Remembering Huxley's Brave New World

Written in 1932, Aldous Huxley's prophetic novel "Brave New World" presents a vision of tyranny made so efficient that people have come to love their servitude.

Can individuality survive within the confines of a technologically advanced world government dedicated to ensuring social stability at all costs? The suicide of John, A Shakespeare quoting savage emblematic of individuality, at the end of Brave New World (1932) answers this question in the negative for its author Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). This prophetic novel is an expression of its author’s greatest fear:  the tyrants of tomorrow will have the power to make people love their servitude, i.e., they will have the power to create utopias. But isn’t “utopia” the ancient Christian strain of bringing heaven to earth in a word? Why shouldn’t humanity strive to create a utopia on earth? The answer to this question is the moral of this story: heaven for the collective is hell for the individual.

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Review

A central world government has imposed utter tyranny on the individual in the name of maintaining social stability. The centralization of power took place after the great Nine Years' War; which ostensibly provided sufficient reason, and terror, for the people of the world to surrender all individual autonomy so that global harmony would prevail – at all costs. We are not, however, treated to a firsthand telling of how power was centralized because the story takes place after the central world government has matured to the point of becoming so efficient in controlling the population of the world that people have come to love their servitude. In other words: the earth is now a utopia.

Every civilized individual is genetically engineered in large batches of identical twins and conditioned by a form of sleep learning called hypnopaedia to fit precisely into their preordained social role without any undue friction: round pegs have the freedom to fit in round holes and square blocks have the freedom to fit in square holes. The Epsilon Semi-Morons, one of the lowest genetic castes, do not yearn to usurp the responsibilities accorded to lofty Alpha Plus’: everyone wants to be precisely what they are and where they are in the social hierarchy. If you happen to catch an Epsilon Semi-Moron taking out your trash and ask him: “How do you feel about your station in society? Do you wish you had more freedom?” He would respond: “What is freedom? I don’t understand sir. I’m doing my part, just as everyone else is. I wouldn’t want to be an Alpha Plus because they work harder. My job is easy and there’s always a soma vacation at the end of the day.” Soma, by the way, is “Christianity without tears:” a wonder drug benevolently bestowed on the population by the central world government to induce in them endless compassion and bliss – taken in every moment of distress or discomfort in the same manner as prayer.

What is lost when human life, mysterious and inviolable, is hedged round by the demands of society (see Ralph Waldo Emerson, History)? If there is nothing to lose in an individual life, then there is no reason why human beings should not be minted as the currency of the collective and manipulated in transactions that enrich the account of the common good. If, however, there is something to lose in but one life, then it is a great tragedy for society to rob its members of their individuality for the enrichment of the empty ideal of the collective. Where does the true value of human life lie? In the individual or in the product of collective interactions which produce the emergent phenomena of society? Huxley is vexed by this question, but he is resolute in his answer: the value of human life lies solely with the individual.

The utopia of Brave New World is so perfect that it has become lifeless. Everyone is mindlessly guided along the stream of life made utterly lazy by the benevolent currents of eugenics, hypnopaedia, hypersexuality, soma, and an elite class of rulers called world controllers. The rulers of this world have not pursued power for power’s sake--as do men in our barbaric age: -- they have seized power for the pure-hearted purpose of saving mankind from itself; yet, even in this ideal outcome that almost defies imagination, something seems to be wrong. The individual lives of the people have been reduced to mere roles in the collective. People have sex with each other like they have their evening meals: shall I have potatoes with a side of Gabriella tonight or should it be cabbage with a side of Gabriel? There are no strong bonds between people because people have ceased to be people: all interactions are reduced to base sensual experiences and all individual strivings are transformed into collective responsibilities. “Everybody belongs to everyone else,” they say, but unbeknownst to them, this means nobody belongs to anybody.

The collective stands triumphantly over the corpse of the individual; the atom has been dissolved by the molecule; no one asks what the collective can do for them: all ask what they can do for the collective. The sublimity of solitude and individual excellence has been discarded in favor of social stasis, for slumber… for living death. All these things speak together with one resounding voice: the loss of individuality is the loss of life. José Ortega y Gasset echoed these sentiments in his non-fiction work The Revolt of the Masses.

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. […] The mass-man is he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting along. Consequently, though his possibilities and his powers be enormous, he constructs nothing.”

– José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Unlike Gasset, no civilized person feels suffocated by the mass-man in Brave New World. Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx are the two primary images of civilized discontent. Something in the genetic engineering process went slightly awry in making them: Bernard is slightly smaller than his round hole and Helmholtz is slightly larger than his square hole. The individual turmoil they face in trying to conform to their collective roles has produced a unique type of divergent consciousness in each of them. Helmholtz is an unfulfilled genius who has been relegated to writing banal hypnopaedic programs. He is too big for his collective role and feels that he’s missing something in life, but he doesn’t know what it is because society has not furnished him with the language and conceptual framework needed to comprehend his discontent. Bernard, on the other hand, is too small for his collective role: he is constantly picked on by members of his caste and there are even rumors that he may have been poisoned like members of the lower genetic castes during his artificial production – perhaps the Predestinators made a mistake in his caste assignment?

Bernard would be happy if he enjoyed the same popularity as Helmholtz. His discontent is a mere product of his shortcomings, but he finds ways of blaming others for his defects. Helmholtz has everything Bernard wants, but he isn’t fulfilled by it. Bernard is like a starving man looking at Helmholtz sighing with ennui atop a mountain of food. The collective is depriving Bernard of things he wants from the collective, but the collective has given all it can to Helmholtz. There is nothing left for Helmholtz in the collective, he knows that he is missing something from within himself, but he does not know how to navigate himself to find what he lacks.

In seeking to woo a woman who proudly wears the standard Malthusian belt laden with standard-issue contraceptives, Bernard invites Lenina to visit a Savage Reservation with him. She accepts the invitation and together they make the journey that ultimately introduces the main character to us: John the Shakespearean savage. He was raised in a Savage Reservation among the primitive remnants of the uncivilized world by his mother Linda, who was herself manufactured, i.e., born, and raised in the world state. Mother and son together endured isolation and discrimination within the reservation because they came from the “Other Place,” i.e., from the world state reigning all that which lie beyond the electrified fence perimeter of the reservation.

At some point in John’s life on the reservation, he was given a neglected mouse-eaten volume of Shakespeare’s complete works. The magic of the bard’s words seemed to complete something in him: they gave shape to the strong amorphous feelings within. By the power of language, John has found his greatest companion in solitude: himself. John was designed to be the better half of Helmholtz who is himself seeking this power of language discovered by John in solitude. But how does Huxley transplant John the savage into the utopian world state?

As fortune would have it, savage John is the bastard son of Bernard’s boss, who is presently trying to get him sent away to an island for petty reasons, but John has no idea who his father is. Eventually, the true identity of John is revealed and Bernard is overjoyed: John will be the ruin of Bernard’s boss because it is forbidden to engage in loathsome viviparous reproduction. Having a child is a crime against the collective in this world. The world state manufactures the children, not the citizens. “Father” and “mother” are both dirty words -- “mother” is reviled the most.

After John is transplanted into civilization and used to successfully ruin Bernard’s boss, three primary plot threads feed into the final strand of John renouncing the brave new world:

1. The continued exploitation of John by Bernard.

2. The blossoming friendship of John and Helmholtz.

3. John’s romance with Lenina.

John quickly becomes something of a celebrity among the multitudes that are always aching for entertainment. Everyone wants to hang out with Mr. Savage, but how do they gain access to John? Bernard has fiendishly installed himself as the gatekeeper to John. Everyone knows that if they want to become acquainted with Mr. Savage, they have to be on good terms with Bernard. Those that were once cruel to Bernard are now kind to him. Women that would have nothing to do with Bernard now beg for his company. Men in high places call upon him. He revels in the limelight of being elevated in the social order. This is what he has always wanted: to be wanted by the collective.

Helmholtz is a lonely creative genius without the genius of Shakespeare to help him channel his potentialities. He is not cognizant of what he lacks, but a feeling of incompleteness haunts him. This is expressed in a conversation between him and Bernard in chapter four:

Speaking very slowly, "Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using-you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?"

Bernard, of course, interprets this amorphous haunting of incompleteness as an expression of his own incompleteness. His reply to Helmholtz being “You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?” Bernard wants the collective around him to be more accepting of him: he wants things to be different. Helmholtz, on the other hand, does not feel incomplete due to any external deprivation: he wants to be different. Both men are incomplete in entirely different ways. Huxley considers Helmholtz to be the superior type of man because Helmholtz seeks to complete himself by transforming himself into a higher being. Helmholtz is quite often unashamedly used as Huxley’s proxy to pour his derision down upon the lesser man as signified by Bernard.

John has everything in him that a genius like Helmholtz needs: Shakespeare, solitude, and asceticism. When the two meet, they are drawn to each other like magnets of opposite polarity. This is intolerable to gatekeeper Bernard, but he must endure it because Helmholtz is his friend. Of course, John likes Helmholtz much more than him – that’s just old Bernard’s luck. Poor Bernard doesn’t understand that something in John attracts Helmholtz to him. The exchanges between the Shakespearean savage and the uncultivated genius are spiritually significant and laden with meaning. Helmholtz uses John to complete himself by transforming himself into a fully realized creative genius by the power of Shakespeare. Bernard, on the other hand, uses John to complete himself by attaining a higher social status which does nothing for his inner life but inflame his ego. Each man is illuminated by how they seek to use John. The higher man, Helmholtz, seeks Shakespeare in John. The lower man, Bernard, seeks to exploit the novelty of John’s outward identity as a savage. To Helmholtz, John is not a savage, but a treasure trove of culture. Bernard is blind to John’s true inner value, and thus John remains a mere savage in his eyes. What a brilliant design by Huxley!

While Helmholtz and Bernard were trying to complete themselves with John, John was trying to complete himself with Lenina. He was smitten with her from the moment he first laid eyes on her, and so she was with him, but they were of different worlds and therefore sought different things in each other. He looked to her for love, but she looked to have him. No one in the civilized world was deep enough for love: all were drained by drugs, hypersexuality, and social duty – Lenina was not an exception to this rule. Only Helmholtz needs what’s inside John, but John doesn’t need what’s inside Helmholtz: he needs the love of a woman; he needs what he believes to be inside Lenina, but he won’t find it there because it isn’t there to be found.

Lenina is a lie, the lie of the utopian world state. She summons all the primitive passions from the depths of John’s soul, but she is not the proper receptacle for them: she does not have the spiritual capacity to receive the sacred payload bound to John’s passions. She has a port, but all incoming cargo disappears in the depths of her collective non-soul. He wants to give himself to her, but she is not authorized to receive anything in her own name.

John is in love with a non-human human: a drone of the collective. When he realizes this, his love is annihilated and hatred reigns over his tempestuous soul. As with all men, when John realizes he cannot create in such an environment, he seeks to destroy it. He storms into a soma pill distribution facility and tries to destroy the soma pills being distributed to a throng of lower caste slaves. The authorities are called and they respond not with guns, but with a motherly recording that makes it sound like he’s a bad child that has done something naughty.

John retreats to an abandoned lighthouse and begins his life as an ascetic hermit. He regularly flagellates himself and endures harsh conditions. The pain is good for him: it makes him feel alive. Those lost in the collective never feel pain, they never think of death…they never live. John has returned to his savage ways in solitude because somehow dying daily (see 1 Corinthians 15:31) is more of a life than being a mindless drone in the collective. He knows that those who believe everything has been given them have had everything taken from them, but they have been spiritually plundered to such a degree that they no longer have the ability to know what they have lost.

A couple of drones from the collective eventually stumble upon John and witness his queer performance of self-flagellation. Ruby red streaks of blood run down his back, his tortured face looks up to the sky like Jesus seeking his Father on the cross, but his audience does not share his pain: they are overjoyed by this discovery of a novel spectacle! Word spreads about the savage with the whip in the lighthouse and drones flock to the scene. A technician from the feelies, a type of entertainment that simulates physical experiences, comes out and secretly captures the sensual experience of John’s self-flagellation. The whole collective goes to see the premiere of John the Savage’s Self-Flagellation and John becomes an even bigger celebrity in his flight from the collective.

The skies are dark with swarming helicopters and the collective descends upon John’s hermitage like a plague of whirring locusts. They surround him and throw treats at him like a zoo animal. The clicking of their cameras a cacophony like the chirping of locusts. John pleads with them to leave him alone; he begs to know what they want from him. They respond with a chant: "We-want-the whip! We-want-the whip!" He franticly obliges and whips himself for their pleasure. Every whip stimulates them, they are getting more excited, then to the point of climax: ORGY-PORGY!

John’s torment as an individual seeking to confront his mortality in solitude, as holy men once did, has now become an entertainment commodity for the collective. Every time they intrude on his hermitage, they have him, they sample the sensual experience he performs, but they can never feel his torment as an individual, or understand his motivations as a living human being – they know not what he does (see Luke 23:34). Amidst a sea of beautiful smiling faces, he is all alone in the world. The collective has snuffed out the life of the individual and thus John’s spirit dies – the rest is a matter of momentum.  

Conclusion

“…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.

Aldous Huxley peered into his soul, which is the crystal ball of visionary artists, and saw a tyranny looming on the horizon more terrible than all that have hitherto come to pass: a technological utopia where people have been conditioned to love their servitude. Huxley’s work was met with much ridicule and mockery when it was first published because the West had just survived the crisis of WWI and was presently building up to the next and much larger crisis known as WWII. As an example of some of the criticism he received, here’s what leading spokesman Granville Hicks of Communist Party USA wrote:

“With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe, and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about?... The unpleasantness of life in the utopia that, as he sees it, is just a century or two ahead.”

George Orwell’s 1984 must have seemed to be a more realistic portrayal of the tyranny looming on the horizon when it was published in 1949. Orwell wasn’t off in the clouds dreaming of some terrible utopia where everyone is happy and enjoys the freedom from want: he envisioned a future where all endured a terrible gloomy existence under the boot of overtly violent tyranny. His vision resonated more with the common fears and experiences of his age.

1984 presents a vision of masculine tyranny. Masculine tyranny uses violence and deprivation to enforce compliance. Brave New World presents a vision of feminine tyranny. Feminine tyranny uses coercion and abundance to enforce compliance. The authorities in 1984 make you comply by putting a knife to your throat. The authorities in Brave New World make you comply by giving you soma. Here are excerpts from each novel demonstrating how each authority deals with renegades:

Scene from the film adaptation of 1984

“The mask [with carnivorous rats inside] was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then -- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment -- one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'”

– Orwell, 1984

Non-violent pacification

“Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll was unwinding itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two (Medium Strength). Straight from the depths of a non-existent heart, "My friends, my friends!" said the Voice so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender reproach that, behind their gas masks, even the policemen's eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, "what is the meaning of this? Why aren't you all being happy and good together? Happy and good," the Voice repeated. "At peace, at peace." It trembled, sank into a whisper and momentarily expired. "Oh, I do want you to be happy," it began, with a yearning earnestness. "I do so want you to be good! Please, please be good and…" Two minutes later the Voice and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another-half a dozen twins at a time in a comprehensive embrace.”

– Huxley, Brave New World

Let us imagine, with great amusement, the indignant communist quoted above holding a copy of 1984 open to the excerpt above in his right hand and a copy of Brave New World open to the excerpt above in his left hand. Winston facing the prospect of getting his face torn off by rats is placed beside a hilarious description of a zany squabble that sounds like a mother trying to make peace between her rowdy children. We can imagine the communist throwing Huxley’s work to the floor in disgust while saying: “THIS is what Mr. Huxley is worried about!” If given the choice between having rats eat our face off and being gassed by a wonder drug that makes us feel utter bliss, we would all choose the latter.

This natural response to feminine tyranny demonstrates just how insidious it is. We naturally understand that violence is a feature of tyranny, but non-violent coercive methods are not similarly perceived by our intuition. If a tyrannical government has the power to make everyone happy, then we will naturally not see it as tyrannical at all. We will have the freedom to “have the most wonderful time,” as Lenina says, and therefore we will conclude that we are free.

Huxley sought to show us that happiness is not equivalent to freedom and that the pursuit of pleasure and happiness when carried to its logical conclusion is a nihilistic mode of existence that eliminates all the finer strivings of mortal beings who bear the desire to create because they are motivated by pain and death to produce something beyond themselves.

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