Speculative Fiction: Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. 

Technology and Control

Science and technology are two different things. Science is the pursuit of truth and fact in the various sciences, from biology to physics. Technology refers to the tools and applications developed from science. Science is knowledge. Technology is what you can do with that knowledge.

The Cost of Happiness

If you gave someone the choice between getting what they wanted and not getting what they wanted, they'd choose getting what they wanted every time. This satisfaction of desire, the person would believe, would make them happy. In order to maintain its stability, the World State in Brave New World ensures that all its citizens get exactly what they want all the time. In other words, the World State is designed to make people happy.

Industrialism and Consumption

Brave New World criticizes the industrial economic systems of the era in which it was written by imagining those systems pushed to their logical extremes. The industrial revolution that began in the second half of the 19th century and sped up through the 20th allowed for the production of massive quantities of new goods. But there's no value in producing new goods that no one wants, so the willingness of the masses to consume these new goods was crucial to economic growth and prosperity. 

Individuality

All of World State society can be described as an effort to eliminate the individual from society. That doesn't mean the elimination of all people; it means the conditioning of those people so that they don't really think of themselves as individuals. What makes a person an individual? Having a sense of oneself as being separate, distinct, unique. 

Dystopia and Totalitarianism

Brave New World is one of the two best known dystopian novels written in the twentieth century. The other is George Orwell's 1984. Both novels envision future totalitarian societies in which individual liberty has been usurped by an all-powerful state. But the two novels show two very different methods by which the state has amassed its power. 1984 presents the rather more conventional vision of a totalitarian state, in which the government maintains power through surveillance, information control, and torture. Brave New World, in contrast, argues that the most powerful totalitarian state would be one that doesn't overwhelm and frighten its citizens, but instead manages to convince its citizens to love their slavery.