This is About as Huxleyan as it Gets
Incredibly intense and colorful are what would describe an unforgettable conversation that took place sometime in the summer months of 2020. I could almost feel him [a close friend] shrug as he quipped, in his usual Al Bundy tone of voice, that “there should definitely be more people dying from this virus.” I did a double-take (just like anyone would) when I heard this. Of course, he was talking from a perspective of overpopulation, nature and Darwinism. What he meant was, that nature has a way of controlling the population and this was one of them. And given the amount of people on the planet, one would expect more people to be dying from such a supposedly serious illness.
At this point throughout the pandemic I was quite worried about the entire virus situation, convinced that if I didn’t put my mask on correctly every second of the day I would be responsible for the mortality of my closest loved ones. When discussing how we don’t even know if society will even “get back to normal,” my friend said something along the lines of “It’s a Brave New World…” This immediately triggered memories of the feelings of intrigue, fascination and excitement that came upon me back in my grade school years, when my English class began studying the book. Of course, other visionary dystopian novels also come to mind that seem to reflect certain developments and circumstances present in our world today. There was George Orwell’s 1984 (which portrayed the government as a totalitarian state referred to as “Big Brother”), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (which portrayed a society that has banned books and it is the firemen’s job to burn them), to name a few. But I found author Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to be much more shiny, sensual and mesmerizing. And, in my opinion, it is more relevant to what we are seeing and experiencing today.
Like the previously mentioned novels, the society that is described in Brave New World is also a society of control. What’s radically different, however, is the manner by which the government’s control takes hold – it is rather insidious and harder to notice than in other stories, because of its shiny and titillating nature. Why is this? Because the World Controllers use pleasure to control the people, instead of pain. And people are, even nowadays, so easily tricked into thinking that feeling happy and content is the main thing everyone should be striving for. If there is something in your life that makes you feel stirred up emotionally, no matter what it is, just back down and revert to satisfying one of the five senses.
Since the onset of COVID-19, it has seemed that much of the world’s rulers did not want their people working – the evidence being the shutdowns of so many businesses. But it could be argued that these rulers didn’t want their people suffering, since economic support was provided by the government in the form of unemployment insurance or economic stimulus [in America and other developed countries]. But what they really want is the people dependent on the government, and satisfied with a specific, limited level of income and the lifestyle that comes with it. And now we live in a world where science and technology can do so many things that seemed impossible not too long ago, and the convenience of the world is literally at the fingertips of most people. The government provides the people what they need and distracts them with pleasure (whether that be alcohol, marijuana, pharmaceuticals, pornography or the ability to choose to be lazy and avoid face-to-face contact with others), they are slowly constricting their freedom. Life can seem comfortable, but without the freedom to choose how to live it, there is no meaning behind it all. And this all works together in the big picture to benefit the overall system that these rulers adamantly support, often for their own benefit.
In Chapter One of Brave New World, the Director explains their society’s definition of happiness, coined by himself and the other World Controllers, as “…making people like their unescapable social destiny.” When I hear this, I can’t help but think of something I have heard numerous times in the past year and a half: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” This is one of the eight predictions made by the World Economic Forum in 2016 about what the world will be like by 2030. And enter what is now commonly referred to as the Great Reset.
Of course, relating Brave New World’s government and society to how our society has been progressing in recent years is nothing new. There is quite a bit of intriguing material all over the Internet published on this matter. Some of the most obvious manifestations of Brave New World have appeared with the increasing prevalence of casual and meaningless sex over the years (in the book sex is used only for pleasure, not pro-creation and the women wear birth control belts), genetic engineering (the story’s human beings are created in test tubes, much like some technologies present in our world today such as vitro fertilization), and dissolution of the family unit (in the book’s society, it is inappropriate to even mention the words “mother” and “father”). There’s also soma, the drug in the story that is taken like it’s going out of style, which can be compared to the widespread downfall into substance abuse that our world has been enduring for a long time. But in the past year or so, I read Brave New World again and there are a few other specific things that have occurred in our world recently that immediately made me think of the dystopian novel’s society.
Religion
On Monday, October 4 [2021], Tucker Carlson stated on his nightly show on FOX News that “public health is the world’s new religion, and Anthony Fauci is it’s high priest.” First, we were told masks don’t work. Then we were told that was in fact incorrect, that masks do work, and in fact it would be wise to wear more than one mask at a given time. To this day, the public continues to appear confused about the real purposes of masks, and their level of effectiveness at preventing COVID-19. We were told that the people at highest risk for COVID were those who were above 60 years or so years of age and with pre-existing conditions. Yet the schools were shut down for indefinite periods of time, and when they finally opened there were widespread mask mandates for children. Though professionals like Fauci were supposed to make decisions based on scientific evidence and reasoning, science doesn’t seem to have played a significant part in much of the policymaking in response to COVID-19. Instead, it has become more like the “religion” of public health, since religion is where man has historically turned to when he cannot get answers from science and technology.
And with God having been so far removed from society at this point, the religion of public health hasn’t been too difficult to implement. This once again is reminiscent of Brave New World, since the premise of the entire novel is a society without God. No one in the dystopian society depicted by the novel has knowledge of, or any dependency on God. Because when the people are kept feeling rather comfortable and pleasant, technology has advanced to do as much as it possibly can, and all the possible drawbacks to life, such as old age or childbirth are erased, what need is there for God? In the novel, society’s dependence on science and technology is even more evident with how they worship Ford (presumably the wildly successful automobile engineer Henry Ford) and Sigmund Freud. Since they felt the need to idolize something, this was a fitting alternative to God in their world.
Old Age
Over the years, our culture has seemed to become more and more preoccupied with retaining youth. More anti-aging products and surgical solutions are being advertised, and thanks to the Internet they are likely to reach far more people than in years past. And if you are an older person in the job market, you may notice that while employers do still value work experience, there also seems to have been an upturn in the value many employers put on youth, who they may refer to as “more junior” or “someone that can grow with the company.” This is where age discriminationcomes into play.
But these cultural practices are subtleties in comparison to some of the events that took place over the past two years, since COVID-19 and all the government policies that seemed to come with it wreaked havoc on our world. In Brave New World, we experience a world without old people. And while that may allow society to avoid certain inconveniences that come with old age, there is also a price the dystopian society pays, since elderly people have so much value and wisdom. The society in Brave New World does still have a few “reservations” where a limited number of humans still living in accordance with older, Western values reside separately from the social and genetically conditioned society. And when two of the characters, Bernard Marx and Lenina go to visit one of those reservations in New Mexico, Lenina encounters an aging man for the first time and is in shock. In Chapter Seven of Brave New World, Bernard explains how the society’s youthful physical state and appearance of the population is achieved: “That’s because we don’t allow them to be like that. We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don’t permit their magnesium-calcium to fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusions of young blood. We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don’t look like that. Partly.”
In the novel’s society, people don’t usually live past the age of sixty. And then we are introduced to two people, Linda and John (mother and son) who are “savages” from the reservation and Western world. In Chapter Eleven Linda, who is aging herself, is placed in a medical facility and put on narcotics (or more particularly, the society’s feel-good drug soma) which are meant to both keep her numb from pain as well as induce euthanasia.
In 2019, with the dawn of COVID-19 came a looming threat to all of the world’s senior citizens. The virus was known to have the most acute risk with the elderly population and those with underlying conditions, since symptoms tended to be more severe than with those groups of people. Second, there were several states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan) that, as a result of orders from the governors, required nursing homes to admit thousands of elderly COVID-19 patients into their facilities. Most of these patients had not been properly tested and the governors’ orders prohibited anyone at the facilities from even asking any of these incoming patients if they had the virus, lest they be discriminated against. There was barely any protocol put into place to protect the elderly already residing in these homes, despite the fact that previous COVID-19 outbreaks in countries such as Asia or Europe had already made it common knowledge that the elderly were more vulnerable to the virus. Governors of states like Florida, which has plenty of nursing home residents, took that information and responded accordingly. As a result, Florida’s elderly population took a much smaller hit from the virus, with under 750 deaths as of May 2020.
But for a large part of America, these nursing home deaths seemed to have become an epidemic. Back in May 2020, the New York Times also reported that there were fourteen states where over half of total deaths occurred in facilities for the elderly. And what is even more surprising is that New York (which had the second highest rate of nursing home deaths in the country, with 1,680 deaths per million people) and New Jersey (which had the number one highest rate of nursing home deaths, with 1,733 deaths per million people) are not included in this list of fourteen states, because the number of total deaths overall were so high in those two states. And as investigations have been called in the U.S. regarding these excessive death numbers, now other countries like Italy are now calling for investigations into excessive nursing home deaths, many of which they felt could have been avoidable.
And even before the reports of all these deaths, there was a certain headline I will never forget that struck me and made me recognize yet another manifestation of Brave New World: Last year, when Pesident Trump decided to re-open the country and its economy after about a month of being shut down following the arrival of COVID-19 in the U.S., MSNBC host Joe Scarborough accused him of being “ready to euthanize” the elderly population. Back in March 2020 Scarborough stated the following on his morning show: “Right now, these conservatives are making Democrats who are pro-choice actually look more pro-life because they’re only worried about the unborn.” And then he added, “It is the born – it is the weakest among us, it is senior citizens – who they’re ready to euthanize because they want Boeing’s corporate earnings to not dip too low.”
Questioning Authority
The character Bernard Marx, who is mentioned above, plays a key role in Brave New World. He is one of the few citizens that questions the way the entire society is being run, and expresses his dissatisfaction with a world that is made to satisfy the physical senses. In Chapter Six of the book, he questions what everyone in that world has come to know and accept. “No, the real problem is: How is it that I can’t, or rather – because after all, I know quite well why I can’t – what if I were free – not enslaved by my conditioning.” When he implies that their population lacks freedom, Lenina is confused: “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” Bernard responds, “Yes. ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
This concept hits the nail on the head for me. In the past two years, as I have grown as a person, life is not all about being happy and feeling good all the time. Though that is definitely the goal at least some of the time, my main goal is to pursue meaningful objectives, no matter how much of a struggle they are. Because if it’s meaningful to me, and brings me closer to God, then it will give me that sense of fulfillment that trumps all other satisfactions. Sometimes it gets ugly when I take on certain projects; I experience hostility, strained relations, I find myself on edge and a bit more worked up than I prefer. It’s uncomfortable. And then people say to me that maybe I should stop pursuing that goal or doing that type of work, so I can just be content and happy. But, at least for me, I have found that sometimes the only way to experience peace and contentment is to know that I never gave up on what I had set my heart on, and fought until I couldn’t anymore.
Because Bernard is different from most in Brave New World, and has the courage to question the way their society is being conditioned, people refer in the story to the alcohol that was supposedly in his test tube when he was born. And there seems to be a familiar pattern in our world today, with those that challenge or question government policies and societal norms such as those surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine and the idea that people can choose their own gender. We have seen this on a pop culture scale with celebrities such as Nicki Minaj, who made headlines for weeksand managed to stir up government officials from both the United States and her native Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobego. This was after a tweet mentioning her cousin in Trinidad who was hesitant to get vaccinated after the COVID injection rendered a friend of his impotent and “his testicles became swollen.” The Trinidad government even tried to track down the person in their country that made this claim involving possible vaccine side effects! And officials at the White House made efforts to “offer to have a conversation” with Minaj. After some back and forth in the press between Minaj and the White House, Minaj railed against “cancel culture” in a live video she posted on Instagram, claiming she had been blocked from Twitter. In the video, Minaj acknowledged the resistance that now exists against anyone who questions government policy and thinks for themselves: “I remember going to China and they were telling us you know, you cannot speak out against, you know, the people in power, there, etc…Don’t y’all see that we are living now in that time where people will turn their back on you…but people will isolate you if you simply speak and ask a question.” Other celebrities who have recently made headlines due to heavy backlash from the media, including organizations like GLAAD, are comedian Dave Chappelle and author JK Rowling. Both made statements that were interpreted as insensitive to the transgender community.
But Minaj, Chappelle and Rowling are far from the only ones to be chastised for their viewpoints. In fact, they may have it better than most people as far as backlash from the government and media goes; most other people that question the vaccine aren’t offered a call from the White House. In the past year and a half, many of us have seen people around us, or maybe even ourselves, being alienated and labeled and slowly we seem to be becoming an “us” and “them” society. I thought that the term “anti-vaxxer,” which I found to be an amusing at first, was newly coined in the past couple of years. But I recently found out it has existed for quite a while, and in fact Merriam-Webster just recently changed the dictionary definition of the term. While an “anti-vaxxer” used to describe a person who doesn’t believe in vaccinations, now it has a different meaning: “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccinations.” This took place some time after the CDC changed the definition of vaccine, to make the term more agreeable with the impediments present in the COVID-19 vaccines.
For so long, hearing the term “Brave New World” may conjure up memories of the exciting and seductive story that was the highlight of my childhood English class. But as it turns out, the reality isn’t near as alluring.
