Hacker News Reader

Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations?

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?

View on HN

It's worth reading Marcuse (and Adorno) for their criticisms of precisely the kind of world laid out in Brave New World, and even as they were speaking from the 50s and 60s, their points were intimately related to society at the time, and even today's society. Marcuse called it 'one dimensionality' and highlighted the dangers of total administration, while Adorno lamented the 'culture industry'. They precisely answer to the simple utilitarian position, and precisely the repression that arises. Contra Orwell's idea of "war is peace, peace is war", Marcuse argued that now the contradiction is not so obvious, but hidden in the noun itself. We speak of 'freedom', but the word 'freedom' itself has been overloaded with things which are characteristically unfree. The view of repression as simple, brute force violence and surveillanace is only scratching the surface. It ignores autonomy, the dangers to democracy, the loss of critical capacity, and alienation.

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.

Thank you! It will take a while for me to read up on these lines. In the meantime, I'll note that if Huxley had been a utilitarian himself, he would probably not have written Island[1].

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?"

Stasis, loss of personal and collective initiative and creativity, and a dishonest mythology of consumerism as the limit of free choice.

There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.

Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.)

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?

Chapter One[1] sufficed.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com