Brave New World
 Brave New World  (novel)   | |
|---|---|
| Type | Fiction |
| Author(s) | Aldous Huxley |
| A warning - or a manual? | |
Brave New World is a novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932.[1] This novel is often compared to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Official narrative
A dystopian novel, it is largely set in a futuristic single World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist.
Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia", somewhat influenced by H.G. Wells'sThe Sleeper Awakes (dealing with subjects like corporate tyranny and behavioural conditioning) and the works of D. H. Lawrence.[2]
Problems with official narrative
While being used in schools and society since then as an example of a dystopian society, for the type of elite circles that the Huxleys were part of the novel could equally well be read as giving the recipe for an utopian society [3]
Aldous’s brother Julian Huxley was president of the British Eugenics Society, and a lifelong proponent of coerced population control.
In the 1990s, David Bradshaw uncovered articles by Aldous from the 1920s and 30s, which revealed the extent to which he shared Wells' and Julian's authoritarian and eugenic views.[4]
At the time of writing, Huxleys might have intended a purely utopian vision of the world under the control of those elite scientists of which they considered themselves a group with the following utopian characteristics:
- Manufacture of babies from a eugenicist blueprint with artificial wombs
- Genetic editing of the population to remove undesirable characteristics
- Removal of the concepts of love and God
- Reinforcing of people's role in society through repetition of massive amounts of subliminal and open propaganda.
- Administration of a daily drug dose ("Soma") to keep the population happy (aka controlled) in order to avoid conflict that would disrupt the elites
- Forced sterilisation
References
- ↑ https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/brave-new-world-by-aldous-huxley
- ↑ Lawrence biographer Frances Wilson writes that "the entire novel is saturated in Lawrence" and cites "Lawrence's New Mexico" in particular. Wilson, Frances (2021). Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 404-405.
- ↑ https://julesevans.medium.com/15-the-early-transhumanists-c98e0f96e66e
- ↑ https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Between-the-Wars-by-Aldous-Huxley-David-Bradshaw/9781566630559
