Brave New World Revisited

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Yet it's still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims of chronic depression or pain today don't need interludes of happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and pleasure were true, then one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical artefacts imbued with the texture of "pastness" would do the job of contrast just as well as raw nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But this sort of stratagem isn't on Huxley's agenda. The clear implication of Brave New World is that any kind of drug-delivered happiness is "false" or inauthentic. In similar fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering and overt behavioural conditioning are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the natural happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Savage on the Reservation is portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit transient and sometimes interspersed with sorrow. Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new worlders have got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences that life can offer as well. Most notably, brave new worlders have sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this presumption is obscure.

Goldberg, Lesley (5 May 2015). "Steven Spielberg's Amblin, Syfy Adapting Classic Novel 'Brave New World' (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the 1921 novel We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. [55] However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. [56] According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. [57] Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We". [58] 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.

Now more than ever: Aldous Huxley's enduring "masterpiece ... one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century" ( Wall Street Journal) must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit in the face of our "brave new world" A. Huxley in Sanary 1 - Introduction". www.sanary.com. Archived from the original on 11 January 2017 . Retrieved 27 September 2019. a b "100 Best Novels". Random House. 1999 . Retrieved 23 June 2007. This ranking was by the Modern Library Editorial Board of authors.

Kate Lohnes, writing for Encyclopædia Britannica, notes similarities between Brave New World and other novels of the era could be seen as expressing "common fears surrounding the rapid advancement of technology and of the shared feelings of many tech-skeptics during the early 20th century". Other dystopian novels followed Huxley's work, including C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (1945) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). [61] Legacy [ edit ] Fanny Crowne, Lenina Crowne's friend (they have the same last name because only ten thousand last names are in use in a World State comprising two billion people). Fanny voices the conventional values of her caste and society, particularly the importance of promiscuity: she advises Lenina that she should have more than one man in her life because it is unseemly to concentrate on just one. Fanny then warns Lenina away from a new lover whom she considers undeserving, yet she is ultimately supportive of the young woman's attraction to the savage John.

Sakmann, Lindsay. "LION: Banned Books Week: Banned BOOKS in the Library". library.albright.edu . Retrieved 18 June 2020. Nathaniel Ward "The visions of Wells, Huxley and Orwell—why was the Twentieth Century impressed by Distopias rather than Utopias?" in Ophelia Ruddle (ed.) Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Multidisciplinary Round Table on Twentieth Century Culture"

BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle there are ten world-controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. Mond governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by the state. The individuality of BNW's two billion hatchlings is systematically stifled. A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role in the hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. There are only ten thousand surnames. Value has been stripped away from the person as an individual human being; respect belongs only to society as a whole. Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection. The individual's loyalty is owed to the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of tension and anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma - the World State controls its populace no less than Big Brother. Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of social control. They are far more likely to induce the "infantile decorum" demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquillisers, including the archetypal "chemical cosh" chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems.Her name is a in-joke reference to John Keate, the notorious 19th century flogging headmaster of Eton.