Book: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

I intend to give a short examination of books I have read as I read them. Brave New World is Huxley's best known work, and a dystopian masterpiece. It has been described as complementing 1984, in the sense that the latter shows a society ruled by top down force, while the former shows one ruled by pure hedonism. This is a very apt description.

One thing that an individual who has read 1984 will likely experience as Brave New World progresses is a feeling of dread or anticipation waiting for the other shoe to drop and the repressive violence of the authoritarian regime to become clear. It never does. The secret police never arrive. A riot is broken up, but it is caused by disruptive acts on the part of an individual from the "savage reservation" where people still live in primitive fashion. There is no torture, no incarceration, nor is there a need for any. The conditioning of the population is so complete that the benevolence of the regime is assured.

Two things that the book holds in interesting juxtaposition are the nature of the pleasure received by the individual brought up on the savage reservation and the pleasure received by the members of the general society. The latter live in a state of complete sexual freedom complemented by the constant fulfillment of desires that they have been conditioned into since birth or before. There is no happiness for them apart from the fulfillment of their desires in these forms and through a perfect drug. And their contentment is assured completely through these methods, such as it it. The savage, to the contrary, seeks to make himself suffer for his sins, to imitate Christ, to go on a vision quest, to fast, to beat himself. The group and the individual find it mutually incomprehensible why the other would act in such a way. Yet it is clear that the savage's path is as much a path to, if not uninterrupted contentment, then a serious form of happiness that the other path does not provide for. This distinction is terribly important to understanding human feeling.

The book is short, and I feel I have given little away in its overall substance. I recommend that it be read by all.