Brave New World; a review

"Brave New World" is a Willy Wonka-esque, psychedelic-tinged novel written by Aldous Huxley decades before his encounters with LSD and mescaline. It paints a picture of a world free from pain and unfulfilled desires—but at what cost?

In this future, a strict caste system is maintained by the state through cloning and in-vitro manipulation that impairs the lower castes, effectively eliminating natural birth. Citizens enjoy unrestricted access to bread and circuses, indulging in every conceivable pleasure. This society takes hedonism as gospel, prioritising the elimination of discomfort and the maximisation of pleasure. To this end, people are conditioned to be promiscuous and encouraged to consume a drug that delivers pure happiness. While some debate whether Huxley intended the novel as a utopian dream or a dystopian counterpart to 1984, the unease that pervades the story is undeniable.

The novel can be interpreted as a critique of utilitarianism, highlighting the dangers of a society where monolithic governmental control prioritises minimising unrest and maximising pleasure. One might argue that such a world has not arrived—after all, we do not live under forced sterilisation or state-sanctioned drug dependence. Yet, in my opinion, the most damning aspects of this society have already been normalised in our time.

We, like the citizens of Brave New World, live in a hyper-connected world where monoculture asphyxiates freedom of expression. In leisure, local television channels have been replaced by global platforms like Netflix, which has steadily increased its exclusive content, delivering a homogenised experience across geographies.^[1] Social media’s virality ensures that someone halfway across the world now has a more similar cultural upbringing to a peer online than to someone born twenty years prior. Even the diversity of languages is fading, with one disappearing every forty days,^[2] eroding a key pillar of cultural identity. Huxley foresaw this erosion of individuality in leisure. In the novel, citizens attend the "feelies"^[3] to watch the same basic, algorithmic blockbusters that neither shock nor challenge.^[4][5]

In the realm of work, a similar homogenisation is evident. Nowadays in our hyper-capitalist civilisation, even skilled modern jobs demand replaceability, reducing workers to mere cogs in a machine. This mirrors the Bokanovsky twins in the novel—identical clones performing identical roles within their caste, each as interchangeable as the next. Even innovation in science is described as rigidly procedural, following "cookbook" formulas where any deviation requires approval from a controlling authority. This is unsettlingly reminiscent of contemporary corporations that prioritise efficiency and profit by treating employees as interchangeable components of a process.^[6]

A slightly anachronistic novel, (understandable, being written almost a century ago), it might be tempting to dismiss Huxley's broader vision of the future as an inaccurate projection of technological advancement. Critically, however, he identifies and critiques the underlying societal and cultural trends that have shaped the modern world since the advent of industrialisation: the commodification of the human experience.