A Brave New World

What exactly was wrong with the future depicted by Aldous Huxley in A Brave New World? I haven't read the book but I'm hesitant to because I've heard that it is anti libertarianism/trans-humanism/utopianism and I see nothing wrong with using technology to eliminate human suffering or creating the most desirable, utopian society possible. I don't understand why people who claim a utopian society is impractical would continue to bring children into a world they consider to be unalterably harsh or painful but that's another discussion. Whether it sounds closedminded or not, I'm just not in the mood to read something that will espouse a view that I consider to be stupid.

It is a world where there is no free choice, where the poor and working class are not given a chance to better themselves. In which a elite society is created by science, and a percentage of the population has illiteracy and ignorance enforced upon them. In which some babies are actually made to be mentally impaired so that they will be content living an impoverished life style, while others are chosen to be bettered.

But even then, everything is controlled, there is no freedom of art or literature, and if a person is different in any sort of way they are punished for it.

A world of complete and total conformity and mind control. In which all creativity is lost. No one has any choice in anything within their life and there is no freedom of thought, or freedom of anything.

There is also no real true emotions or feelings, when a person starts to feel anything real, or begins to question their society, the solution is that they are drugged, they take these pills that ultimately make them high and make them "feel good" so they are not troubled with any real thoughts and people live only on a surface level of shallowness.

There is also no relationships, women are used as breeding cows, in which they are conditioned to sleep with a variety of different meant, and are in fact prohibited from forming close attachments to anyone. And they do not raise their own children, there is no really family system anymore.

The word mother is treated like a swear word and is banished completely.

Every little nuance of life is controlled, decided, and dictated by science and statistics and so people are stripped away of everything which truly makes them human, and become little more than robots or machines, they become slaves to science and have everything controlled.

In order to create a utopian world in which there is no pain or suffering, than everything which also gives genuine feelings of happiness and joy must also be stripped away as well, and people must not be allowed to feel anything on any deep emotional level.

There can be no love because love has the potential to create pain and suffering, and so the only way to alleviate that is to condition people out of feeling love of any kind.

In order to ensure people do not suffer based upon their social class, they simply must be denied knowing that there is a potential for a better life than the one they have. They are treated as cattle, as not truly human, they are brainwashed and conditioned, so they will be stupidly happy working in manual labor jobs, and it is someone else whom decides who is worthy of what positions within society based upon genetics.

There is no true opportunity for anything, because opportunity can lead to failure.

It is a modern way of going back to the mediaeval system, If your father was a baker than you will be a baker and your children will be bakers.

People are essentially completely dehumanized in order to ensure that they feel no suffering, but at the sacrifice of all of their potential greatness.

It is essentially a more advanced way of giving lobotomies to mental patience to calm them down and control them.

Everyone is for the most part "lobotomized" and that is the solution to preventing suffering

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Originally Posted by African_Love

What exactly was wrong with the future depicted by Aldous Huxley in A Brave New World?

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It's because there are more people who feel like Dark Muse than those who feel that if free will and human emotion are the only concepts to be given up, then we aren't giving up all that much.

How much free will do conscripts in our armies get when they are conscripted and sent to be returned in body bags?

How much free will does a child born in poverty have? What chance does he have of bettering himself when a drink of clean water is the number one priority?

How do emotion like jealousy, hatred and greed help mankind?

If I look at it objectively, I see a world where the vast majority of people spend almost all of their lives working for someone else to enable provision of food and shelter. Those of us lucky enough to have an internet connection were born to go to schools and be educated under someone else's curriculum, then work in a job for the vast majority of our waking hours while we send our kids into someone else's care.

Far from Huxley creating robot humans, we've managed it already, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, without becoming remotely utopian.

Read the book, enjoy the look and feel of a world where sybaritic and sensual pleasures rule. If you've had a bad day, take a two-week holiday to Mars in your mind while you sleep a drug-induced sleep, or go to the movies and luxuriate in the actual feel of what's happening on screen. If you feel like sex, go and share your pleasure with a woman whose physical requirements and needs match your own.

A world where there is no disability, poverty, dissent, violence or hatred? I'd trade a few human construct emotions for that any day.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

People are essentially completely dehumanized in order to ensure that they feel no suffering, but at the sacrifice of all of their potential greatness.

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Just from a realism perspective, what percentage of people born into under-privileged homes actually ever achieve greatness? How many Einsteins and Obamas ever live?

Isn't the carrot of "anyone can be anything" to encourage menial workers to keep doing their minimum-pay job more dishonest than trading off emotion for sensual pleasure?

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Just from a realism perspective, what percentage of people born into under-privileged homes actually ever achieve greatness? How many Einsteins and Obamas ever live?

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And in A Brave New World, there never would have been an Einstein or Obama, and that is a sacrifice that I do not think is worth making.

As well you can throw any sort of artistic creatively out the window, we would not be here right now having this discussion, because literature would be dead.

Being an Atheist you most have some apperception for free thought. What is the difference between religion making sheep of mankind and science making sheep of mankind?

The Brave New World utopia would just be nothing more than a scientific version of The Garden of Eden.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

And in A Brave New World, there never would have been an Einstein or Obama, and that is a sacrifice that I do not think is worth making.

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Trading off the pair of them for 4 million kids who die stupidly needless deaths a year seems fair. In Utopia, we wouldn't have any need for either Einstein or Obama anyway.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

As well you can throw any sort of artistic creatively out the window, we would not be here right now having this discussion, because literature would be dead.

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But creativity is clearly not thrown away as music and cinema still exist.

The reason we wouldn't be having this discussion is because I'd be whacked on soma with my fourth different woman this week.

:D

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

Being an Atheist you most have some apperception for free thought. What is the difference between religion making sheep of mankind and science making sheep of mankind?

The Brave New World utopia would just be nothing more than a scientific version of The Garden of Eden.

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Yep, and I see no problem with that.

Hey, I'm a cynical pragmatist; I see no chance of humans removing stupidity, apathy and malice from our makeup, so the idea of a constant utopia seems quite logical.

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Yep, and I see no problem with that.

Hey, I'm a cynical pragmatist; I see no chance of humans removing stupidity, apathy and malice from our makeup, so the idea of a constant utopia seems quite logical.

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To me the idea of Utopia just sounds dreadfully boring and dull and pointless.

I would not sacrifice everything which has meaning in my life, and acutally makes life worth living for some empty, shallow, delusion of happiness.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

To me the idea of Utopia just sounds dreadfully boring and dull and pointless.

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One man's meat and all that...

:)

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

I would not sacrifice everything which has meaning in my life, and acutally makes life worth living for some empty, shallow, delusion of happiness.

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This is a good topic.

I'm presuming those things you wouldn't give up are the ones you listed in the first couple of posts?

I look at things like freedom, emotion and relationships as simply human constructs - we're conditioned by our upbringing and society to embrace those things. If we construct a different system of belief, I just don't see why it's so bad.

You also said that: "A world of complete and total conformity and mind control" would be bad.

Don't we do that by default anyway? While people can stand up and call themselves anarchists, they still have to conform to the laws of the world or be thrown in jail. How much freedom do we really have? How does a person live in the world without money, for instance?

We are as much a slave to the dollar as the inhabitants of Utopia are to their genes and conditioning. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement.

I think dissent is better than no dissent. And, rather than solve human rights issues by deciding that "everyone belongs to everyone," I think that pursuing the sort of human rights that are agreed upon in the U.N. is a better idea. The obstacles to accomplishing that aren't any more difficult than getting everyone to agree on the society envisioned in Brave New World, I don't think. (NOTE: I haven't read the book itself, just some outlines and related articles).

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

I look at things like freedom, emotion and relationships as simply human constructs - we're conditioned by our upbringing and society to embrace those things. If we construct a different system of belief, I just don't see why it's so bad.

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But they are not strictly human constructs, for examples of the importance of relationships, or some sort of contact or connections can be seen to varying degrees within the animal kingdom. Animals such as Elephants, dolphins, wolves and other canines, apes, to name a few examples have in fact quite complicated social constructs of their own. And it is known that when animals adapted to this sort of social interaction of put into captivity and denied a strong family unit, they do indeed become depressed and as a result of that become physical ill.

So it is something that goes beyond, and is far deeper than just some sort of human conditioning.

And even if people could be reconditioned to accept a different sort of social construct (though I personally do not think that deep down a person could find true fulfillment when denied these things, and the very fact that drugs are needed to reaffirm ones "happiness" is proof alone that the system is not truly effective) while these things such as relationships, emotion, freedom, etc. might have become ingrained within our society the primary difference which would make it a bad thing to try and recondition, is the fact that it was not a system that was dictated by an elite class whom decided they knew what was best for everyone else.

Humans out of their own free will and nature constructed for themselves this social network. From the very earliest primitive man humans have had these ideas, concepts, whichever you want to call them, it was not something forced upon them.

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Don't we do that by default anyway? While people can stand up and call themselves anarchists, they still have to conform to the laws of the world or be thrown in jail. How much freedom do we really have? How does a person live in the world without money, for instance?

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But a person can still make the choice to break the law knowing what the consequences of their actions might be if they should get caught. Pot is illegal where I live, does that mean that no one smokes it? Hell no!

If they get caught, the will be punished for it, but there is nothing actually stopping them from getting high, it is actually relatively easy to accomplish.

And as I have stressed in my prior posts freedom of creatively, expression, artistic freedom are very important to me and does very much exist, and would be completely suffocated in a world of conformity. Oh sure they might have their so called music and so called movies, but it is all propaganda, there is no true free thought. There would be no Van Gogh, no Monet, no Picasso, no Hemingway, no Dickens, no Poe, and the list goes on endlessly, while some people might not care about these things, to me this would be a gross travesty and insufferable.

As far as living without money, people do in parts of the world where there are still traditional tribes whom live as their ancestors had for 100's of years, relatively unharresed and uninfluenced by the Western modern world. The modern world might shun this but nonetheless it is a possibility.

I just recently saw a story about a man in the UK who decided to abstain from the world of so called civilization and society, and built a tree house in the middle of the woods to live off the land.

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Originally Posted by billl

The obstacles to accomplishing that aren't any more difficult than getting everyone to agree on the society envisioned in Brave New World, I don't think. (NOTE: I haven't read the book itself, just some outlines and related articles).

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There's no agreement - it's a decision made by a few.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

But they are not strictly human constructs, for examples of the importance of relationships, or some sort of contact or connections can be seen to varying degrees within the animal kingdom. Animals such as Elephants, dolphins, wolves and other canines, apes, to name a few examples have in fact quite complicated social constructs of their own. And it is known that when animals adapted to this sort of social interaction of put into captivity and denied a strong family unit, they do indeed become depressed and as a result of that become physical ill.

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Yes, but society still exists, just the nature of it has changed. I'm quite sure people would survive.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

Humans out of their own free will and nature constructed for themselves this social network. From the very earliest primitive man humans have had these ideas, concepts, whichever you want to call them, it was not something forced upon them.

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Except the rules have been forced upon them.

Point to one ancient civilisation which had universal suffrage.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

As far as living without money, people do in parts of the world where there are still traditional tribes whom live as their ancestors had for 100's of years, relatively unharresed and uninfluenced by the Western modern world. The modern world might shun this but nonetheless it is a possibility.

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Soiety could not become cashless. The vast majority of the population would die out if forced to fend for itself.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

I just recently saw a story about a man in the UK who decided to abstain from the world of so called civilization and society, and built a tree house in the middle of the woods to live off the land.

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Smart fella!

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Except the rules have been forced upon them.!

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The existence of society, human relationships, emotions, family, etc. were not dictated to the masses by a small elite group. It is something which naturally developed out of human nature.

It was not something that was contrived, if these concepts were nothing more than some sort of social conditioning than from one end to the globe to the next from the very beginning of man throughout time, every human society would not have developed in such a closely similar way.

There are in all cultures/societies certain differences, but the importance of family, human relationships, friendship, the expression of a wide spectrum of emotions can be found in any given society at any given period of time.

These are not things which one person, or small group of people just decided for all of man kind, but things of which mankind came into of their own.

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Soiety could not become cashless. The vast majority of the population would die out if forced to fend for itself.

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I fear I am not convinced of that being a bad thing. I see less people has having a rather positive effect upon the health of the planet.

And I was not suggesting a complete abolition of the use of money within society, but the fact that if one truly wanted to be completely free, and escape the bounds of its necessity it would not be an impossible goal to achieve but can and has been done.

I'm with DM on this one.

I'd rather kill myself than live in Huxley's hedonistic dystopia. Evolution has produced a species, homo sapiens, that are driven by constant anxiety. True contentedness doesn't exist, only distraction. The "happiest" people are probably those that are too hungry, and busy looking for food, to have time to realize how much life really does suck. The odds are stacked against us from the beginning, the only consolation is that there is a level of complexity that produces a sense of randomness that gives us an illusion of freedom. The reality of being a puppet of fate in Brave New World is just too disconcerting.

I imagine the Zetas were quite happy as mindless chattel, but being always happy simply isn't human.

To take another line from The Tempest, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; And our little life is rounded with a sleep"

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

The existence of society, human relationships, emotions, family, etc. were not dictated to the masses by a small elite group. It is something which naturally developed out of human nature.

It was not something that was contrived, if these concepts were nothing more than some sort of social conditioning than from one end to the globe to the next from the very beginning of man throughout time, every human society would not have developed in such a closely similar way.

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I don't quite agree with your anthropological history.

Humans cleaved together in prehistoric times through necessity. Just as shoals of fish form to protect the herd, so did human societies.

The common origin of humans means that there will always be some similarity between cultures, but there are sufficient examples of unusual culture to counter any claims that societies develop along the same lines.

The ruling factor over most of our societies has been the bond and rules of theology. Take a trip back a few thousand years and look at the diffrences between cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia - the differences in the way those societies worked is quite stark.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

There are in all cultures/societies certain differences, but the importance of family, human relationships, friendship, the expression of a wide spectrum of emotions can be found in any given society at any given period of time.

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Those emotions have grown out of evolutionary imperatives, so they must be the same. I don't see why that makes them any more valuable.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

I fear I am not convinced of that being a bad thing. I see less people has having a rather positive effect upon the health of the planet.

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I find this a bit contradictory. I agree that the planet would be far healthier with 90% less humans, but it's a lot more radical than a mild brainwashing. What shall we do, just let 90% starve? Isn't that a bit harsh?

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

And I was not suggesting a complete abolition of the use of money within society, but the fact that if one truly wanted to be completely free, and escape the bounds of its necessity it would not be an impossible goal to achieve but can and has been done.

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But not en masse. The odd person being able to achieve it doesn't count for much, and I bet the tree-dweller still finds a doctor when he's sick.

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Originally Posted by OrphanPip

I'm with DM on this one.

I'd rather kill myself than live in Huxley's hedonistic dystopia. Evolution has produced a species, homo sapiens, that are driven by constant anxiety. True contentedness doesn't exist, only distraction. The "happiest" people are probably those that are too hungry, and busy looking for food, to have time to realize how much life really does suck. The odds are stacked against us from the beginning, the only consolation is that there is a level of complexity that produces a sense of randomness that gives us an illusion of freedom. The reality of being a puppet of fate in Brave New World is just too disconcerting.

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This also seems contradictory. On one side, you say that life sucks for the majority of mankind and you accept that freedom is illusory, yet you wouldn't allow people a means of them all finding happiness.

I also dispute your claim regarding hunger and happiness. Do you think the family of the child in my avatar is happy?

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Originally Posted by OrphanPip

I imagine the Zetas were quite happy as mindless chattel, but being always happy simply isn't human.

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It would be if that's how we lived. I don't believe there is a ready handbook anywhere which can tell us what is "human" and what is not.