Societal worship of captains of industry, check. Mutually disdaining social strata, check. Huxley simply rearranges the atoms to propose another stable macro-molecule, an orgiastic buckyball in which soma and feelies and a mysterious man behind the curtain manage to keep the global 6-billion-horny body politic humming.Īre we living in Brave New World already? A drug for every emotion, check. It is perhaps not a cosmic coincidence that religion, marriage, and private property all emerged from the swamp of pre-history around the same time. Society, of course, is controlled through sex, at least if you believe that pervert Freud. The core of Huxley’s thesis is that we humans are not rational creatures, and it wouldn’t be all that difficult to control society via sex. Brave New World is Leviathan meets My Dad Wrote A Porno.ĭon’t knock the strategy: Plato’s Republic had sex and nudity aplenty, if you recall the guardians’ prescribed wife-swapping and state of undress. But interesting ideas, as a general rule, don’t sell books. It contains no new ideas, for the simple reason that the author had previously written several essays describing the novel’s intellectual contributions: ideas about genetic engineering, abolition of the family, and controlling society via pleasure. Brave New World is a work of political philosophy masquerading as a science fiction novel.
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