Huxley wrote this book as a harbinger. At least he said this in a recorded interview I listened to once. He said he saw his new world several hundred years in our future but had changed his mind in his old age and thought it would happen in a couple of hundred years.

I've never read a book that seemed to nail it in the prophecy department like "A Brave New World." Maybe most if not all dystopia writers share Huxley's belief in their future visions, I don't know. Huxley seemed to shake me the most.

If you don't know what he was going for here is a very brief picture.

The world is ruled by powerful and powerfully genetically enhanced people while the workers they rely upon are purposely created with average and below intellects by hampering their brain development at a crucial point. This world creates babies and doesn't make them anymore. It controls everything about its human population to make sure even their need to worship is provided an outlet. All human natures are accounted for and controlled even human sexuality. It is incorporated into their entertainment to the point of making pornography passé.

The people who do make babies the old fashion way are in reservations free to do whatever they want as long as they don't threaten the rulers of the world. In fact, one of the ways they support themselves is being the subjects of tourism like animals in a zoo.

Basically, the world division of haves and have nots breaks down to the simple understanding of the haves having a dreamlike life of pleasure even if they are cleaning toilets due to the perfect drug - soma. You can enjoy the most mundane things under its influence and their worship heavily involves using it to get to an ecstatic catharsis of faith.

And the have nots have freedom within certain geographical limitations.

I can see this happening in our future. All it would take would be it get buy in by the people who are most influential over the most people. Let the little people not covered by corporate sponsoring wanting their freedom be free.

It wouldn't take too many years. Money rules the world as evinced in our daily lives. Follow it down the logical path of getting people to give up their freedom to join a society where every individual is cared for and given work they were "designed" to do. And if they don't want it, there is a great big reservation to go out and try to subsist on.

The first step is to slowly replace money in place of the monolithic drugs of religious beliefs and individualism, and with the simplicity of money the stress of feeling powerless in a society an world to big to conceive of in one mind is reduced. Then use an actual drug.

All the while this is slowly progressing acquire all the land needed to support the higher people. It is basically a Banana Republic model of fences and gates and let them outside eat cake or whatever they can find. The money will only work inside. Outside its bartersville and the diseases and the brokering of services the haves might be willing to let them do for something they need to live.

Satellites and the space above the earth is essential in this takeover. Herding the have nots with space weapons and controls is how to make the new fences and gates. It is also the best place to quarantine on, well, off the planet if pandemics become problematic. So get on up there and make sure it is an Eden above. Once the genetics gets up to speed returning to earth immune to everything will be nice.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2020 07:46PM by Elder Berry.

"Brave New World" (written in 1931) has earned its place as one of the most incisive and respected works of modern Western culture.

Thirty years after "Brave New World," Huxley wrote "Island"--with the intention of illuminating a possible, opposite from "Brave New World," end of the spectrum: a healthy, philosophically, psychologically, and culturally rich "world" (a large island kingdom, in Southeast Asia, which does not actually exist).

His imagined, healthy sort of utopia is a remote, but intensely thriving, place where the widely-agreed-upon human errors of modern Western society have been intentionally replaced by far healthier and positive cultural values.

Although, when read today, many of the suggested ideas of "Island" seem a bit old-fashioned (as in: very twentieth century, in a currently stereotypical kind of way), the philosophy, psychology, and sociology underlying "Island" is fascinating to read, and offer plenty of contemporary food for thought (which was, of course, Huxley's goal in writing this book).

When you have finished reading "Brave New World," try reading "Island" afterwards. See what Huxley perceived, within the actual "real life" we all mutually experience: the deeper and more satisfying potentials of human change which would indeed evolve during the upcoming century (which was, at the time Huxley was writing, still in the future).



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2020 03:13AM by Tevai.

I didn't like the sequel. It seemed like some sort of attempt to soften Brave New World's blow.

But this book is an interesting trajectory for us albeit without aliens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End

Human world society could rationalize themselves into being like the overlords. But the humans mere humans eventually rule the day.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2020 02:28PM by Elder Berry.

I actually had to read A Brave New World for honors English class when I was a senior at a Catholic high school. Initially, I thought that Mr. Huxley's viewpoints, especially concerning sexuality, were right on and worth pursuing. However, as I've grown older, I've come to see this book as more of a reflection of the views of Aldis Huxley than on anything else.

In fact, I think the biggest thing Mr. Huxley got wrong was his views on sexual exploration as described in the first chapter before the actual story begins. Mr. Huxley, having grown up during the later portions of the Victorian Age, tended to view sex as something not to be talked about and only to occur between husband and wife after the marriage ceremony. He viewed sex education as something to oppose, not support, and this is why, he views the sexual experimentation in the book's first chapter negatively. As I've aged, I've come to view sexual behavior as being a regular part of human behavior, and I have come around to the view that young people *should* be encouraged to sexually experiment with each other so that they can more easily learn the difference between sex (a feeling of immense pleasure) and love (which involves doing things for somebody else that you would not ordinarily do because you care for them).

On perhaps a less controversial note, Huxley's view of electronic music versus non-electronic music (a concert of the two is described in one of the book's chapters) has already occurred. However, I don't notice that most folks mind when the string parts of a musical selection are played using a computer keyboard instead of the traditional string instruments, with the major exceptions being the players of those stringed instruments who can now no longer find work.

So again, I think we need to look at the world that Mr. Huxley describes and take a step back to see if his negative framing has made that world much worse than it actually is.

blindguy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> He viewed sex education as
> something to oppose, not support, and this is why,
> he views the sexual experimentation in the book's
> first chapter negatively. As I've aged, I've come
> to view sexual behavior as being a regular part of
> human behavior, and I have come around to the view
> that young people *should* be encouraged to
> sexually experiment with each other so that they
> can more easily learn the difference between sex
> (a feeling of immense pleasure) and love (which
> involves doing things for somebody else that you
> would not ordinarily do because you care for
> them).

I don't know how true that is, but nonetheless, I believe in sexual experimentation as a good thing, albeit playing with fire to learn how to handle that too.

"On the other hand, he not only wrote about group sex in Brave New World, but he maintained an open relationship with his wife Maria. He was even happy for her to become a member of the "sewing circle", a club for lesbians in Hollywood, which supposedly also boasted Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as members. The otherwise abstemious Huxley also became one of the world's first psychonauts: an early experimenter with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs during the early 1950s, and a trailblazer who had a huge impact on the 1960s "revolution in the head"."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4TQhTRDcHw1V0YhbtL600BJ/sex-drugs-and-aldous-huxley

There are other views and speculations about the future. One that I think has a lot of merit is the future civilization shown in the TV show, "The Expanse", which takes place a few hundred years in the future. The Earth has become grossly overcrowded. Jobs are scarce, so everyone has a guaranteed minimum pay even if they do not work. IIRC, there is one world government.

There is a mining colony in the asteroid belt populated by a permanent underclass. This underclass is at the mercy of the Earth as they need valuable resources such as air to survive. They have also begun the process of evolving to a body type more adapted to a low-gravity environment, which limits their options to relocate, even if they had the resources to do so.

One dystopian vision of the future was presented in the "Hunger Games" series. The futuristic civilization presented in the HG is based on ancient Rome, a concept that I don't find inconceivable. You can see the rich, privileged, and spoiled center of that civilization at odds with the far poorer and hardscrabble provinces.