Aldous
Huxley was an English writer, novelist, and philosopher, most renowned
for his 1931 novel, Brave New World.
In this novel, he describes this futuristic dystopia where the entire world lives
under a dictatorship:
Humans are grown inside tubes and conditioned to believe
certain moral “truths” through a process called hypnopedia. Hypnopedia is the
process of learning by hearing while asleep or being under hypnosis. In this
dystopia, this kind of conditioning puts forward the belief in the value of
society over the individual. The point of this conditioning is to ensure that
every individual exists in order to benefit society. They are taught to be
consumers and workers, to buy lots of material items, and essentially do their
jobs.
So what do you get when you have a society that consumes and
works a lot? You get a stable economy.
And this was the direction Huxley was headed towards. He
goes on and creates a caste system that divides everyone into Alphas, Betas,
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The Alphas are tall, good looking, and smart
while the Epsilons are short, ugly, and dumb. In order to make them dumb,
people in the lower castes are given alcohol and deprived of oxygen while they
are still inside their tubes. They are grown in batches and each individual in
a batch is a clone.
There are two main activities that everyone is a part of in
this world. Everyone takes a narcotic called soma, which is a drug that causes
hallucinations and allows people to escape reality. There is a crazy abundance
of it and the government is the one that is responsible for distributing it. The
other big activity in this world is sex. It’s casual. Everyone sleeps with
everyone. Monogamy is illegal, and you cannot marry or date.
Brave New World
was written between World War I and World War II during what Huxley calls “the
height of technological optimism.” Huxley wrote that the aim of Brave New World wasn’t just to talk
about science and technology, but how it affects people. In Huxley’s world,
instead of science “liberating us”, it’s what imprisons us because the people desiring
power want to take advantage of it. Brave
New World is Huxley’s criticism on the popular belief that technology is
the remedy for the world’s problems.
In an interview in 1958, Huxley was asked, “Who and what are
the enemies of freedom here in the United States?” Huxley responded saying he
doesn’t know if there are any, “sinister people deliberately trying to rob
people of their freedom,” but that, “there are a number of impersonal forces
that push in the direction of less and less freedom and that there are
technological devices that can be used to accelerate this process.”
He went on to describe that there were two main impersonal
forces. The first one being overpopulation pressing against existing resources,
that as population grows in countries, people have less food and less goods per
capita. This leaves an unstable economy, causing the central government to take
more responsibility to keep its citizens fed. And then eventually, Huxley says,
you get social unrest and the central government having to intervene more and
more. All of this pushes in the direction of a totalitarian regime … a
communist state. The second main force Huxley spoke about was
over-organization, that as technology becomes more complicated, it becomes
necessary to have more hierarchal organizations. He says, “Incidentally,
technology is being accompanied by advancing the science of organization, it’s
now possible to make organizations on a larger scale. You have more and more
people living their lives as subordinates in these hierarchal systems
controlled by bureaucracies of big businesses or government.”
Huxley’s world is unsettling to think about because its
concepts don’t seem too far from a possible reality.
He makes many more profound statements in this interview,
but there was one that I found even more unsettling to think about.
It’s better said by him. (10:09 – 12:00)
Quiz:
1. What belief does
Huxley’s dystopia push forward?
2. What are the two
main activities that everyone participates in?
3. What does Huxley
describe about the period between World War I
and World War II?
4. What is one of the
main impersonal forces that Huxley says
pushes towards
diminishing freedom?
Discussion:
1. Huxley says that
there are a number of technological devices
that can be used to
accelerate the process of diminishing freedom.
In what way, if any,
can we see modern technology being used for this
intent?
2. Could you be
content living in Huxley’s Brave New World?
3. Do you think that
the impersonal forces Huxley describes are inevitable? No matter what we do, is
it possible to overcome these “impersonal forces” (overpopulation and
over-organization)?
Comments on final reports:
"Do you think that the impersonal forces Huxley describes are inevitable?" NO! (But of course if determinism/fatalism is true, I would inevitably say that...)
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