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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 e

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 guy called John the Savage who reads Shakespeare in the redneck reservation and is the real woke one compared to all the sheep on soma and sex. If someone wrote this book today you would think they have listened to too much talk radio, and I think it's one of the best examples of what Leo Marx called 'the machine in the garden' myth.[1] the anxiety of (predominantly anglosphere) authors that technology and industrialization disrupt their naturalistic and God given, pastoral community. I think I might be one of the few people who read the book and came away liking the one world government more, because the book completely and utterly failed to convince me how it is anything but fear of modernity, technology and the liberation of women from reproductive obligations. That last part is very important and in that respect the book has aged particularly poorly. The author of the essay at the end calls the book a warning of 'feminine tyranny', and I think that's exactly right. Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden

AndrewDucker 5y ago
I felt likewise.
drw85 5y ago
I agree, i also found the writing to be very "try hard" and pretty unpleasant to read. That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.
antihipocrat 5y ago
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 humanity is horrifying enough. To then drug the population in order to prevent them from feeling bad about being slaves to their biological betters is the icing on the cake. Whether an Alpha or epsilon, that's not a world that I would want to live in.
- cryptica 5y ago
  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.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    > Were we're heading What makes you think we're headed that way? Are there other plausible directions?
    - cryptica 5y ago
      I just see a strong correlation between mental instability and career success. I'm only speaking from personal experience. Sometimes it feels like it's the instability itself, not any specific action which leads to success because unstable people seem to recognise each other and help each other. Even among those who are psychopathic.
  - WriterGuy2021 5y ago
psydefbooks 5y ago
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 insidious type of tyranny that I have called "feminine tyranny." > Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good. These "higher forms of social organization" can only come at the expense of the individual. This is one of Huxley's main anxieties. Huxley was not a racist, he was not a sexist: he was a creative individual. He saw how collectivization movements were killing his kind. Brave New World is his cry. Given that Huxley was a writer, who names several of his books with the words of Shakespeare -- Brave New World itself is a bit of dialogue from The Tempest, -- I believe John IS Huxley's avatar. And John commits suicide at the end. I find myself incredibly sad that you've interpreted him this way. I truly don't believe he was the type of individual you claim he was.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  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.
ByteJockey 5y ago
You're just going to ignore the entire engineered caste system part of the book?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  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.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    > I think it's purely a creation of the author for the purpose of making his point 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.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Nope, it’s the central theme. It’s a deeply feminized society with preassigned behaviors and motivations and zero agency.
leto_ii 5y ago
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_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...
gremloni 5y ago
Calling the caste system a higher form of social organization compared to monogamy couldn’t make me disagree with your perspective more. Additionally I share Huxley’s belief and preference for a pastoral lifestyle and the odiousness of a feminized society. Your classification of child rearing as a “burden” doesn’t make your views palatable. The only things we agree on are that I like the heads of the one world government as well.
- decasteve 5y ago
  The warning from Huxley is regarding what happens when the choice of child rearing (and bearing) are removed by both government and social pressures. He explores this to the extreme but many aspects of his thought experiment in Brave New World exist today. More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).
cheeseomlit 5y ago
>Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good. The case he makes is his horrifying depiction of the alternative to the monogamous family. You're correct in identifying his fears, but I personally don't see that they're unfounded. I can't help but feel an instinctual revulsion at "the monogamous family being washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization", its a profound loss of individuality
abruzzi 5y ago
I've actually known quite a few people that liked the society depiceted in the novel. I had one friend that felt that it was ideal because what was depicted was a less painful version of the mindless drudgery that most of the world spends their life in, and those that don't fit in are sent somewhere where they can be themselves (Falkland Islands) He saw it as a better version of the divisions already present in our society. (His opinions, not mine.) I've found the novel to be a bit of a Rorschach blot since people read their whole view of current society, and their place in it into the novel. As has been pointed out, Huxley was an artist, so his interpretation of his novel is heavily guided by a creative personality, and for many creative people, individuality is one of the highest goods. Others read their own views into it, and interpret the novel very differently. My personal reading has some sympathies with Huxley's version, but it is not the same. I'm not a fan of the way society (both at the macro and micro level) is structured now (or in 1932), so there are aspects of BNW that appeal to me.
drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
>Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization... It would be rude of me to ask about your family of origin.

AndrewDucker 5y ago

I felt likewise.

drw85 5y ago

I agree, i also found the writing to be very "try hard" and pretty unpleasant to read. That might be because i'm not a native english speaker, though.

antihipocrat 5y ago

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 humanity is horrifying enough. To then drug the population in order to prevent them from feeling bad about being slaves to their biological betters is the icing on the cake. Whether an Alpha or epsilon, that's not a world that I would want to live in.

cryptica 5y ago
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.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  > Were we're heading What makes you think we're headed that way? Are there other plausible directions?
  - cryptica 5y ago
    I just see a strong correlation between mental instability and career success. I'm only speaking from personal experience. Sometimes it feels like it's the instability itself, not any specific action which leads to success because unstable people seem to recognise each other and help each other. Even among those who are psychopathic.
- WriterGuy2021 5y ago

psydefbooks 5y ago

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 insidious type of tyranny that I have called "feminine tyranny." > Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good. These "higher forms of social organization" can only come at the expense of the individual. This is one of Huxley's main anxieties. Huxley was not a racist, he was not a sexist: he was a creative individual. He saw how collectivization movements were killing his kind. Brave New World is his cry. Given that Huxley was a writer, who names several of his books with the words of Shakespeare -- Brave New World itself is a bit of dialogue from The Tempest, -- I believe John IS Huxley's avatar. And John commits suicide at the end. I find myself incredibly sad that you've interpreted him this way. I truly don't believe he was the type of individual you claim he was.

Barrin92 5y ago
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.

ByteJockey 5y ago

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

Barrin92 5y ago
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.
- throwanem 5y ago
  > I think it's purely a creation of the author for the purpose of making his point 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.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Nope, it’s the central theme. It’s a deeply feminized society with preassigned behaviors and motivations and zero agency.

leto_ii 5y ago

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_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...

gremloni 5y ago

Calling the caste system a higher form of social organization compared to monogamy couldn’t make me disagree with your perspective more. Additionally I share Huxley’s belief and preference for a pastoral lifestyle and the odiousness of a feminized society. Your classification of child rearing as a “burden” doesn’t make your views palatable. The only things we agree on are that I like the heads of the one world government as well.

decasteve 5y ago
The warning from Huxley is regarding what happens when the choice of child rearing (and bearing) are removed by both government and social pressures. He explores this to the extreme but many aspects of his thought experiment in Brave New World exist today. More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).

cheeseomlit 5y ago

>Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good. The case he makes is his horrifying depiction of the alternative to the monogamous family. You're correct in identifying his fears, but I personally don't see that they're unfounded. I can't help but feel an instinctual revulsion at "the monogamous family being washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization", its a profound loss of individuality

abruzzi 5y ago

I've actually known quite a few people that liked the society depiceted in the novel. I had one friend that felt that it was ideal because what was depicted was a less painful version of the mindless drudgery that most of the world spends their life in, and those that don't fit in are sent somewhere where they can be themselves (Falkland Islands) He saw it as a better version of the divisions already present in our society. (His opinions, not mine.) I've found the novel to be a bit of a Rorschach blot since people read their whole view of current society, and their place in it into the novel. As has been pointed out, Huxley was an artist, so his interpretation of his novel is heavily guided by a creative personality, and for many creative people, individuality is one of the highest goods. Others read their own views into it, and interpret the novel very differently. My personal reading has some sympathies with Huxley's version, but it is not the same. I'm not a fan of the way society (both at the macro and micro level) is structured now (or in 1932), so there are aspects of BNW that appeal to me.

drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago

>Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization... It would be rude of me to ask about your family of origin.