Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
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Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
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Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#2This was a good essay. Covers the entire book perfectly. When I was 11 years old I asked my brother for a book to read, and he gave me this. I read it at summer camp. It was the first book that made me really and truly THINK.
And I found I liked thinking.
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#3We are literally living inside that world but people don't see it. :)
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#4We are literally living inside that world but people don't see it. :)
What motivation do people have to see the world as it is? Billions of people believe they will never die because Heaven is on the other side of this world. As Nietzsche wrote: "Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!" It's nothing new that humanity has a will-to-blindness. In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#5This was a good essay. Covers the entire book perfectly. When I was 11 years old I asked my brother for a book to read, and he gave me this. I read it at summer camp. It was the first book that made me really and truly THINK. And I found I liked thinking.
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Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#6A perfect life can be dystopian. Stability, convenience, distraction, and safety seem like the pillars of Huxley’s dystopia. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the last bit, safety. In today’s modern world some notions of safety - like crash testing cars - are very sensible. When focus on safety and elimination of risks is taken to an extreme however, it can lead to unbearable limits on people. Suddenly free expression, personal choice, experimentation, and adopting a different calculation of risks than others might be not allowed. The notion of safetyism was popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind (https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g...), and I see the concept creep mentioned in that book continuing today. It’s always with the best of intentions, in pursuit of a perfect world, but I worry that we are veering towards Huxley’s nightmare.
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#7We are literally living inside that world but people don't see it. :)
What motivation do people have to see the world as it is? Billions of people believe they will never die because Heaven is on the other side of this world. As Nietzsche wrote: "Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!" It's nothing new that humanity has a will-to-blindness. In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
> In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
This is one of my favorite things to discuss about this book! See, I enjoy making games and having meaningful interactions with other people, and the world is readily granting me all that. Keeping in mind that (1) I'm NOT The Chosen One, (2) I don't have 600 metric tons of plot armor, and (3) people much wiser and knowledgeable than me still find the world perfectly livable, why should I sentence myself to a lifetime of misery to end up changing nothing? How much exactly should I be convinced that I know best in order to do that?
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
What motivation do people have to see the world as it is? Billions of people believe they will never die because Heaven is on the other side of this world. As Nietzsche wrote: "Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!" It's nothing new that humanity has a will-to-blindness. In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life...
> In fact, it is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps the truth itself is hostile to life... This is one of my favorite things to discuss about this book! See, I enjoy making games and having meaningful interactions with other people, and the world is readily granting me all that. Keeping in mind that (1) I'm NOT The Chosen One, (2) I don't have 600 metric tons of plot armor, and (3) people much wiser and knowledgeable…
Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice. If you fit well into your social role, then you aren't going to seek "the truth." Bernard is more aware of his surroundings because he is not suited to his role. Helmholtz is more aware because he exceeds his role. The way they are and what is expected of them preordained their awakening and its character.
As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder.
When you're naturally predisposed to be an outsider, the self-preservation matrix of the collective does not capture one's libido. One is freer psychically, but free like a starving man on the hunt for food as opposed to a sated man lounging on a couch. To not be hooked into some preservative frame induces great motion within...but is energetic motion superior to sated stillness? A question I've been trying to answer myself...
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#9A perfect life can be dystopian. Stability, convenience, distraction, and safety seem like the pillars of Huxley’s dystopia. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the last bit, safety. In today’s modern world some notions of safety - like crash testing cars - are very sensible. When focus on safety and elimination of risks is taken to an extreme however, it can lead to unbearable limits on people. Suddenly free expr…
In Huxley's dystopia, all friction is eliminated. Friction is what makes people wake up. These "unbearable limits," i.e., friction, would not exist in Brave New World.
Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
#10The money quote from the article:
“…the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
– Aldous Huxley, from a 1949 letter to George Orwell.