Brave New World

Aldous Huxley · 1932

Premise

In the year 632 After Ford, a World State keeps everyone content by engineering people before birth, conditioning them in childhood and supplying pleasure on demand; when a man raised outside it arrives, the novel asks whether a society that has abolished suffering has also abolished everything that makes life worth living.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

The most effective control is not force but pleasure. People who are kept happy do not want freedom.
A society can manufacture the people it needs, fixing their abilities and desires before they are born.
Conditioning that works below conscious thought is more reliable than persuasion, because nobody experiences it as control.
Stability requires removing what makes people unstable: strong emotion, family, art, religion and serious truth.
Constant distraction and easy gratification leave no room for the inner life that freedom depends on.
The alternative is not comfortable. Choosing freedom means choosing the right to be unhappy.

Stability above all

The World State's motto is "Community, Identity, Stability," and stability is the one that governs the rest. After a catastrophic war, the world's rulers decided that a stable society was worth any price, and they built one in which conflict cannot arise because nobody wants anything they cannot have.

The story carries the idea through Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, who explains the system to the novel's rebels near the end. He tells them of the Cyprus experiment: the Controllers once settled an island entirely with Alphas, the highest caste. Within years they fell into civil war, and the survivors asked the Controllers to resume governing them. A society, Mond concludes, needs most of its people content with simple work, and only engineering and conditioning can make them so.

Mond is not a hypocrite. He reads the books he has banned, and he once chose to give up pure science, which threatened stability, in exchange for power. He understands exactly what the system costs and has decided the cost is worth paying.

Implication: any promise of perfect stability deserves the question of what has been removed to achieve it. The most persuasive defenders of a closed system are those who know its costs and accept them.

Manufactured people

The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where human beings are produced in bottles. Through Bokanovsky's Process a single fertilized egg is made to divide into as many as ninety-six identical embryos, so that a factory can be staffed by identical twins working identical machines. Embryos are assigned to castes, from Alpha down through Beta, Gamma and Delta to Epsilon, and the lower castes are deliberately stunted, starved of oxygen before birth so that they will be fit for, and satisfied by, menial work.

Natural birth, parenthood and family have become obscene. "Mother" is a dirty word. The State has replaced the family because families produce strong attachments, and strong attachments produce conflict.

The mechanism is that inequality is made invisible by being built in. Nobody in the World State resents their caste, because each caste has been designed to want exactly the life it is given.

Implication: be wary of any system that shapes people's desires to fit their circumstances instead of shaping circumstances to fit people. Contentment that has been engineered says nothing about whether a life is good.

Conditioning instead of force

The World State rarely uses violence. It conditions. In one scene, Delta infants are shown books and flowers, then subjected to sirens and electric shocks, until they recoil from both for life: books might teach them to think, and a love of nature costs nothing, so it would not keep factories busy.

Older children are taught by hypnopaedia, sleep-teaching, in which slogans are repeated thousands of times while they sleep until the slogans become their own convictions. Adults speak in these phrases without noticing: "Everyone belongs to everyone else"; "A gramme is better than a damn"; "Ending is better than mending."

The mechanism is that beliefs installed below conscious thought are not experienced as beliefs at all, but as simple truths. People defend them as their own and cannot imagine thinking otherwise.

Implication: the views you hold most automatically, and repeat most easily, are the ones most worth examining. Ask where a belief came from before deciding that it is yours.

Pleasure as control

Where older tyrannies used fear, the World State uses gratification. Soma, a drug with no hangover and no side effects, dissolves any bad mood in a "holiday"; it is handed out to workers at the end of each shift. Casual sex is encouraged from childhood and lasting attachment is discouraged. The "feelies," films that transmit physical sensation, replace serious art.

Consumption is part of the design. Citizens are conditioned to throw away rather than repair, and games are approved only if they require elaborate equipment, so that leisure keeps the factories running. Solitude is suspect; people spend their free time in crowds.

The mechanism is that a population that is always entertained and never left alone has no occasion to ask whether its life is good. Discomfort, boredom and solitude are where questions begin, and the State has eliminated all three.

Implication: watch what you reach for to escape discomfort or boredom. A habit of instant relief can remove the very experiences that lead to reflection and change.

The outsider

The second half of the novel turns on John, called the Savage, born to a woman from the World State who was stranded on a reservation in New Mexico. Raised among the reservation's people, he has learned to read from a battered copy of Shakespeare, and he sees the world through it. When Bernard Marx, an Alpha who feels out of place in his own society, brings John and his mother Linda to London, John at first echoes Miranda in The Tempest, calling it a brave new world, the phrase that gives the novel its title.

The phrase sours quickly. London treats John as a curiosity. Linda, who has longed to return, spends her last weeks in a soma haze and dies in a hospital where children are brought to be conditioned to see death as unremarkable. John, who loves her, is the only person there who grieves.

The mechanism is contrast. Shakespeare gives John a language for love, grief, honor and sin, and the World State has no words for any of them. Through his eyes, a society that looked like paradise appears empty.

Implication: reading deeply in another age's literature gives you a vantage point outside your own society's assumptions. Without one, it is hard to see what your society has lost.

The right to be unhappy

The novel's climax is a debate between John and Mustapha Mond. Mond defends the World State: it has eliminated war, poverty, disease and grief. The price is art, science, religion and passion, which all depend on suffering, instability or unanswered questions. John refuses the bargain. He wants God, poetry, real danger, freedom and goodness. Mond points out that he is then claiming the right to be old and ugly, to be hungry, to live in fear and to suffer pain. John answers: "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

The ending shows how little room the World State leaves for that claim. John retreats to an abandoned lighthouse to live alone and punish himself for what he sees as his own corruption. Reporters and crowds find him and turn his suffering into entertainment, and after a night in which he joins their frenzy, he hangs himself.

The mechanism is that a society organized around comfort cannot tolerate someone who refuses it. His refusal becomes a spectacle, and the spectacle destroys him.

Implication: freedom includes the freedom to struggle, fail and suffer. A choice that removes all of those removes the possibility of meaning as well.

Where it falls short

Huxley himself named the novel's chief flaw. In a foreword written in 1946, he said that John is offered only two alternatives, an insane utopia or a primitive and brutal life on the reservation, and that if he rewrote the book he would add a third: a sane, decentralized community in which freedom and stability coexist.
The conditioning the novel imagines has proved weaker than Huxley supposed. Sleep-teaching, the hypnopaedia on which much of the World State depends, was tested by Charles Simon and William Emmons in 1956, who found that people learned essentially nothing from material played to them once they were confirmed to be asleep.

Agnotology — ignorance produced on purpose, the World State's method studied as a real phenomenon.
Crime and Punishment — suffering as a source of meaning, the claim John makes against Mond.