4 ms·

I strongly agree with you. Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence

by nxc18 6y ago

I strongly agree with you. Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe. The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it. We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.

Oricle 6y ago
Should be removing the puppet masters off their perch is all so all gentiles can live free from their unempathetic evil ways. Judah as always been the enemy to gentiles
enriquto 6y ago
> We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984. I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations? As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism. What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Stasis, loss of personal and collective initiative and creativity, and a dishonest mythology of consumerism as the limit of free choice. There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.) For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 (Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.) As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        Chapter One[1] sufficed. Mr. Foster is doing creative ontogenic work with the intention of introducing improvements to the status quo (and Huxley takes a sideswipe at "They will outbreed Us"[2]): > "Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. ... "But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet." and there is other creative work to be done, are other changes to introduce: > Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head. No problem with utilitarianism, even if they move a different lever for utility than we do (or do they? compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 ): > "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny." (As Huxley wrote 30 years before the Cleese + Ronnies sketch[3] his idea of social destiny may have been a bit more predetermined than our twenty-first century bien-pensant ideas on the subject.) [1] https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html [2] Körner notes that no matter what kind of Darwinist: Social, Economic, Academic, etc., they may be spotted by their constant undarwinist worry that the unfit will outbreed the fit. [3] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?lang=en https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...
yyyk 6y ago
>Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe. Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for. Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position. * It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Ch. 16 > "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them." (Note the implicit english attitude to ireland, or compare some of our current deltas' attitudes to quarantine.)

by nxc18 6y ago

Oricle 6y ago

Should be removing the puppet masters off their perch is all so all gentiles can live free from their unempathetic evil ways. Judah as always been the enemy to gentiles

enriquto 6y ago

> We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984. I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?

082349872349872 6y ago
Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations? As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism. What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Stasis, loss of personal and collective initiative and creativity, and a dishonest mythology of consumerism as the limit of free choice. There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.) For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 (Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.) As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Chapter One[1] sufficed. Mr. Foster is doing creative ontogenic work with the intention of introducing improvements to the status quo (and Huxley takes a sideswipe at "They will outbreed Us"[2]): > "Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. ... "But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet." and there is other creative work to be done, are other changes to introduce: > Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head. No problem with utilitarianism, even if they move a different lever for utility than we do (or do they? compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 ): > "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny." (As Huxley wrote 30 years before the Cleese + Ronnies sketch[3] his idea of social destiny may have been a bit more predetermined than our twenty-first century bien-pensant ideas on the subject.) [1] https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html [2] Körner notes that no matter what kind of Darwinist: Social, Economic, Academic, etc., they may be spotted by their constant undarwinist worry that the unfit will outbreed the fit. [3] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?lang=en https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...

yyyk 6y ago

>Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe. Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for. Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position. * It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.

082349872349872 6y ago
Ch. 16 > "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them." (Note the implicit english attitude to ireland, or compare some of our current deltas' attitudes to quarantine.)