I never quite understood was was 'dystopian' about Brave New World. A world in which everybody is happy and content with who they are and the circumstances they live in, how is that dystopian? He threw in some bad things (the people in the reserves, the people who didn't take their meds, the 'conditioning' of the children) but never really justified why they'd be necessary. All of them (and the 'orgy-porgies') were, I felt, added to be able to make the argument that the society he was portraying was morally wrong.
Boy oh boy. Well, the thing is it is a society that is completely in thrall to a system of basic pleasure orchestrated with the questionable justification that a life without real pleasure or pain is a better one. The people are oblivious to all art and real achievement, they have no desires and no ambitions, they create nothing and have no desire to, they feel no real emotions and all sex is mechanical, and they happily march to their own deaths at a certain age. If a vision of humanity as infinitely complacent, all advancement come to an end, a billion pampered babies with their unremarkable and entirely calculated lives engineered since before birth — if that doesn't strike you as a dystopia, an "inverted utopia" in which what is meant to be perfect is anything but, well brother, I don't know what should!
> The people are oblivious to all art and real achievement
Or, maybe the people in our real society are oblivious to the peace and happiness experienced in A Brave New World's society.
> they have no desires and no ambitions, they create nothing and have no desire to, they feel no real emotions and all sex is mechanical, and they happily march to their own deaths at a certain age.
Are any of those differences actually useful things inherently, or only in pursuit of happiness? If you've got your happiness from another source (a drug), why keep doing the things that were previously necessary to attain happiness?
Well, people have been unable to settle on a comprehensive definition of happiness in the few thousand years the argument has been documented so I don't think we'll settle it here. But consider that we identify so many kinds of happiness, from the fleeting to the unforgettable: joy, euphoria, satisfaction, ecstasy, etc. I think Brave New World is about excluding all else in life but one of those. If that sounds good to you, go for it! No one can tell you what happiness is — except that's exactly what the authorities in Brave New World are doing, and they are eliminating the option of pursuing other, perhaps greater happinesses than the one they have chosen for you.
How is now not what you describe? Maybe there are no clear puppet-masters driving it, but vast swaths of people in the US live like this and fervently support it right now.
Yes, we have arrived. I have become more and more interested in Huxley over the last few years as I have become more and more aware that we have become something like what he described. The only thing left is for the powers that be to take advantage of our state of passivity and transition us to 1984
I just logged in to ask a similar question and would like to hear what others thoughts are on this. I don't support the ideas or situation described in BNW but what is the alternative that we should hope to achieve?
How do we draw the line between "helping people live happier lives" and "tricking the masses into contented servitude"?
What is the ultimate goal of humanity and our global society? What should it be? How do we reconcile differing opinions on this question?
A frequent answer for me is "to reduce suffering as best we can for the greatest number of people" but if taken to the extreme... a sedated and distracted society might be the one with the least amount of suffering? I can't support that idea but it is the unfortunate logical extension which reminds me of the sci-fi dystopias in which AI is tasked with ensuring the best for humanity...
Which is the greater horror: oppressively managed lives imposed on the populace, or sought by the populace?
"Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from." - _The_Matrix_
It has been a very long time since I last read BNW, but at the time I read it I felt that that was a very conspicuous tension in the novel. Specifically that our expectations of 20th/21st century people, and our veneration of individualism, were at odds with a society that ostensibly delivered what hoped for in terms of poverty, crime, happiness. Even the rebellious that couldn't live in such a stifling society were shipped off (it was to Iceland right?) to live with other intellectuals and iconoclasts where they would likely be much happier than if they had stayed among the happy masses.
> A world in which everybody is happy and content with who they are and the circumstances they live in, how is that dystopian?
Because being happy and content is by far not all what makes life worth living, and these people are stuck in eternal mental infancy. And they don't get a choice, either: they are conditioned to despise natural birth, not sleeping around, and deep affection -- and the caste system is proper for insects maybe, but not fully developed human beings. It is not what they eventually happened to agree on, it was engineered that way, they were born into it without even the ability to see what has been done to them, and all of this calculated. They are instant gratification junkies in an endless loop of mental stagnation, what's not to hate?
> but never really justified why they'd be necessary. All of them (and the 'orgy-porgies') were, I felt, added to be able to make the argument that the society he was portraying was morally wrong.
Do you think Huxley is making the argument that "being happy and content is bad", and the rest is just filler? If so, read his this one:
Clearly, he's not against being happy and content. But it has to be real and come from within, not just from being deprived of the ability to grasp injustice or reasons to be sad, or reasons to love (which implies the possibility and eventual reality of loss, too).
If I injected you with drugs that made you a mindless, but very happy and healthy zombie, and hooked you up to IV everything-you-need -- "you" (there would not be much left of the former you) would love it, but how would your friends react? Badly. Does this then mean they are against happiness? Of course not.
Most cattle are relatively happy, have their medicine, their wild versions, conditioning of their young and forced sex (orgy-porgies without the orgy. . . ).
Do the social structure and outlook of cattle appeal to you?
Edit: because that's what the dystopia presented in A Brave New World is similar to.
Visceral reaction is not an argument. If you ask me to imagine undergoing surgery I'll think "eew". But I still think a world in which people can undergo surgery is better than one in which it doesn't exist.
Even a short interruption of soma led to a riot. You would get grumpy if you didn't have coffee one morning, but would you start destroying things? And it is likely a common thing, as they have a special police group just for addressing this scenario. So, to reiterate my original question, if even the smallest bad thing causes riots, are they really happy?
In brief, it's the same problem with the world of The Matrix. At the end of the day, that sort of life isn't "real" in some way. The masses are blissfully ignorant and patronized. It would be a robust (possibly unending) discussion to fully explore the philosophical implications, since it's an existential question at the end of the day.
You can poison someone and feed them to your dogs without them suffering or having a moment of unhappiness.
The problem is with using behaviorist methods to train (and breed) out all possibilities of choice or creativity outside of specified bounds for human beings, who are naturally creative and whose choices of what to think and consider doing are nearly limitless.
>> A world in which everybody is happy and content with who they are and the circumstances they live in, how is that dystopian?
In his book The Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl made the case that "happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue." He said that one can't simply be happy. Rather, they must have a reason to be happy.
