This review includes spoilers, you've been forewarned.
Oh wow. Where do I begin with my review? I'm always amazed at how current a book written in 1931 can be so current and readable nearly a century later in 2018.
Oh wow. Where do I begin with my review? I'm always amazed at how current a book written in 1931 can be so current and readable nearly a century later in 2018.
The Brave New World is set in a future some centuries away where happiness is society's key. Religion, art, science and truth have been sacrificed to archive global sustainable happiness.
People are engineered from embryo though constant tweaking at the fertilisation process and growth, then though as children conditioned using Pavlovian techniques: you read a book, you get zapped - aged 18 months. Aged 6 the children engage in "erotic play". Sleep hypnosis with rhymes that the individuals will live inside society with. Each individual is predestined for a class in society: alphas, betas, down to the "epsilon semi-morons" - button pushers.
All seemingly pretty grotesque, but much later in the book, the benefits of this new world are argued, and it's a fairly convincing argument. Everything is for the sake of happiness.
Ignorance is bliss. The less truth there is to be sought, the more content you are with your reality. And thus, a stable, sustainable, healthy society.
It seems as through there's three protagonist with increasing complexity to break the orthodox rules of the New World.
Lenina allows herself to romanticise being with one person, and feeling love, but this is surface-deep and she's still very much a slave to her conditioning and unable to see beyond these walls.
Bernard Marx, an Alpha plus who appears visibly as a Delta, with nasty rumours that alcohol had been slipped into his fertilisation process. He is able to think and speak outside of his orthodox conditioning but when it comes to acting, he falls short, and in fact proves himself more of a coward (or in fact probably as most would act: though inaction).
John (the) Savage is different. He has a mother. He's learnt of God, learned to read and reads Shakespeare. He was born an outcast in The Old World (The Savage Reserve), and brought into the New World when Bernard and Lenina stumble upon him and his mother (originally from the new world but became injured and lost in the reservation some 20 years prior).
John is the only one who questions and tries to change the new world that he now lives, and, obviously fails. The new world is centuries in the making.
John is relatable because he comes from our time. And this is why he's a man out of time.
There's nothing he can do to change society in an impactful way, and even if he did, it would be at the sacrifice of happiness of others.
It's almost an inevitability that he goes mad. That he doesn't survive this brave new world. He can't. He can't escape it, and so, in the end, like any good Shakespeare tragedy, he tries and fails to extract himself from society, as it's impossible, in a rage of madness, goes on to kill the woman he loves, and then himself.
An amazing, and maddening tale. Wow.
25 Highlight(s)
"They can only stand red light." And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer's afternoon.
"that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny."
Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the planet had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.
There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."
"Every one belongs to every one else, after all." One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority.
a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything.
more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety.
That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private.
"A gramme in time saves nine," said Lenina, producing a bright treasure of sleep-taught wisdom.
The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs, the flies. Her face wrinkled up into a grimace of disgust. She held her handkerchief to her nose. "But how can they live like this?" she broke out in a voice of indignant incredulity. (It wasn't possible.) Bernard shrugged his shoulders philosophically. "Anyhow," he said, "they've been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by now."
"What's the matter with him?" whispered Lenina. Her eyes were wide with horror and amazement. "He's old, that's all,"
"Yes, that's just it." The young man nodded. "If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
Lenina felt herself entitled, after this day of queerness and hor-ror, to a complete and absolute holiday.
the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering,
One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Bernard's other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity—a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz's character.
"Poison to soul as well as body." "Yes, but let me get on with my distribution, won't you?
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
"The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above." "And they're happy below the water line?" "Happier than above it. Happier than your friend here, for example."
Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people's happiness.
And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.
so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist.
without any of the inconveniences." "But I like the inconveniences." "We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."