There was a time when it was a trend to write on dystopias which were meant to be social commentary on the present.
We, 1984, Anthem, and many others - all of them supposed to be caveats that “This could happen to us!”
There is no doubt that in less crafty hands, the genre could produce absurd, stupid, and retarded shit disguised as poor social commentary on contrived perceptions of supposedly prevalent problems.
And so was Brave New World defecated by this miserable excuse of an author.
No doubt about it, everybody hated it when it came out. The man became a notorious joker in the literary world and every review for it was completely negative. The most common complaint was the childish prose of the book. Indeed, the man who wrote it didn’t know how to write. Isaac Asimov also wrote like a 12 year old child. But at least Asimov was engaging and you could feel the thrill of a young man cycling around strange ideas in his mind. Huxley’s writing style was not only childish and simplistic, but it was also boring and written with little enthusiasm. Most writers, be it H. L. Mencken or Kurt Vonnegut, get the reader’s interest, because they write what they think and wrote whatever they wanted. This man was more stilted and unnatural, because he was trying to affect something he was not - a great and serious social critic. Look at the way he kept repeating similar phrases over and over - he simply did not know specific and strong ways of expressing himself.
But enough about the lag in the author’s IQ - could he write something of value? No, and that’s what I wonder about. Supposedly, the only message in the story was that materialism and sexual decadence enslaves people and they end up hyper-specialized and controlled as worker beings. You know, back in 1790, they were complaining about how access to romances, novels, and plays had absorbed too much of the youth’s time and made them leisure-oriented people. Back in 1910s, they declared cinema to be an evil. And now, Aldous Huxley condemns materialistic lifestyles in general - following the trend of arbitrarily declaring lower order satisfaction as an evil, and somehow making a political message of tyranny surrounding it. It says more about Huxley than it does about the society he hates so much - that his third party preferences are superior and is for the greater good of all people.
Patrick Buchanan recently wrote an article on how abortion led to fiscal deficits in PIIGS. Buchanan’s thinking and logic is still better than Huxley’s.
But people hated it when it came out. When did it become popular? Much much later into the twentieth century. What happened? As more people got “educated”, more people came up to earning that sense of moral superiority for having different preferences. Take it on a large scale in the western world, and suddenly, you have entire football stadiums worth of people complaining about choice of entertainment in today’s world. And what better than to condemn the very materialistic and industrial civilization that ended up “educating” people like them?
That’s when resurrection of such stories happened - and people could gladly earn that moral superiority and back it up by calling consumers of mass entertainment to be sheep who are inferior to them and more easily subdued.
The problem was never Aldous Huxley.
The problem was today’s culture of imposing third-party preferences on other people. And so, many people have built the habit of justifying such notions with their ideas of the greater good, that they become politicians, academics, media personalities, and many other such people, who could then go on and manufacture consent to regulate and restrict and choose our lifestyles.
Never again, Mises.Org, must we allow our children to grow up under self-righteousness and hatred or contempt of their fellow man. They must grow up understanding that they should see why people have certain interests, and not teach them how to arbitrate other people’s preferences.
(And also gently suggest them not to touch rubbish books like this one)