Brave New World Paperback – October 17, 2006

Before there was ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Bladerunner’, before there was even ‘1984’, there was 'Brave New World'. It is astonishing that Aldous Huxley wrote this tale of technological dystopia in 1932. The social elements from the story are similar to those in Orwell and Kafka and others, namely a society of obedient sheep run by the state and benevolent dictators through brainwashing and groupthink. But what’s striking about the novel is how it so astutely anticipates a society taken over by benevolent technocrats rather than politicians, a scenario that appears increasingly likely in the age of AI and genetic engineering.Huxley came from an illustrious scientific family with social connections. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s close friend, publicist and “bulldog”, whose famous smackdown of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce has been relished by rationalists fighting against religious faith ever since. His brother was Julian Huxley, a famous biologist who among other accomplishments wrote a marvelous tome on everything that was then known about biology with H. G. Wells. Steeped in scientific as well as social discourse, possessing a deep knowledge of medical and other scientific research, Aldous was in an ideal position to write a far-reaching novel.This he duly did. The basic premise of the novel sounds eerily prescient. Sometime in the near future, society has been regimented into a caste system where people are genetically engineered by the state in large state-run reproductive farms. Anticipating ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, only a select few women and men are capable of providing fertile eggs and sperm for this careful social engineering. The higher castes are strong, intelligent and charismatic. The lower castes are turgid, obedient and physically weak. They don’t begrudge those from the upper castes because their genetic engineering has largely removed their propensity toward jealousy and violence. Most notably, because reproduction is now the responsibility of the state, there is no longer a concept of a family, of a father or mother. There is knowledge of these concepts, but it’s regarded as archaic history from a past era and is met with revulsion.How is this population kept under control? Not shockingly at all, through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Promiscuity is encouraged from childhood onwards and is simply a way of life, and everyone sleeps with everyone else, again without feeling jealousy or resentment (it was this depiction of promiscuity that led the book to be banned in India in the 60s). They flood their bodies with a drug called soma whenever they feel any kind of negative emotion welling up inside and party like there’s no end. They are brainwashed into believing the virtues of these and other interventions by the state through subliminal messages played when they are sleeping; such unconscious brainwashing goes all the way back to their birth. People do die, but out of sight, and when they are still looking young and attractive. Death is little more than a nuisance, a slight distraction from youth, beauty and fun.Like Neo from ‘The Matrix’, one particular citizen of this society named Bernard Marx starts feeling that there is more to the world than would be apparent from this state of induced bliss. On a tryst with a particularly attractive member of his caste in an Indian reservation in New Mexico, he comes across a man referred to as the savage. The savage is the product of an illegitimate encounter (back when there were parents) between a member of a lower caste and the Director of Hatcheries who oversees all the controlled reproduction. He has grown up without any of the enlightened instruments of the New World, but his mother has kept a copy of Shakespeare with her so he knows all of Shakespeare by heart and frequently quotes it. Marx brings the savage back to his society. The rest of the book describes the savage’s reaction to this supposed utopia and its ultimately tragic consequences. Ultimately he concludes that it’s better to have free will and feel occasionally unhappy, resentful and angry than live in a society where free will is squelched and the population is kept bathed in an induced state of artificial happiness.The vision of technological control in the novel is sweeping and frighteningly prescient. There is the brainwashing and complacent submission to the status quo that everyone undergoes which is similar to the messages provided in modern times by TV, social media and the 24-hour news cycle. There are the chemical and genetic interventions made by the state right in the embryonic stage to make sure that the embryos grow up with desired physical or mental advantages or deficiencies. These kinds of interventions are the exact kind feared by those wary of CRISPR and other genetic editing technologies. Finally, keeping the population preoccupied, entertained and away from critical thinking through sex and promiscuity is a particularly potent form of societal control that has been appreciated well by Victoria’s Secret, and that will not end with developments in virtual reality.In some sense, Huxley completely anticipates the social problems engendered by the technological takeover of human jobs by robots and AI. Once human beings are left with nothing to do, how does the state ensure that they are prevented from becoming bored and restless and causing all kinds of trouble? In his book “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari asks the same questions and concludes that a technocratic society will come up with distractions like virtual reality video games, new psychoactive drugs and novel forms of sexual entertainment that will keep the vast majority of unemployed from becoming bored and potentially hostile. I do not know whether Harari read Huxley, but I do feel more frightened by Huxley than by Harari. One reason I feel more frightened is because of what he leaves out; the book was published in 1932, so it omits any discussion of nuclear weapons which were invented ten years later. The combination of nuclear weapons with limitless societal control through technology makes for a particularly combustible mix.The biggest prediction of Huxley’s dystopia, and one distinctly different from that made by Orwell or Kafka, is that instead of a socialist state, people’s minds are much more likely to be controlled in the near future by the leaders of technology companies like Google and Facebook who have formed an unholy nexus with the government. With their social media alerts and Fitbits and maps, the tech companies are increasingly telling us how to live our lives and distracting us from free thinking. Instead of communist regimes like the Soviet Union forcibly trampling on individual choice and liberty, we are already gently but willingly ceding our choices, privacy and liberties to machines and algorithms developed by these companies. And just like the state in Huxley and Orwell’s works, the leaders of these corporations will tell us why it’s in our best interests to let technology control our lives and freedom, when all the while it would really be in their best interests to tell us this. Our capitulation to their inventions will look helpful and voluntary and will feel pleasurable and even noble, but it will be no less complete than the capitulation of every individual in “Brave New World” or “1984”. The only question is, will there be any savages left among us to tell us how foolishly we are behaving?

Before I write the review, people should know that Brave New World Revisited is usually included in Brave New World. Even though they didn't specify that in the copy I bought, that was the case, so before you decide on buying both, get this one first to see if the other is included.I remember finishing this book while I was dropping down in Poland, and it dawned on me, "Oh my God, we are living in the Brave New World!" It seemed implausible to me that this was the case because Huxley wrote the book in 1931. That's 81 years ago. 81 years ago man! Do you know how long ago that is? He had no idea that the media would turn into the manipulating monarchy it has become; that we would be living in a totalitarian world, where the television announcers preach peace, democracy, and other hypocrisy, while the leaders of the world sit in their billion dollar mansions, sipping on billion dollar champagne, reveling in the unfolding of their master plan.I found it quite amusing that he called Mustafa Mond, one of the leaders of Brave New World, The Controller. I only realized the propensity of calling him such a name by the end of the book because he was literally in control of everything. What was most frightening to me is that he was in control of the information that the people could access. He knew about God, Shakespeare, and many other things from the "Old World", but in order to keep people subjugated and obedient, he deliberately chose not to allow this information to be spread to the general public. Don't you think that the real leaders of the world, the ones behind the iron curtain, know very well about a variety of things which good actually lead humanity to be liberated? "But how can this be?" you may ask. "That means that the world is being run by bad people!" Well, if it wasn't do you think there would be any form of war in the world?We are living in the Brave New World Huxley prophesied all those years ago, where the information we receive is controlled; where we, as Huxley put it, are content with our slavery. We have forgotten our humanity. We have forgotten that we are people, that every single one of us in a individual that deserves the utmost respect, and we have been conditioned to cling to the mass organizations because we feel a sense a completeness once we are a part of something. That is what they want. They want a group of blind sheep going wherever the road takes them, and not setting their foot down and saying "No! We want it differently!"It is a terrible state of affairs, and if you look back at the history of the world, you will see that any dissenter to the status quo has been silenced, crucified, and put down. When I say crucified, I don't just mean Jesus on the cross because he told the Jews they had it wrong. I am also referring to people like JFK, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon. Their voices were heard by millions of people, and they were starting to become a threat, so they were crucified by the murky evil men sitting behind the curtains. How dare I mention these "mere mortals" with the name of the "Lord and Savior" Jesus Christ? Well, read a little about the history of Christianity; the fabrications which have made us believe that Jesus was the son of God; that in order to be saved, we have to be obedient sheep and to turn ourselves over to Christ. This is exactly what happened in the Brave New World in Huxley's book: information manipulation and information control to keep the people obedient and domesticated. If you dig deep, you will realize that the only thing that Jesus preached was love, and if you dig even deeper, you see that even he said that all external ordinances are not only unnecessary, but harmful because the people who do them feel like they are exempted from performing acts of love. Open your eyes and see. All you have to do to see the truth is to let go of the beliefs you have blindly clung to all your life, and look at things with an open mind. Chances are, the beliefs you have today aren't yours, but were slowly seeded into your mind until you were convinced that they were yours if you really, really think about it.In my opinion, information control and information manipulation is by far the most dangerous thing in the world today. The mass media (including wikipedia) choose what you think. National Geographic documentaries won't tell you anything either, and CNN is probably the biggest horse show running in the world today (apart from the O'Reily Factor). In order for us to be liberated, it is essential that we start reading books. There are where the answers lie; not on Wikipedia, or YouTube, or a DVD documentary where the director has probably been told that he can't show a large portion of the truth because it would be too dangerous. Books. Books Books. Start reading. Whenever you want to know about a subject, buy a book about it, and even then, be skeptical. Keep digging. Dig deeper and deeper until you are entirely convinced by what you have read from different sources that what the authors are saying is true. There are far too many liars in the world today for you to be content with watching anything, so my advice to you is to open and book, and start reading.

The horrific thing about reading a dystopian classic like Brave New World is that so much of its contents are uncomfortably familiar to all of us. Perhaps we have not evolved or devolved into quite the dystopian nightmare imagined by Huxley, but it’s difficult to point out any element that he got too far off. No, we’re not all grown in laboratories and destined to work in particular classes of employment for all our lives, but our prospects do seem to be largely determined our upbringing and education, so there’s at least a hint of truth to it. We may not be completely pacified and sedated by mindless and soulless entertainment, meaningless sex, and mind-numbing drugs, but…well, look around the world today. Huxley wasn’t too far off the mark there, either.Let’s just say it’s a classic for a reason. But that reason is almost entirely to do with the ideas behind the book rather than its value as literature. Don’t get me wrong; it’s well-written, to be sure. A review upon the book’s release from the New Statesman and Nation (which is quoted in my edition’s backmatter) pointed out that Huxley himself never really seemed interested in the story of the novel but only in the ideas of it. At the time, that was meant as a harsh criticism and as part of an overall negative review. I think it’s entirely correct, but I don’t see it as nearly as great a flaw as Huxley’s own contemporaries might have. It’s not a great novel in terms of plot or character. But it IS a great novel in terms of satire and philosophy, and it is for those that we read it and for those that we consider it a classic.