I think your overthinking things here. Who's portraying them as bad things? I think the point isn't that they're bad, it's that they're used by a society to k

I think your overthinking things here. Who's portraying them as bad things? I think the point isn't that they're bad, it's that they're used by a society to keep itself in a coma. A society that has killed itself isn't a good thing, but what you read into that is your own perspective. You see happiness as being the problem itself here; but you might also see the means of pursuit as being problematic. Or you might see that happiness may be an insufficient precondition for a healthy society. Or an indictment of mankind in that we're a literally happy to sell our souls for contentment. Or that we don't value the ability to make up our own minds enough. In short: it's thought provoking, and by all means draw your own conclusions - but even if you think that a happy society is necessarily good and that huxley's full of it, maybe there's still something in another perspective. For example, it reminds me of how when you optimize for a particular benchmark, you may well succeed while losing sight of the big picture; and you might end up doing more harm than good.