“Brave New World”, by Aldous Huxley

 

176 pages, The Folio Society

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian novel first published in 1932. My copy from the Folio Society is a third printing from 1997, based on the Society’s original version from 1971, with drawings by Leonard Rosoman, a rather well-known British artist (once). Huxley got his title from Miranda’s speech from Act V, Scene I of The Tempest by Shakespeare:

            O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t.

Of course, smart person that you are, Dear Reader, you know that this speech is ironic in nature, as the innocent and naive Miranda cannot recognize the evil intent in the invaders. The novel is largely set in an all-powerful, nameless World State, the citizens of which are produced rather than born and conditioned to fit into an intelligence-based and color-coded social hierarchy from which none can ever escape. Huxley anticipated grand scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are thence used by this dystopian society to master humanity the world over. Considering that Fascist Italy and Communist Russia, both powerful top-down governments, were going strong and, indeed, were widely admired by many at this time, the idea of an all-powerful government that could control and manipulate the people of the world did not seem at all far-fetched in 1932 – or in the early 21^st Century, for that matter.

As to how to keep 2 billion people (the ideal population number to support global welfare) under control in the year 632 AF (After Ford, or 2540 AD)? Well, that little conundrum is solved by flooding the bodies of the masses with a drug called soma; whenever one of the herd feels any kind of negative emotion welling up inside, soma solves it all and euphoria takes the place of miasma. In addition to drugs, sex is used to master the masses, with promiscuity being absolutely encouraged from childhood on as simply a way of life and with everyone sleeping with everyone else, without feeling jealousy or resentment (indeed, Lenina Crowne, one of the main characters, is made to feel shame for desiring monogamy). As the State says, “Everybody belongs to everybody else”; thus, promiscuity is the way in which the nuclear family was destroyed in order to make the State supreme in the hearts and minds of the masses. The herd is brainwashed into believing the virtues of these and other interventions by the State through subliminal messages played when they are sleeping, with such unconscious brainwashing going all the way back to their birth (one of the other main characters, Bernard Marx, comes to rebel against this through the course of the book). People do die, but out of sight, and when they are still young looking and attractive. Death is little more than a nuisance, a distraction from youth, beauty and fun.

Huxley explored all of the negatives of a totalitarian New World Order, in which everyone appears to be housed, well-fed and provided for in all of their earthly needs, and yet this apparent stability is only achieved by the total sacrifice of personal freedom in its true sense and the idea of personal responsibility. This brave new world may be safe, but it is also stultifying, oppressive and dull, dull, dull. And, it is still the driving force of many today: Feeling bad? Here are some drugs to fix that. Frightened by the chaotic state of the world? Let’s reorganize it so everyone has a place and knows it – and stays there. Have a differing moral authority than the state? Remove all religion and even the family as competing foci of thought and feeling to the state. At the end of the book, when John the Savage, the one character born outside of this “utopian” world at last meets his fate, one can only envy his escape from this “brave new world” and its totalitarian crushing of the individual.