Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
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“…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.
i.e. if you need to do some menial paperwork (i.e. file with city that you are changing plumping, the a.i. handles it for you).
Basically an interface that is human friendly and can keep governments informed/processed/licensed as needed.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
The book was released on 1985, and its main premise is that the mass-media has a damaging effect in our capacities to understand and elaborate rational arguments. In his opinion, TV was their age soma. I wonder what he would think today...
https://twitter.com/EmojiPan/status/1353088799086157835?s=20
And I found I liked thinking.
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.
That seems like vapid, temporary happiness to me. Like rockstar, Kurt Cobain, type happiness.
I've read it, along with his entire bibliography as Aldous Huxley has been my favorite author since I read Doors of Perception as 16 year old boy, and I think that both are still highlighting the pitfalls of centralized planning of Society as in the case within Brave New World.
To me both seem like a direct response to the perils outlined in Artic Hay, which is to say that effective centralized planning of Society and Human Organization can be successfully achieved provided you include the basic needs and wants of the Human Condition while catering to it's pleasure seeking nature to make one's servitude acceptable (include Genetic modification as in the case of BnW) all while omitting the need for strife, challenge, and adversity that makes something feel fulfilling for Humans: hence the story of the savage.
I'd say he was pretty damn close.
I wrote the above and then did some googling. Found this article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3060491/what-happened-to-my-brai.... I don't know how reputable it is, but here's a quote relevant to this discussion:
"There have been EEG studies that demonstrate that television watching converts the brain from beta wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with a daydreaming state, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills."
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.
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
I disagree. I mean, the combinations of education, travel, and hallucinogens has pushed me further in my art and intellectual curiosity than suffering ever has. For so many people, suffering simply stagnates them because it eats up so much mental and physical energy.
The lives are certainly not without conflict, however. Meeting social norms still creates some conflict (what, you want to be with only one person!?!). Most folks are, however, missing things that pushes them just a little outside of their comfort zone - but you certainly don't need conflict for that, but rather, just things that are different enough.
It's almost a relief to see I'm not the only one having this view. I've been living in NL for the better part of a decade now and to most of the people back home (one of those terrible 'former Eastern Bloc' countries) I sound like a complete lunatic when I bring up similar impressions.
I guess an ideal place would have to be as functional as the Netherlands and yet far less soulless. Is this possible I wonder? Is there some intrinsic trade-off between the two aspects?
Yeah, I realize the attitude is a bit simplistic. It's certainly true that serious conflict is way worse than boring mild-dystopia.
I'm thinking however of someplace like the 'second-tier' rich European countries - the Northern Meditteranean, perhaps even a few former 'Eastern Bloc' places. Those might have a better balance.
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.
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.
That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.
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.
At the top, there will exist a form of altruism so superficial and devoid of substance that only insane people will be able to join the elite class.
The best we can hope for is that the elites will be so insane that they won't last very long; that way we can get enough churn to ensure that no individual ever has enough time to enforce their insanity on the rest of the population.
As a group, we can hope that they will be so insane that they won't be able to agree on anything; their power will be constrained by their heterogeneous irrationality.
The worst case scenario is that we end up with homogeneous irrationality... Sadly we can see some signs of this today. Let's hope it can't sustain itself.
It does sometimes seem that mentally unstable people seek stability by leaning on other unstable people who are afflicted with the same kind of irrationality... Instead of looking to lean on mentally stable people who are different from them.
It seems as if mentally unstable people hate stable people. Maybe there is a deep seated jealousy behind this. Which is kind of ironic because they could probably get there themselves if they surrounded themselves with stable people. But they lack the humility to see this and nobody in their circles will ever point it out to them since they suffer from the same problem.
What makes you think we're headed that way? Are there other plausible directions?
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." - Ephesians 6:12
Today we're calling it "mentally unstable" or "psychotic" or "sociopatic," but yesterday we simply called it "evil."
It's the eternal struggle.
It's not a masterpiece of literature. Huxley himself did not believe it was a great work of his. It has, however, become a symbol for an insidious type of tyranny that I have called "feminine tyranny."
> 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.
These "higher forms of social organization" can only come at the expense of the individual. This is one of Huxley's main anxieties.
Huxley was not a racist, he was not a sexist: he was a creative individual. He saw how collectivization movements were killing his kind. Brave New World is his cry. Given that Huxley was a writer, who names several of his books with the words of Shakespeare -- Brave New World itself is a bit of dialogue from The Tempest, -- I believe John IS Huxley's avatar. And John commits suicide at the end.
I find myself incredibly sad that you've interpreted him this way. I truly don't believe he was the type of individual you claim he was.
What the book boils down to, and you touch on it a few times, is a criticism of manufactured society. But the book never gives this a fair shake. John's experience is authentic because it is 'natural', synthetic desires are not. People choose the brave new world because they're genetically brainwashed, not because Huxley generally considers if there's something to that world that would make people chose it. Individualism is good, collectivism is mindless, driven home by characters who are largely neurotic caricatures without Soma.
The kind of questions I think a work like this needs to deal with are, what if there are collective experiences, more real, more genuine than anything any individual could ever feel, what if John is actually wrong, is he just limited in his perspective? What makes John more authentic of a character, aren't his drives just as biologically determined, but merely by chance rather than by design?
John is a sort of Neo among bluepilled people, everyone else is just an 'NPC' as people would say today. The one thinking guy who has walked into the Borg cube etc. And i think like the Matrix as real social criticism this is kind of trite. It does not take alternatives to individualism seriously.
Read in retrospect, one could find in it a cri de coeur on behalf of what is today called "authenticity" and, oft as not, itself manufactured (#vanlife).
I think what the book is really missing, in the light of a century hence, is a discussion of how this exquisitely planned, designed, and constructed society handles a crisis - a change in circumstances that calls the assumptions of its design into question or invalidates them outright. When Huxley wrote, it was still possible to repose one's faith in technological positivism, which was after all the vastly prevailing intellectual current of the day. These days, maybe not so much - if nothing else, the last few decades have put a lot of deep dents in the idea that we, as a species in the large, can and will engineer ourselves out of any difficulty we encounter. I'd like to see someone take on the question of what happens to the Brave New World society in the face of that.
> What makes John more authentic of a character, aren't his drives just as biologically determined, but merely by chance rather than by design?
This is a really good question. John is more authentic because he's an individual -- I know, don't scoff yet. He's looking to create a personal connection with Lenina. He doesn't want to "have" her like the other men have her: he wants to love her. Lenina cannot form love bond with John -- that's not in her programming. She can only sample his sexuality.
Now, we may ask: what's the value of personal connections? I have a hard time answering this in the abstract right now, but all I can say is that I've enjoyed intense personal connections in my life that could never be replaced by impersonal collective relations.
You'd likewise do better to look further beyond the text - you have, after all, a century of perspective on which to draw, but your analysis reads as if uninformed by anything newer than Nietzsche or maybe Evola. Whether that's intentional I've no idea, but either way it seems to have caused you a harder time finding anything new to say here.
You can, I hope, do better than "hedonistic nihilism is bad actually", and I'd be interested to see what might come of the attempt.
I ultimately believe that there's a progression system of consciousness related to the nature of our being. Modifying our being by forming different kinds of attachments and detachments, in the Jungian sense of alchemy, allows us to achieve different states of consciousness. It appears to me that there exists an "enlightened" state of consciousness that is associated with the "perfect being." I believe the greatest achievement and goal of human existence is to transform ourselves into this perfect being, i.e., attain enlightenment.
Lenina has subordinated her prima materia to the macro alchemical work. Whereas John reserves his prima materia and seeks to work it himself in solitude. John is thus on the path to enlightenment, but Lenina has abandoned the path. If John keeps going, he may develop a pure enough being to see the kingdom of God, i.e., attain enlightenment (see Matthew 5:8). This is why John is ultimately superior to Lenina.
The beings of Helmholtz and Bernard offer us perfect examples of superiority and inferiority in being. Bernard is attached to the collective, but his attachment to the collective is not yielding its expected returns -- hence his misery. Helmholtz, on the other hand, is attached to the collective, but the yield on that bond is not enough to complete him: Helmholtz is yearning for a higher state of development, i.e., for a higher state of being.
When Bernard's status is elevated in the collective by his exploitation of John, he is overjoyed and complete. Helmholtz exploits John in a different way: he uses the Shakespeare in John to help him develop his potentialities, i.e., evolve into a higher state of being. The better man is seeking to evolve, while the lesser man yearns to fit in his place.
This is a brief sense of the metaphysics I subscribe to and the judgement it produces.
That's the hackernews comment "attempt" in any case.
Slavery (which is really what it is in the story) you are more likely to enounter in the Antebellum South than in a modern metropolis and high modernity. Limiting the intellectual capacity of your subjects would never be the point of the kind of society that Huxley envisions, and it's one example of how he does not take the thing he aims to critique seriously.
A society so advanced it could realize Huxley's fears is not at the same time going to build itself a medieval army of slaves. Even at the time of Huxley's writing Taylorism was already well past its peak and criticism of mechanized production was everywhere.
It's a deliberate critique of eugenics, which was a popular and little criticized school of thought at the time of writing, and which did in its original iteration claim to offer the prospect of engineering people to fit assigned social roles.
While it's not unfair to suspect Huxley of primitivist nostalgia, I don't think his reaction is against progressive modernity, feminism, leftism in general. The fear to my mind is of something like Taylorism/Fordism taken to its extreme [1].
What I've always found more compelling in BNW as compared to explicitly totalitarian dystopias (1984 etc.) is precisely that the dehumanizing, alienating, oppressive nature of the system is hidden. On the face of it it's a utopia, nothing to complain about. The abomination shows itself when you read a bit between the lines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...
The only things we agree on are that I like the heads of the one world government as well.
More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).
The case he makes is his horrifying depiction of the alternative to the monogamous family. You're correct in identifying his fears, but I personally don't see that they're unfounded. I can't help but feel an instinctual revulsion at "the monogamous family being washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization", its a profound loss of individuality
I've found the novel to be a bit of a Rorschach blot since people read their whole view of current society, and their place in it into the novel. As has been pointed out, Huxley was an artist, so his interpretation of his novel is heavily guided by a creative personality, and for many creative people, individuality is one of the highest goods. Others read their own views into it, and interpret the novel very differently. My personal reading has some sympathies with Huxley's version, but it is not the same. I'm not a fan of the way society (both at the macro and micro level) is structured now (or in 1932), so there are aspects of BNW that appeal to me.
It would be rude of me to ask about your family of origin.
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?
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...
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.