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Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

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Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#21

Post by Broken_Hippo »

WriterGuy2021 wrote: post #19
dr_dshiv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds a lot like the Netherlands. It’s so damn nice and functional here — more freedom than the US, even — but there is a gnawing sense that it will lead to a very dulltopian world, where needs are fully satisfied and life becomes rather unimportant.

> dulltopain Huxley ultimately believes, as all artists believe, that a creative life is the only life worth living. Suffering and conflict is the fuel of all higher pursuits. In Brave New World, people are drained of this fuel. Life is easy. People just go along with the flow. But this means they create nothing. This is a horrifying prospect to Huxley. "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth t…

"Suffering and conflict is the fuel of all higher pursuits"

I disagree. I mean, the combinations of education, travel, and hallucinogens has pushed me further in my art and intellectual curiosity than suffering ever has. For so many people, suffering simply stagnates them because it eats up so much mental and physical energy.

The lives are certainly not without conflict, however. Meeting social norms still creates some conflict (what, you want to be with only one person!?!). Most folks are, however, missing things that pushes them just a little outside of their comfort zone - but you certainly don't need conflict for that, but rather, just things that are different enough.

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#22

Post by ByteJockey »

Barrin92 wrote: post #13

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…

You're just going to ignore the entire engineered caste system part of the book?

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#23

Post by leto_ii »

Barrin92 wrote: post #13

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…

My take on the book (which I think is the more common one) is that it's a criticism of a form of 'soft' fascism. People are placed on a rigid hierarchy where everybody is biologically conditioned to belong to a certain caste. At least the individuals of the upper caste live a carefree life of empty consumerism and everybody is constantly intoxicated with happiness-inducing narcotics.

While it's not unfair to suspect Huxley of primitivist nostalgia, I don't think his reaction is against progressive modernity, feminism, leftism in general. The fear to my mind is of something like Taylorism/Fordism taken to its extreme [1].

What I've always found more compelling in BNW as compared to explicitly totalitarian dystopias (1984 etc.) is precisely that the dehumanizing, alienating, oppressive nature of the system is hidden. On the face of it it's a utopia, nothing to complain about. The abomination shows itself when you read a bit between the lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#24

Post by Barrin92 »

psydefbooks wrote: post #17
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…

As the writer of this review, I agree that the book's fame sets expectations that cannot possibly be met. And perhaps my enthusiastic review which ignores its inadequacies, in favor of focusing on the value I saw in it, also inflates one's expectations to the determent of the work. It's not a masterpiece of literature. Huxley himself did not believe it was a great work of his. It has, however, become a symbol for an…

I mean don't get me wrong, I don't think he's sexist or racist (at least not any more than most of his peers at the time) but I don't think he actually transcends his anxieties or sentimentality.

What the book boils down to, and you touch on it a few times, is a criticism of manufactured society. But the book never gives this a fair shake. John's experience is authentic because it is 'natural', synthetic desires are not. People choose the brave new world because they're genetically brainwashed, not because Huxley generally considers if there's something to that world that would make people chose it. Individualism is good, collectivism is mindless, driven home by characters who are largely neurotic caricatures without Soma.

The kind of questions I think a work like this needs to deal with are, what if there are collective experiences, more real, more genuine than anything any individual could ever feel, what if John is actually wrong, is he just limited in his perspective? What makes John more authentic of a character, aren't his drives just as biologically determined, but merely by chance rather than by design?

John is a sort of Neo among bluepilled people, everyone else is just an 'NPC' as people would say today. The one thinking guy who has walked into the Borg cube etc. And i think like the Matrix as real social criticism this is kind of trite. It does not take alternatives to individualism seriously.

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#25

Post by XorNot »

WriterGuy2021 wrote: post #20
jcynix wrote: post #18

And then there's Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" published about 30 years afterwards, with twelve essays to look at the world in 1958. He concludes (iirc) that a lot of the changes he expected to appear in a hundred years after "Brave New World" took shape already.

If he had predicted that the primary means of conditioning the public would be T.V. instead of hypnopedia, there would be no doubt that we're living in something like BNW -- or at least one of its spiritual progeny.

Hypnopedia was really just continuous repetition of "facts" until they were an autonomous response.

I'd say he was pretty damn close.

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#26

Post by cryptica »

antihipocrat wrote: post #16
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…

I wasn't too impressed with the writing, especially after hearing so much about the book. However, I think it provides an interesting alternative to the fear based absolute authoritarian control used by governments to varying effect currently and throughout history. Huxley's description of a biological determinant (arbitrary or otherwise) as the basis upon which to build a discriminatory caste system for all of human…

Were we're heading, we will wish that discrimination was based on biological factors. Instead, it will be based on mental factors. Cruelty, deception, hypocrisy, psychopathy, inhumanity will be rewarded. The determinant of class will be good and evil, with evil at the top.

At the top, there will exist a form of altruism so superficial and devoid of substance that only insane people will be able to join the elite class.

The best we can hope for is that the elites will be so insane that they won't last very long; that way we can get enough churn to ensure that no individual ever has enough time to enforce their insanity on the rest of the population.

As a group, we can hope that they will be so insane that they won't be able to agree on anything; their power will be constrained by their heterogeneous irrationality.

The worst case scenario is that we end up with homogeneous irrationality... Sadly we can see some signs of this today. Let's hope it can't sustain itself.

It does sometimes seem that mentally unstable people seek stability by leaning on other unstable people who are afflicted with the same kind of irrationality... Instead of looking to lean on mentally stable people who are different from them.

It seems as if mentally unstable people hate stable people. Maybe there is a deep seated jealousy behind this. Which is kind of ironic because they could probably get there themselves if they surrounded themselves with stable people. But they lack the humility to see this and nobody in their circles will ever point it out to them since they suffer from the same problem.

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#27

Post by leto_ii »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #12
WriterGuy2021 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds a lot like the Netherlands. It’s so damn nice and functional here — more freedom than the US, even — but there is a gnawing sense that it will lead to a very dulltopian world, where needs are fully satisfied and life becomes rather unimportant.

> It sounds a lot like the Netherlands

It's almost a relief to see I'm not the only one having this view. I've been living in NL for the better part of a decade now and to most of the people back home (one of those terrible 'former Eastern Bloc' countries) I sound like a complete lunatic when I bring up similar impressions.

I guess an ideal place would have to be as functional as the Netherlands and yet far less soulless. Is this possible I wonder? Is there some intrinsic trade-off between the two aspects?

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#29

Post by WriterGuy2021 »

XorNot wrote: post #25
WriterGuy2021 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he had predicted that the primary means of conditioning the public would be T.V. instead of hypnopedia, there would be no doubt that we're living in something like BNW -- or at least one of its spiritual progeny.

Hypnopedia was really just continuous repetition of "facts" until they were an autonomous response. I'd say he was pretty damn close.

That's a very good point... and are we really awake when we watch T.V.? Or are we in some type of suggestive state?

I wrote the above and then did some googling. Found this article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3060491/what-happened-to-my-brai.... I don't know how reputable it is, but here's a quote relevant to this discussion:

"There have been EEG studies that demonstrate that television watching converts the brain from beta wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with a daydreaming state, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills."

Re: Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”

#30

Post by Barrin92 »

ByteJockey wrote: post #22
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…

You're just going to ignore the entire engineered caste system part of the book?

I actually do entirely ignore it because I think it's purely a creation of the author for the purpose of making his point. Caste society is not a symptom of modernity, in fact the opposite. It's an anachronism in the book, sort of like putting your ideological opponent into a Nazi uniform and giving him a tiny mustache and making him speak with a scary German accent.

Slavery (which is really what it is in the story) you are more likely to enounter in the Antebellum South than in a modern metropolis and high modernity. Limiting the intellectual capacity of your subjects would never be the point of the kind of society that Huxley envisions, and it's one example of how he does not take the thing he aims to critique seriously.

A society so advanced it could realize Huxley's fears is not at the same time going to build itself a medieval army of slaves. Even at the time of Huxley's writing Taylorism was already well past its peak and criticism of mechanized production was everywhere.

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