I’m having a lot of trouble summing up how I feel about this book. In many ways, it’s exactly what I expected, but it doesn’t progress toward an endgame like I thought it would during the first few chapters. The theme is pretty straightforward. I could put my finger on it within a couple of chapters. Brave New World is a warning about the misuse of powerful technological and sociological developments in service of the ‘greater good.’ In this case, the greater good being to make a society without any trace of instability. From the emotion controlling drug soma, to the wildly promiscuous social standards, and the constant bombardment of games and other entertainment, the state has engineered a world where no one is allowed to feel anything but the most dutiful happiness. The problem I have is that I realized all of this within Mustapha Mond’s (one of the World Controllers) first speech at the end of chapter one. From then on, nothing changed as the story progressed.

It has many individual moments that I wish would add up something more by the end of the book, but they just don’t really. All the rest of the tragic events serve the theme established in chapter one. Nothing ever happens to subvert the theme in a clever way, or even make the suggestion that this Brave New World could be improved somehow. Huxley seems to be saying that once the world has become a state controlled dystopian nightmare where everyone belongs to everyone else, it’s simply too late to do anything about it. The people living in the brave new world are either fully brainwashed, or if they do have doubts, they are powerless to do anything about them. The society has actually achieved their goal of perfect stability, and it’s the end of individual thought, goals, and relationships.

It hits the mark in so many ways that fit with today’s problems in society. The gamification of everything, including the ever more complex and energy intensive distractions, the rampant drug abuse that leaves almost everyone in a constant state of hazy joy, the power of social rejection that serves as the motivation to do whatever society deems as good, the idea that ever increasing levels of consumption for consumption’s sake is the ultimate goal. Huxley took everything he saw wrong with the world, or anything that might be considered perverted, and dialed it all up to 11. Unfortunately, none of this really means anything beyond how bad it is. It works as a warning, but not as anything else. Certainly not as a story I’d like to read again, or something I could find higher meaning in on a second read.

I’m not really satisfied with the book because it doesn’t end any more positively or even any more negatively than it began. I’ve seen some articles call it a tragedy, but in my opinion a tragedy needs change as much as a heroic triumph. Instead, this is a stable world, where no matter who does what or who dies when, nothing ever gets better or worse, so I hesitate to even call this a tragedy because there’s no fall. Tragic events take place, but equally tragic things were happening on page one compared to the last page, and on every page between. I read books to grow, and this book doesn’t help me with that. Maybe it says something profound about society, but the irony of it is that nothing about this book actually changes anything about how one approaches living in society. The only character who ever acts like a human at all is essentially eaten by the brave new world and his own guilt before he can do anything helpful. If anything, the book shouts at you to conform and live happy but unfulfilled, or resist and die horribly, and there’s no alternative, and neither option will actually result in anything. Overall it was just bleak, and didn’t make very clear what Huxley thought would actually help society at large. Instead he just hints at the possibility of purpose beyond being happy for the sake of being happy in one singular scene, without any specifics. Beyond that one moment, it was a pure and simple warning and nothing more.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley