Website - Brave New World
Website - Brave New World
By Michael Olson
Written 2006-01-21
Quoted parts are Copyright (C) 2006 Caleb Platt
I wrote this as a long response to another long response to a response to a comment by Caleb Platt that mentioned he had read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
If I look at the world through a Huxley colored lense, I can see where he is coming from and how it applies to today's society (but then again, everything is biased). I see how people want everything done for them.
That's not quite what I got out of it initially. I marvel at the way that exceptional circumstances are handled (it appeals to the programmer in me, I guess). If someone has a really crappy day, they know that a soma pill will make it go away without disproportionate lasting harm. If someone is creative and resists sleep-molding, they are put in a position of power or research, with others like them. The Savage himself is treated quite well, even to the point of being allowed to leave the compound and practice his self-punishing narcissism.
I mean ... to some extent it might seem better to do without the soma pills and just learn to cope with the hand life deals you. And even in that time, the more enlightened would severely limit (or just not take) their own soma trips. I wonder if it's even possible to teach people to cope well with exceptions in their lives ... if not, soma could be an elegant way of tackling the problem. It's not an acceptable solution in this era, of course :^) .
The main problem with building this society is that it relies on a fixed population size at the upper tier, not to mention the unpleasant way of forming classes.
Now if we introduce robotics for the harder maintenance work, then as long as the population was controlled (or allowed to expand to other planets, depending on their philosophy of space exploration), this might be feasible. Then people could merely be separated into classes by means of testing their abilities or desires, rather than asphyxiating them as infants (ugh). The perfect world would be the one where everyone is doing what they're good at (and/or what they like to do), a cog in the greater (and felt) whole. But this is just a fantasy that reflects my own world-view ... others would probably not find this so desirable.
On the other hand, I sympathize with the Savage. Life is more poetic in the extremes. You fell alive when you are close to death. Things can never get better if the never get worse I guess this is based on an idea that the goodness or poorness of our quality of life is limited, like we are stuck in a mediocre homeostasis.
Yes, there is the tendency to file more alive in the extremes. Whether the sacrifice of extreme-coping (and/or fighting with nature for survival) is worth the peace probably depends on the person.
Then again, there may be deeper issues here, such as could love exist, or maybe floursih would be a better word, in a society like that? (Did it exist/flourish in the land of the Savage...in what we are presently living?)}
I wonder if there is much of a difference between love and fixation. If not, the land of the Savage could be viewed as a place with unhealthy long-term man-and-woman fixations, with the complication of family members, while the rest of the world would at least rotate their fixations properly. They could even be able to conscionably do without the heady elixir of love, without feeling obligated to please a significant other during an "off" period.
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