Brave New World (Paperback)

“Community, Identity, Stability” is the motto of Aldous Huxleys utopian World State. “The worlds stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they cant get. Theyre well off; theyre safe; theyre never ill; theyre not afraid of death; theyre blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; theyre plagued with no mothers or fathers; theyve got no wives, or children or lovers to feel strongly about; theyre so conditioned that they practically cant help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, theres soma.” Soma is a drug engineered to eliminate side effects of sickness, while promoting submission.

The revelation of Huxleys world, how it is created and how it functions leads to powerful messages about the purpose of humanity, the pursuit of happiness, the role of suffering and the need for individual human dignity and freedom.

It also illustrates Huxleys theory that the masses are more easily mollified by the power of pleasure than the threat of force. Huxley wrote, in a letter to George Orwell dated 21 October, 1949 about the differences between “Brave New World” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: “Within the next generation I believe that the worlds rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”