Brave New World - Or: Suspension to disbelief; another self-righteous U20 talking about the fabric of societies themselves. Part 1

Hey everyone! I thought about what to do for my first post, and what I came up with was this, I really enjoy what Huxley did with this book and the implications of what he wrote, when extrapolated into our reality, have always been fascinating to me; then it occurred to me to explore that idea and see where it takes us. I'll be uploading a second part soon, hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Here we go!

Within the context of the modern world, under the social norms that have been established throughout mankind’s existence, varying almost constantly without entirely letting go of ideas or old concepts, what do we see as a dystopia? The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines it merely as “A negative utopia: a place where instead of all being well, all is not well”. Therefore, we must repeat the question to ourselves and, ultimately, through that personal idea we can reach some common ground; probably most of us agree that sadness is a trait of it, as well as oppression, discrimination and an overall sensation of fear.

As a result of this general view towards a dystopia, it’s interesting to analyze the book “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, in which is possible to appreciate the repercussions and circumstances that take place in a particular sort of society, one that genuinely proclaims to be happy and satisfied, but from the reader’s perspective it becomes nothing but frightening, tyrannous. Huxley liked to call these “Techno Dictatorships” or even “Scientific Regimes”; "If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled", he said in 1958.

in other words, when it comes to lodging on to power…

Moreover, in the same interview with Mike Wallace, Huxley talked about how such totalitarian states achieve that goal (which is the people’s approval):

“(…)This has happened again and again in history with technology's advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn't foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn't want to do (…) bypassing the so called rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery (…) this is the danger, that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy (…)”

The result of this particular vision is “Brave New World”, in which the individuals are no longer such, “everyone belongs to everyone”; people are just part of one big mechanism, a system that’s built on top of genetically engineered human beings, each one conditioned throughout its life to execute a specific set of functions and even produced in batches of up to 72 identical individuals. Furthermore, through that aforementioned “conditioning”, they’re taught to be happy with their place within the State’s structure, drowned into consumerism, unleashed sexuality and reluctance to any sort of negative or strong emotions, avoiding the latter ones by taking a drug called “Soma”.

The rulers of the world imagined by Huxley, in order to preserve control, have efficiently bypassed the rational side of mankind by (among other things) turning the concept of “family” into something that’s frowned upon, something that causes disgust, a dirty joke, if you will. They successfully suppressed grief, monogamy and marriage, for example, because of the danger these represent to a regime, they thought of it as an obstacle in the way to an advanced country; a homogenous society was deemed necessary in order for the world to progress. As a consequence this must be asked, is our individuality, our uniqueness, a drawback or a stepping stone?

Although a consensus on this question probably will not be reached, a few considerations should be brought up, such as how our personal traits influence us; an example would be our desire to be the best among our pierces, that competitive string that sometimes gets out of hand, giving ruthless people as a result. Secondly, the direct counterpart, that feeling of failure or impotence that also gets out of hand and makes us underperform, a hopelessness which pulls us down and buries us beneath everyone else, far from reaching our true potential. A balance is necessary to make exceptional individuals, but the difficulty of it is just as exceptional, hence the dominance of the previous examples is rather evident.

So basically a conflict between

and

that might just end up in

As a consequence of these premises we could think that yes, maybe individuality can undermine the efforts made in order to progress as a society… nevertheless, perhaps a fully functional society isn’t a society at all, perhaps a life as just part of a unit, where the idea of standing on our own is not at all common, in which we would feel satisfied with everything would not be a life worth living for us; maybe that is why readers of Huxley’s novel feel scared of what he depicted, because in that environment we would be forced to resign to most of the things that make us people, not just humans.

However, within that world of detachment, filled with “people” that never deal with their emotions and where everyone is apparently (and self-proclaimed) “happy”, there are still individuals that are not at all comfortable with the ways of that society, thus making the reader question its own nature, are we naturally nonconformists? We can find a flaw in everything that surrounds us, we are not happy with our world and that translates even to fiction; considering this and deeming it as a fact, are we able to separate what’s actually wrong from what we perceive as being wrong within our own reality? Are we capable of distinguishing the mundane from the flaws of our societies?

image courtesy of Vox*

Wait for part two

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