Brave New World

(Minor spoilers) This book is about two things: individuality and civilisation.The characters are all caricatures of what it means to possess social individuality. In broader terms, to be different to those around you. Bernard is different because he's on the bottom rung of his caste, a rung that no one knew existed until he showed up. He is rejected because his individualised traits do not cohere with the rest of the caste that a part of. Helmholtz's difference is his superiority, an ubermensch amongst the elite. He's above everyone else. For Helmholtz, success is trivial, women are trivial, life is trivial; his place in society means little to him and so he has become aloof, rejecting comformity to his caste in favour of radical misbehaviour. John is different because he has no caste at all. He's and outsider to almost everyone's social circle, a true pariah. He's too white and civilised to be an Indian yet too emotional and unstable to be considered civilian. That same civilisation then took his mother from him, poisoned his moral purity and, in the end, refused to let him escape its grasp. Lenina, in fact, has no individuality at all. She is the perfect Alpha - beautiful, brainless, adamant in her pursuit of orthodoxy. Her suffering arises when John forces individuality upon her through his exclusive infatuation of her – and then rejects her scripted advances, undermining the stability upon which her conditioning rests. It is through Lenina that we glimpse the dire consequence of removing individuality in favour of stability, pruning the autoimmunity that individuality gives. Mustapha Mond parenthetically tells us that difference is suffering. Ironically, Mond is perhaps the most individualistic person in the book, and paradoxically its happiest. Why? Because Mond isn't actually different; because he is his own caste, his own comparison, his own society. He reads what he likes, dictates what he likes, declares his own morality – by his own admittance, he makes the rules. In a sense, he is beyond society. The illustration Aldous Huxley has painted for us is one of status anxiety, a critical feature of our modern world. It is what drives consumerism. It is what makes us jealous and angry at the success of others, and ashamed of our own failures. But what is failure without a comparison to success? Alain de Botton's [b: Status Anxiety 23425 Status Anxiety Alain de Botton https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1298417783s/23425.jpg 14280288] deals with this topic better than I ever could. In 1930, Aldous Huxley would have been aware of the rise of communism and the future it could promise. This book is in many ways a critique of that communism. The Brave New World is pointedly similar to how many people at the time described the ultimate outcome of successful communism – both the detractors and pundits; utopia and dystopia. Everything is easy, everyone is happy; to each what they need, with needs regulated closely. What Huxley truly felt about communism is best illustrated in the Cyprus experiment, perhaps. Is this book really dystopian, or is it utopian? What would Bentham have to say about the satisfied Alpha-Socrates, alongside the satisfied Gamma-Pigs? In 2019, a lot of the world that Huxley envisioned seems right around the corner. Designer babies, powerful escapist drugs made ubiquitous, paternalistic governments, insatiable consumerism...the list goes on. But the real lesson on offer in this book has been seemingly ignored: do we really want a world where individualism and its instability, its sturm-und-drang and emotional labour, has been replaced with happiness, easiness, and perhaps most jarringly of all, equality?