Such a Profound Read
|
Aldous Huxley's classic book, "Brave New World," is very interesting and such a profound read. This book should be strongly recommended.
In a way, this book is prophetic. While it is considered a science fiction, it remarkably parallel to that of today's world. Projecting suggestions through our sleeps are one of modes of mind control.
Today, we are all been subject constantly to 'suggestions' to one form or another, including a controlled media. And, we are ignoring the madness and believing in the lies brought forth by our so-called 'leaders' through the media. They can even seep the 'suggestions' through education, through televisions, through strobe lights, and through any media of sorts. And, we do not have a strong psychological resistance to these suggestions.
There is very important quote from this book that speaks of mind control:
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too - all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides is made up of these suggestions. But these suggestions are our suggestions...suggestions from the State."
Brave New World is similar to George Orwell's "1984" in term of bureaucratized society where one lost self-identity and under a complete control of the state. Both "1984" and Brave New World do indeed had an impact on me as well anyone else in reading them.
Huxley's book is strongly recommended and receive more than five stars because it holds the real warning...
|
|
|
The Malthusian drill
|
`The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.' (from a letter to George Orwell, 1949)
As the European Union celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, it is sobering to reflect on Huxley's preface to `Brave New World' written twenty years after it's original publication in 1932: `Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.'
The main pleasure in reading this novel now is in ticking off the boxes for how much he got right so many decades a go - recreational drug use, instant contraception, twenty four hour TV, child sex education, genetic engineering. Huxley's characters are even obliged to participate in communal drug taking and ecstatic dancing to trance inducing music as part of their conditioning. There is also the compulsory Metrication that is a feature of both Huxley's dystopia and Orwell's `1984' - a sure symptom of totalitarianism.
`Brave New World Revisited', published in 1958 is less known but even more fascinating - this is non fiction and elucidates how `Big Government and Big Business already possess, or will very soon possess, all the techniques for mind manipulation described in Brave New World, along with others of which I was too unimaginative to dream.' - and he hadn't even come across Bluetooth and `Second Life.'
|
|
|
More & More Prescient
|
BNW while not perhaps truly great in a literary sense, is most certainly extraordinary in a prophetic one, and in its way a deeper book than 1984, displaying Huxley's subtler understanding of totalitarian's potential wiles, and also his wry and absurdist sense of humour...the Epsilon Semi-Morons and their newspapers of no more than one syllable comes to mind. Now what could that be lampooning in the modern world? Huxley once described it as perhaps fraudulent to pretend to be a novelist, but that he was more of an essayist who with much pleasure used the novel form to embody his ideas. Having said that though, I think he could write works that are fine works of art, with special mention to Eyeless in Gaza and also Those Barren Leaves.
Anyway to get back on track, BNW Revisited is a work that deserves as wide a readership as its more famous younger brother, and displays Huxley's remarkably incisive, elegant and clear thinking about issues of great importance, which can be broadly grouped together as the ever present threat to man's freedom from those in power. As Huxley wrote, "A democracy is a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused, and should be entrusted to officials in limited amounts only." This is especially important now as particularly in modern US and Britain, civil liberties are eroded by centralising governments promising us that these increased powers are for own good. Revisited contains amongst much else very elightening thoughts on propaganda in a supposedly free society. Anyway these two books can hardly be more highly recommended, and despite the heavy subject matter, somehow manage to lighten rather than deaden one's mood and worldview due to the self-evident uplifting sense of Huxley's own self. Those impressed with BNW should probably check out Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as Huxley said that he gained much of the inspiration from its magnificent book within a book, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
|
|
|
How societies will change after cloning? Simply prophetic!
|
|
Cloning, Birth Planning, Racism; Huxley is trying to warn people of the implications of massive application of cloning on human societies. How science will dominate society and why a new rasism will rise after human cloning? Are we going to be pre-determined from the lab? How everyday life will change in future if science is advancing so rapidly? Can we stay forever young and good looking? Is that good? Does science has ethical boundaries? Does more science means less freedom and less democracy? An excellent and prophetic book by Huxley which alarms us and tries to draw a detailed picture of the future when cloning will be considered as natural. A must read!!
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada