The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it.
We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism.
What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002
(Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.)
As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
Mr. Foster is doing creative ontogenic work with the intention of introducing improvements to the status quo (and Huxley takes a sideswipe at "They will outbreed Us"[2]):
> "Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. ... "But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet."
and there is other creative work to be done, are other changes to introduce:
> Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.
No problem with utilitarianism, even if they move a different lever for utility than we do (or do they? compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 ):
> "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
(As Huxley wrote 30 years before the Cleese + Ronnies sketch[3] his idea of social destiny may have been a bit more predetermined than our twenty-first century bien-pensant ideas on the subject.)
[1] https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html
[2] Körner notes that no matter what kind of Darwinist: Social, Economic, Academic, etc., they may be spotted by their constant undarwinist worry that the unfit will outbreed the fit.
[3] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...
It's worth noting that even J.S. Mill recognized some problem with pure utilitarianism, and tried to interject with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He recognized the problem, but could not solve it with pure philosophy that starts from the sole measure of the good as being pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill's account is thus inconsistent, but what he was getting at was incredibly important, and it's a bit of a shame to see this classification of society in terms of the number of people happy versus unhappy repeated in 2020, when Mill saw a problem with it in the early 19th century.
A 1961 take on 'freedom' being just another word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhSKk-cvblc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
> "If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for.
Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position.
* It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.
> "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them."
(Note the implicit english attitude to ireland, or compare some of our current deltas' attitudes to quarantine.)
Fear not; tiring of it, it appears we're going to try Orwell's dystopia next.
"[27 March] Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news.
Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who addresses me as 'you shit', among other things.
The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokyo. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and - I think - with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stands for the more reactionary policy."
http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html
It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror.
(Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)