Brave New World is a fictional account of a futuristic world where the motto is "Community, Identity, Stability", written by Aldous Huxley and first published in 1932.

In that world (a population of about two billion) humans are incubated and highly conditioned in laboratories employing eugenics. Everyone takes a "feel good" drug called soma. Religion, individualism, and free thinking is frowned upon, and most every human being is content with their "station in life". There is no such thing as a family, a family unit, a mother, father, son, or daughter, and promiscuity is the social norm. The world is overseen and managed by ten world controllers, one of which is Mustapha Mond (the Resident World Controller for Western Europe).

The story takes place, for the most part, in a futuristic London.

The main character of the book is John "The Savage", who was born the "old-fashioned" way on a reservation in New Mexico and grew up in a Native American Indian culture.

When John is brought to London, the stark differences between "old school" humans and genetically-engineered and conditioned humans comes to light.

Although a work of fiction, Huxley's story is an insight and perhaps a warning of what life for humans on planet earth might eventually become.

View Cliffs Notes for the book here.

Huxley wrote a follow up essay to Brave New World published in 1958 entitled Brave New World Revisited. In that essay he discusses the following twelve topics:

1. Over-Population
   • Huxley compares his book with 1984 by George Orwell:
     

     The society described in 1984 by George Orwell is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization.

   • Regarding birth control:
     

     Birth control depends on the cooperation of an entire people. It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world's teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or mechanical methods of contraception are used) an expenditure of more money than most of these millions can now afford. Moreover, there are nowhere any religious traditions in favor of unrestricted death, whereas religious and social traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction are widespread.

   • Regarding overpopulation per se:
     

     The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals - this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.

     Unsolved, that problem [mounting population pressures on our own planet] will render insoluble all our other problems. Worse still, it will create conditions in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable.

     Over-population leads to economic insecurity and social unrest. Unrest and insecurity lead to more control by central governments and an increase of their power. In the absence of a constitutional tradition, this increased power will probably be exercised in a dictatorial fashion.

2. Quantity, Quality, Morality
   • Regarding the effects of modern medicine and other factors on human reproduction:
     

     In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greatre numbers shall be of biological poorer quality. In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind. Under the conditions now prevailing, every advance in medicine will tend to be offset by a corresponding advance in the survival rate of individuals cursed by some genetic insufficiency.

3. Over-Organization
   • Huxley talks about how technological advancement leads to the concentration and centralization of economic and political power.
     

     But the Nature of Things is such that nobody in this world ever gets anything for nothing. These amazing and admirable advances have had to be paid for.
     Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and with a deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress.

     In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people.

   • Regarding technological advancement and its effect on mental health, Huxley quotes philosopher-psychiatrist Dr. Erich Fromm:
     

     Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

   • Huxley defines what he calls the "Will to Order" and says that although mostly a good thing as it relates to science, art, and philosophy, it's not such a good thing as it relates to the "social sphere", politics, and economics.
     

     Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finally abstracting some kind of "law", in terms of which they make sense and can be effectively dealt with.

     The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind. Within the realms of science, art and philosophy the workings of what I may call this "Will to Order" are mainly beneficient...It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude.

     Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.

4. Propaganda in a Democratic Society
   • Huxley defines two kinds of propaganda:
     

     There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.

     If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-rang self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise.
     As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery.

5. Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
   • Huxley quotes parts of a speech given by Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armamaments, where Speer talks about Hitler's dictatorship.
     

     It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man...Since Hitler's day a great deal of work has been carried out in those fields of applied psychology and neurology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher...Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence.

   • Huxley goes on to discuss the non-technical methods Hitler used to control the masses.
     

     The first principle from which he started was a value judgement: the masses are utterly contemptible. The are incapable of abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their immediate experience. Their behavior is determined, not by knowledge and reason, but by feelings and unconscious drives...To be successful, the propagandist must learn how to manipulate these instincts and emotions.

     To make them [the masses] more masslike, more homogeneously subhuman, he assembled them, by the thousands and the tens of thousands, in vast halls and arenas, where individuals could lose their personal identity, even their elementary humanity, and be merged with the crowd...Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgement or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm, and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as if he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd poisoning".

     He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effectively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already primed with herd-poison.

     Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority...Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations which are the propagandist's stock in trade.

     "All effective propaganda," Hitler wrote, "must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas." These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for "only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."

     The demagogic propagandist must therefore be consistently dogmatic. All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white.

     In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt "a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with." He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated. The morally squeamish intellectual may be shocked buy this kind of thing. But the masses are always convinced that "right is on the side of the active aggressor."

     But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his victims into action,
     are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.

     In an age of accelerating over-population, of accelerating over-organization and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual?

6. The Arts of Selling
7. Brain-Washing
8. Chemical Persuasion
9. Subconscious Persuasion
10. Hypnopaedia
11. Education for Freedom
12. What Can be Done?

Source:

Huxley, Aldous. (1946). Brave New World. ISBN: 978-0-06-176764-7. HarperCollins Publishers.

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