31–40 of 86 posts
The 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.
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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 clas…
What makes you think we're headed that way? Are there other plausible directions?
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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 soul…
The 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.
It turns out they were both approximately right about dystopia.
Our bodies are this type of utopia. Some billions years ago individual cells evolved to live in collectives. Then they evolved to form specific castes or as we call them tissues. Cancer is a disease where some cells are loosing their caste and multiply. Auto-immune diseases are when the army caste of a body does not serve the collective.
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…
The only things we agree on are that I like the heads of the one world government as well.
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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…
Read in retrospect, one could find in it a cri de coeur on behalf of what is today called "authenticity" and, oft as not, itself manufactured (#vanlife).
I think what the book is really missing, in the light of a century hence, is a discussion of how this exquisitely planned, designed, and constructed society handles a crisis - a change in circumstances that calls the assumptions of its design into question or invalidates them outright. When Huxley wrote, it was still possible to repose one's faith in technological positivism, which was after all the vastly prevailing intellectual current of the day. These days, maybe not so much - if nothing else, the last few decades have put a lot of deep dents in the idea that we, as a species in the large, can and will engineer ourselves out of any difficulty we encounter. I'd like to see someone take on the question of what happens to the Brave New World society in the face of that.
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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)…
It's a deliberate critique of eugenics, which was a popular and little criticized school of thought at the time of writing, and which did in its original iteration claim to offer the prospect of engineering people to fit assigned social roles.
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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…
> What makes John more authentic of a character, aren't his drives just as biologically determined, but merely by chance rather than by design?
This is a really good question. John is more authentic because he's an individual -- I know, don't scoff yet. He's looking to create a personal connection with Lenina. He doesn't want to "have" her like the other men have her: he wants to love her. Lenina cannot form love bond with John -- that's not in her programming. She can only sample his sexuality.
Now, we may ask: what's the value of personal connections? I have a hard time answering this in the abstract right now, but all I can say is that I've enjoyed intense personal connections in my life that could never be replaced by impersonal collective relations.
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It turns out they were both approximately right about dystopia.
We are in a world of Orwell's surveillance devices, lovingly toted by the proles as Huxley suggested.