
Brave New World Revisited, Revisited - DyslexicAtheist
https://spectator.us/2018/10/brave-new-world-revisited-revisited/
======
codeulike
A key component of Brave New World, that this article barely touches on, is
genetic engineering. In BNW people do not 'breed' naturally but are created
en-masse in genetic factories. This creates the in-book caste system of
alphas, betas, gammas etc. Low skill workers are deliberately bred to have low
intelligence and conditioned to like their allotted jobs. There is a memorable
scene in the book where a class of infants is conditioned by loud scary noises
to not like bright flowers or natural scenes. They are being conditioned to be
happy with grey drabness.

So the reason 1984 is mentioned a lot more at the moment compared to BNW is
that we aren't really in the BNW zone yet. But perhaps there will be a time
when BNW is even more relevant. Things somewhat like Gattacca and BNW might
still come to pass.

~~~
inetknght
You don't think we're being conditioned to be passive against each other and,
by proxy, our government?

You don't think we're being conditioned to value the abstinence of violence
for _whatever reason_ regardless of claims of justification?

You don't think we're being conditioned to ignore the reasons people blow up
and instead ask how they had the means to be able to do so?

You don't think we're being conditioned to complain about the way things are
without thinking about the way things could, or even should, be?

The book should be taken at face value indeed.

~~~
adrianN
Some people call it conditioning, others call it education. Societies seem to
work better when people don't bash each others heads in all the time, so we
try to teach our children that violence is not okay. That seems pretty
reasonable to me.

~~~
inetknght
It seems pretty reasonable to me too. Indeed, education is supposed to
enlighten you to see others viewpoints. Why do we continue to have problems
meeting eye to eye with others' ideas then?

------
jefflombardjr
This article does a good job of drawing parallels between the book and reality
in a short amount of time. I feel like the article is just scratching the
surface though.

> Television was transforming the news into a rapid and proliferating series
> of images, a form of entertainment that prized ‘the unreal’ and the ‘more or
> less totally irrelevant’. You can contest facts, he said, but not images.

Noam Chomsky has some excellent work in this area. It can be very very dry
reading, but very informative. Check out manufacturing consent
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)

In the same vein and much more entertaining is this video that compares local
news channels:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI)

~~~
icebraining
I don't remember how Manufacturing Consent referred to the facts vs images
distinction, can you give a pointer to that?

I think the work by the Situationists is more relevant, particularly the
concept of the Spectacle. But it was "in the air" at the time, arguably even
the works of Hunter S. Thompson reflect it.

~~~
jefflombardjr
I was more referring to the role that the news plays in all of this rather
than specifically facts vs images.

Haven't heard of the Situationists, I'll check them out! Thanks!

------
evrydayhustling
The least prophetic and most distracting part of Brave New World is the
presence of the World Controllers in the first place. The idea that there is
even someone to argue with about the preferred state of society is off - the
folks driving forward a culture of consumerism and sounds byte dialogue are as
much desparate consumption addicts as the rest of us!

~~~
creep
>The idea that there is even someone to argue with about the preferred state
of society is off

I completely agree. The idea of someone, or a small group of someones, who
control the world is another scapegoat, a kind of fantasy we sometimes revel
in to explain why everything is going wrong. "At least someone's in control".

The fact is, we're all in this together. Certain people have more influence on
the direction of certain societies, it's true, but the whole mass is some kind
of undulating, chaotic consciousness constantly trying to adapt to itself. The
people "not in control" compose most of the mass, influencing the people "in
control" from the bottom-up, like how plate tectonics et al cause tsunamis,
while those "in control" attempt to place restrictions on the crowd. There is
not usually a state in which one body can contain the other, unless we do have
a society akin to what we have in 1984, or unless we don't have class mobility
(distributing influences).

Fortunately, in societies dominated by European and "western" philosophies, we
have class mobility and we have sectors of the mass actively attempting to
keep the upper influences manageable and the greater mass informed. Our focus
on intellectualism, scientific thought, and individualism are, in my opinion,
the biggest reasons why this is the case. We want to understand how the world
works, we want to know where we fit as individuals and how our individual
power contributes to the collective. We want to mark our place on the world,
which means we generally strive to expand our individual influence radius as
far as it can go, which means any top-of-the-pyramid actors do actually have
much less control of anything that might shake the boat (since we tend to
shake the boat very often).

------
mosselman
"But why do we look to Orwell’s vision when Huxley’s rings truer?"

'We' here apparently is the US as I think China, with its social credit
system, looks more like the society from 1984.

~~~
grenoire
Agreed, I don't think that BNW is more appropriate for the current world than
1984.

BNW has taken many things to the extreme, especially with regards to the
cementing for a class system through destroying anything that's remotely human
about our existence. 1984 on the other hand makes people freak out because the
idea of truthless-ness and state surveillance and language controls are much
more real and close than a forced societal divide.

~~~
mosselman
I just meant that there are different perspectives for different people. If
you look at countries like Russia and China there is more of a 1984 society,
whereas in the US and Europe, at least here in the Netherlands, society
resembles Brave New World more.

Brave New World captures many of the frustrations that I have with the
indifference people exhibit when reacting to issues like privacy or
trustworthiness of media or politics.

When you read historic novels like Ken Follett's 'Fall of Giants' you get more
of a 1984 vibe with the Russian stories. Seeing China's surveillance system
described in various place doesn't give off a 1984 vibe, it breathes 1984 to a
scary degree. Add modern day technology to the mix and it is nothing short of
horrific.

------
PhasmaFelis
The thing about Brave New World is, it's awful in a bunch of obvious ways, but
it's distinctly _not_ awful in many more ways that we've all learned to
ignore. Outside the reservations, no one goes hungry, no one is lonely, no one
needs fear violence, no one is homeless or jobless or denied basic medical
care. There are millions of people in the world today who would give anything
to live as well as the lowest Epsilon in BNW.

It's a bad place. But I think the world we live in today might actually be
worse.

~~~
magduf
I honestly _don 't_ see how the world of BNW is really a bad place at all.
There's huge advantages to it: as you said, no one is homeless or jobless or
denied medical care, there's no violence, etc. Even better, kids are raised
better: instead of having children raised by complete amateurs as we do today,
which causes all kinds of horrible problems (abuse, neglect, teaching poor
values or insane belief systems), children in BNW are raised by trained and
experienced professionals.

Really, I don't see what the real problem with BNW's world is, aside from
deliberately creating idiots to do boring jobs. But that's one thing Huxley
missed: in our future, we're going to automate away all or most of those jobs,
so we won't need a bunch of idiot Deltas to do them. The main problem is that
we won't have much to struggle for, since that's when humans seem to do well,
but along with that struggle always comes a lot of horrors, so is it really
worth it?

~~~
pjc50
As presented in the novel by the "savage" outsider, the problems are
essentially ones of meaninglessness. It's comfortable, but not free, and has
no real room for individuality, creativity, or higher purpose.

The novel also claims that they tried an Alpha-only society, but it was
inherently unstable. The most important job of the Deltas is to be there for
the Alphas to look down on.

~~~
magduf
One thing to remember here is that BNW was a book written by one guy; it's not
a reliable look into a possible future timeline, it's just one person's idea
of it. I'm pretty sure there have been primitive societies (small villages,
etc.) in the past that lived collectively and didn't require having a whole
class of citizens to "look down on" to stay stable, so I don't accept this as
a necessary component of a stable society. It does seem that some people feel
better this way when they're in a bad position, which is why we have a lot of
racism (e.g. poor white people want to be able to look down on black people)
but it's a non-sequitur that a society requires this.

As for a "higher purpose", what kind of higher purpose do we have in our
current society? Perhaps trying to make it better somehow (by various measures
of "better"), with better technology, medical science, etc.? I'm not sure why
a BNW society wouldn't have these as well. There's always room for
improvement. BNW's society did seem overly stifling as far as creativity and
such, but I don't really see why that's necessary in that society either.

------
panta
Another "revisitation" is contained in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business" by Neil Postman, an essay written in
1985 which extends the thesis that media are the main force which are creating
a BNW kind of world (in particular TV, being written before the digital
revolution).

~~~
bloomer
I can’t recommend this book enough. Although it was written in 1985, it feels
like it could have been written yesterday. It’s amazing how he predicted the
actual effects computers would have on western society as opposed to the
utopian dreams present at that time (and still parroted about).

------
blakesterz
Huxley's actual BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED [1958] is online and can be read
here:

[https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/](https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/)

I'd love to see him be able to revisit it again now!

------
jadell
Orwell's dystopia is more palatable than Huxley's _we_ are to blame in
Huxley's version.

We become _Brave New World_ by getting exactly what we ask for: entertainment,
leisure, sex, escape/drugs, distraction.

Compare that to _1984_ , where the dystopia is imposed on society from above,
by a bureaucratic Party.

People (en masse) are not introspective or forward-thinking. Of course we
prefer to believe we're living in a dystopia forced upon us unwillingly,
rather than one of our own making, brought on by our own inability to see the
consequences of our own mass desires taken to their current extreme. We have
no one to blame except ourselves.

------
interfixus
Britain had a referendum. With a narrow margin, it came out in favour of
leaving a supranational union which the country had joined by stages in 1973
without the people being asked. Why do all sorts of presumably intelligent and
grown up people from all sorts of countries keep on touting this as an omen of
the coming of the end of the world?

Does noone - in an article on _Brave New World_ , no less - pause for a moment
to consider the irony?

~~~
pjc50
> Why do all sorts of presumably intelligent and grown up people from all
> sorts of countries keep on touting this as an omen of the coming of the end
> of the world?

You might conclude that everyone has been brainwashed .. or maybe all these
people have looked at the issues themselves and are becoming increasingly
worried about what the answers might be?

Brexit plans fall apart when confronted with questions like "how is this going
to work, exactly?" and "why would they agree to that?"

------
RichardCA
Why do we look at Orwell or Huxley when Kafka rings truer?

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2018/09/25/6475315...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2018/09/25/647531500/taken-for-a-ride-doctor-injured-in-atv-crash-
gets-56-603-bill-for-air-ambulance)

------
amrtn
Can't recommend enough the Intelligence Squared episode on Brave New World vs
1984

[https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/brave-new-
world-v...](https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/brave-new-world-vs-
nineteen-eighty-four-with-adam-gopnik-and-will-self/)

~~~
maxxxxx
That debate seems pretty misguided. Why does it have to be one or the other
and not aspects of both?

------
EugeneOZ
Strange issue. Instantly saying "please leave me and forget forever"
[https://imgur.com/qzTSQdZ](https://imgur.com/qzTSQdZ)

------
doubletree
Have been planning to re-read "Brave New World" for a long time, but keep
getting sidelined by my "near infinite capacity for distraction’.

------
rcMgD2BwE72F
[https://i.imgur.com/2H8gZq5.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/2H8gZq5.jpg)

------
jccc
“But why do we look to Orwell’s vision when Huxley’s rings truer?“

Simpler explanations aren’t as entertaining but I think they tend to be the
correct ones.

First, 1984 was received by many as anti-communist into the height of the Red
Scare. This greatly amplified its influence ever since beyond what Brave New
World could ever achieve.

Second, and fortunately for us, Orwell is a much superior writer to Huxley.

~~~
jccc
It’s offensive to say Orwell is a better writer? It’s incorrect that 1984 was
seen to be anti-communist?

I’m sincerely mystified, and I’d like to know what the objectors’ problem is.

------
brianmcc
1984 and BNW remain the two real standouts of dystopian fiction. 1984 always
felt the more powerful of the two to me: it's starker, more overtly shocking.
BNW is subtler, but for probably most cultures it rings more true to real life
as it's turned out this far.

Today we see aspects of both novels in play: echoes of 1984's Two Minutes Hate
when politicians rail against immigrants, the rise of "Fake News" and anti-vax
calling into question to a scary extent of the population what's real, and the
fact we do seem to have always been at war with Eastasia; and from BNW, the
electorate largely subdued by TV, social media, fashion and being obedient
consumers - and with legalisation of cannabis increasingly a thing the
comparison to SOMA isn't too big a stretch.

What to do about this, of course, is plainly way above my pay grade, and
probably involves educating the electorate (UK and US probably both going
backwards in this regard, given Brexit and Trump) - but suffice it to say both
novels remain a must-read even 70 - 80 years after they were written. They're
very accessible, readable books too FWIW if anyone is hesitating, intimidated
by their rep.

~~~
bluntfang
>with legalisation of cannabis increasingly a thing the comparison to SOMA
isn't too big a stretch.

I'd go further and relate it directly to MDMA, LSD, and other drugs. The
government knowns about Burning Man, music festivals, etc. If they really
didn't want people doing these drugs do you think these events would be
allowed to happen?

~~~
brianmcc
You're not the first to make the link:
[https://www.somarecords.com/](https://www.somarecords.com/)

Here in the UK in the 90s the Govt tried _really quite hard_ to shut down
"raves":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994)

Glasgow lost its legendary Arches venue very recently, arguably the single
best clubbing venue in Scotland, due specifically to these kinds of concerns.

I think a certain amount of "youthful exuberance" is indeed tolerated - but go
too far and Thou Shalt Often Be Shut Down.

~~~
bluntfang
>I think a certain amount of "youthful exuberance" is indeed tolerated - but
go too far and Thou Shalt Often Be Shut Down.

Living in Boston I see the revolving music venue scene. It seems like about
every ~5 years or so the well known venues close down for whatever reason
(mismanagement, fallout from harassment/drug use, etc) and another one pops up
to fill the void. It seems like getting shut down is a power check from the
government to keep us complacent, as the next scene will appear and be just as
much as a Time and Place as the one before it.

