Brave New World: A Beautiful, Devastating Silence

I did not hear about Aldous Huxley, but my sister recommended that I read his “Brave New World” after “1984”. 

I tried to gather different parts of my essence and put my mind into a unity again for several weeks after reading this book. “Brave New World” is a masterpiece that every human being must read, and Aldous Huxley was not only a great writer - he was a prophet.

Numerous times, while reading this book, I returned to his biography and checked the year of publication - 1932. I asked myself, Google, and ChatGPT how he might have used terminology and described processes that we have only in our time. But on the other side, how could he predict fully the society in general that we are now extremely approaching and even already living in?!?!

While reading, I felt all the time dual emotions: from admiration of him like an author, and extreme pain of realizing that the world he described almost 100 years ago, we are living in now.

The voices of Huxley's characters and main protagonist are still with me, triggering questions and making me feel that this world is doomed.

While “1984” is a classical dystopia of fear, “Brave New World” is a dystopia of pleasure (utopia on the surface, but dystopia underneath). His dystopia is not loud, not brutal, like Orwell’s - it frightens us in a softer, deeper, more intimate way: a world without pain equals a world without depth.

Brave New World, created by Huxley, is a world of engineered happiness and chosen DNA. There is no natural birth. No pregnancy. No parents. Human eggs and sperm are taken in laboratories. Babies are taken out of the bottle like a product. Infants are raised in State Conditioning Centres, not families. They learn everything through sleep-teaching (hypnopaedia) and conditioning. No families. No mothers or fathers.

The world of constant entertainment, drugs (soma), sexual freedom, no suffering, no pain, no individuality, but an obsession with being young and perfect.

Soma is a perfect drug that removes stress, keeps mood stable, and slows visible aging. Combining with perfect nutrition, control of health and living conditions, no disease, and no emotional trauma, people stay almost forever young. Sounds great from a very primitive and limited perspective. As people are just transferred to drug-addicted robots without empathy, compassion, any feelings or emotions, besides sex instincts.

Staying young-looking and healthy, then one day they just die. Death is fast, clean, painless, and medicalized. People are dying in the Hospital for the Dying. The dying process is surrounded by perfumes, bright lights, music, singing children who are conditioned not to fear death, and large soma doses to keep the dying person peaceful. There is no mourning, no funerals, no grief in the world created by Huxley.

Huxley designed an ideal world at first glance, where there are no wars, poverty, disease, grief, or pain. Everything is predicted and created according to science and necessity. Everyone is happy; you do not need to struggle for happiness, you were engineered to be happy, and you need to take soma to be even happier.

Divining deeply into the book, you can realize that something is wrong with this ideal world - everything that makes us human has been quietly removed. Everything that forced us to think and feel evaporated. Everything that provided us with experience was taken away. There is no art, literature, or culture in this perfect world. You do not need to think or feel; the government will install all important patterns of behaviour in you so that you can perfectly fulfil your task and role in society. There is no longing or belonging, no relationships besides sex, no faith and freedom, no individuality, no devotion or true passion. All of the most important pillars of human existence were abolished.

“Ideal world” without pain and suffering, only with pleasure, has its cost - you obey because you are comfortably numb; you are not free - government controls you.

The protagonist, John, who was the last human as he was the last one born naturally, committed suicide. He was not able to survive in the artificial world of primitive senses, absence of values, and addiction to drugs, occasional sex, artificial beauty, and controlled youth. He was the only one who was raised on Shakespeare, pain, religion, hunger, and longing. When Huxley took him into the Brave New World, John believed that this civilization was advanced, beautiful, intelligent, and the most developed in the world. But he faced the painful reality of deep emptiness and the sterilization of the society that he could not bear any longer.

Lenina, one of the main characters, is not bad or good; she is a product of her time - perfect, young, cheerful, happy, conditioned, desperately normal, and emotionally anaesthetized. The true representative of this advanced civilized society.

Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, the philosopher of comfortable emptiness. Unlike everyone else, he remembers the old world. He has read Shakespeare. He understands theology. He knows about God, suffering, art, and tragedy. But he has chosen the world of pleasure, controlling and conditioning others now. His most famous phrase is chilling and terrifying: “People want to be happy; they don’t want to be free.”

Bernard Marx is the first hint that something is wrong in the “perfect” world. He feels small, insecure, and different; he searches for meaning but doesn’t truly know what meaning is. His rebellion is half moral, half ego. For him, attention was much more valuable than truth. When the system turns against him, he collapses in fear.

Helmholtz Watson is a person whom Bernard wishes to be: tall, gifted, confident, charismatic. He was dissatisfied with the propaganda he was forced to write. He was also searching for meaning, but he was not guided by ego, and when he found the meaning in meeting John, his life collapsed, and unlike Bernard, he chose exile instead of comfort and pleasure. 

Linda is a tragic echo of what the World State does to the human soul. She was a Beta exciled from the New Brave World. Once she returned, her stay there was unbearable - she was old, overweight, and “ugly” — everything that society cannot tolerate. She escaped from reality with the overtaking soma - her death was a moment to finally understand how dehumanizing stability is. The part about her death was the most painful part for me, just because it fully resembled and triggered my memory of the death of my mother in a very comfortable room at the palliative department in a local hospital.

The final image of the book is a lighthouse where John escaped from the ugly reality of the civilized world and tried to create a life of purity and solitude, but "advanced" society found him and looked at him as an animal in the circus, and turned his suffering into a spectacle. Even in his suicide, they saw only a fascinating performance. So many times have passed since the Roman Empire, but people still need only "Bread and Circuses".

Huxley lived the discomfort in my soul, triggering important questions that every human being should ask himself/herself:

• What are we willing to sacrifice for perfect comfort?

• Can happiness be real without suffering?

• When everything becomes easy, does anything remain meaningful?

• What is the meaning of life if we are not free?

• Can comfort and pleasure coexist with freedom?

• What happens to a soul in a civilization that replaces it with technical control and machines?

The author did not tell you this is bad and this is good, he ingeniously showed two worlds - one painless and full of pleasure, the other one raw and painful - that's only you who understands the cost of each of them.

Perfect empty world controlled by Authority and addicted people to numerous things functioning on a robot level is the world in which we already live, besides the fact of producing people in probs like products with predicted and chosen DNA. But I am pretty sure that in the near future, taking into account nowadays technologies and societal madness, we will do it in 10-30 years.

If you are true to yourself, you can see and acknowledge the powerful addiction of our civilization:

Have depression (even if it's not a depression) - take antidepressants.

Have anxiety - take anti-anxiety pills.

Cannot sleep - take sleeping pills, sedatives, or melatonin.

Have mind fog - take a magic mushroom.

Want to be relaxed - smoke cannabis.

Have pain - painkillers are the past, take opioids.

Want to socialize - drink alcohol.

Feel lonely - scroll endlessly on social media and speak with ChatGPT.

Feel insecure, "not enough" - buy....anything....

Feel empty - eat.

Feel stressed - drink alcohol or smoke cannabis.

Feel unloved - chase validation, likes, hearts.

Feel old - inject youth into your face, freeze your skin, erase your history.

Cannot accept your body - cut it, reshape it, polish it until it looks like someone else.

....

Isn't all of this terrifying and awakening?!?!

This is Huxley´s SOMA for our civilization that is already everywhere, not in one pill, but literally everywhere. In every escape, we call "normal life".