The money quote from the article:<p>“…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.”<p>– Aldous Huxley, from a 1949 letter to George Orwell.
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.
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.<p>And I found I liked thinking.
It's a real shame that Huxley's final novel <i>Island</i>, written after his first exposure to actual psychedelics, gets so little press compared to <i>Brave New World</i>.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)</a><p>But apparently the world wasn't ready for a utopia of Tantric sex and drugs where people are genuinely happy.
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.
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 <i>safetyism</i> was popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind (<a href="https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-generation/" rel="nofollow">https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g...</a>), 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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden</a>