when prompted with the phrase "Rockstar Happiness"
- 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a guy called John the Savage who reads Shakespeare in the redneck reservation and is the real woke one compared to all the sheep on soma and sex. 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. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden

AndrewDucker 5y ago
I felt likewise.
drw85 5y ago
I agree, i also found the writing to be very "try hard" and pretty unpleasant to read. That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.
antihipocrat 5y ago
I wasn't too impressed with the writing, especially after hearing so much about the book. However, I think it provides an interesting alternative to the fear based absolute authoritarian control used by governments to varying effect currently and throughout history. 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.