My Top 3 Takeaways from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I realize this is a curious recommendation based on what I normally suggest, but I’m including it in the series because I think it’s an important and timely read.

To understand why, consider the following from a speech the author gave in 1961:

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

And then look at the world around you. Here in the West, people . . .

-Watch an average of 38 hours of video content per week.
-Spend an average of 1.5 hours on social media per day.
-Play an average of 6.4 hours of video games per week.
-Spend on average over 90% of their income.
-Are abandoning marriage and religion.
-Collectively watch billions of hours of porn per year.
-Collectively eat over 84 million fast food meals per day.
-Collectively spend over $230 billion on alcoholic beverages per year.
-Collectively spend over $10 billion on marijuana per year.
-Collectively smoke over 250 billion cigarettes per year.

. . . while also spending just 17 minutes reading per day (and mostly fiction and novels), just under 2.5 hours productively working per day, and less than 30 minutes exercising per day.

BUT HEY the optimists say . . . at least infant mortality and carbon monoxide emissions are down, renewable energy consumption is up (a little), the internet is getting faster, and more people are recycling!

That’s neat. And completely unsatisfying, like a picture of oxygen to someone drowning.

Anyhow, my point is Huxley was remarkably prescient in his predictions (or maybe it wasn’t so remarkable given the circles his brother Julian ran in), and in Brave New World, he paints the whole picture for you.

And it’s unnervingly familiar.

So much so that by my lights, the recipe for the world unfolding before us is something like three parts Brave New World, two parts Atlas Shrugged, and one part 1984, with a dash of, oh, I don’t know, Alice in Wonderland?

In other words, technocratic totalitarianism and transparent topsy-turvydom disguised as enlightenment, enrichment, and empowerment.

Don’t believe me? Read the books and see for yourself. Why bother if we’re doomed anyway? Says who? Humanity has seen much darker days than these and rebounded. We can do it again.

First, however, we need enough people to see the world as it is and not as they wish it were, and that’s why I’m recommending Brave New World.

It represents the logical conclusion of this late stage of our current civilization: the complete and scientific subjugation of the human spirit.

Let’s get to the takeaways.

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