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| Brave New World |
Aldous Huxley's dystopia is the one we should probably be more frightened of — not Orwell's boot on the face, but a world so successfully organized around pleasure and comfort that the very desire for freedom has been engineered out of existence. The horror of Brave New World is that most of its citizens are happy, in the specific flat way that people are happy when they have never been allowed to want anything they cannot immediately have.
The World State runs on conditioning. Human beings are not born — they are decanted — and the process of conditioning begins in the bottles, continues through childhood, and extends through adult life via the gentle pharmaceutical management of soma, a drug that provides happiness without side effects or consequences. The social castes — Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and below — are engineered for their roles, their intellectual capacities calibrated to their designated positions, their desires shaped to fit what their position allows.
Bernard Marx is an Alpha who feels the conditioning hasn't quite worked on him — he has a persistent dissatisfaction, a longing for something the World State cannot name. His discomfort is rendered without much sympathy; Huxley makes clear that Bernard's alienation is partly genuine and partly self-flattering, the ego constructing its own specialness from the same materials that construct everyone else's contentment.
John the Savage, brought from the New Mexico Reservation to London, is the novel's philosophical fulcrum. He has been raised on Shakespeare — specifically on The Tempest and a collected works — and his moral vocabulary is formed from sources the World State has eliminated: suffering, passion, sin, redemption, the entire vocabulary of tragedy. When he encounters the World State's version of happiness, he rejects it with the fervor of someone who knows that pleasure without suffering is not actually happiness but its simulation.
Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, is the novel's most interesting character — a man who has read everything the World State suppresses, who understands exactly what was sacrificed for stability, and who has made his peace with the sacrifice. His conversations with John are the novel's philosophical spine, and Huxley is fair enough to give Mond the best arguments for his position.
Brave New World imagines a future that is not imposed by force but consented to — which is why it has grown more rather than less relevant. The mechanisms of consent it describes — entertainment, comfort, pharmaceutical mood management, the engineering of desire — are not fantastical. They are present, in attenuated form, all around us.
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