Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Brave New World Revisited

This book is a small political essay that is just as relevant today as it was at the time of its writing (1958), some twenty-five years after the publication of Huxley’s masterpiece. What the author is trying to do here is to assess the validity of his novel’s predictions, about the socio-political situation of the 1950s and forward. Interestingly, Huxley also compares his predictions with that of Orwell’s 1984.

Huxley mainly focuses on two significant problems of our present time: overpopulation and over-organization or “Will to Order”, i.e. the control — and even despotism — of “Big Business” and “Big Government” over the whole of society, and the subsequent waning of individual freedom, creativity and happiness. But how these big controlling powers are expressed in Brave New World is almost the opposite of that of 1984: “In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain, in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.” (p. 34).

Essentially, Brave New World depicts a society where power is exerted in the most despotic way, by feeding the people an evolved version of the Romans’ panis et circenses (feelies and orgy-porgy). This is an entirely accurate description of our occidental civilisation, ruled under the vast mass communication networks (TV and the Internet), manipulated in many ways as instruments of conditioning and as social intoxicants. Huxley provides a few — sometimes humorous — insights into our present political situation, by analysing the use of propaganda technology under the Nazi regime, in part inspired by the indoctrination machinery of the Holy Office in earlier times, and in part inherited by the advertisement industry in later times.

Today’s populist politicians use the same tactics and have the same disdain for honesty and objectivity. In this regard, Huxley’s essay is invaluable to help understand a widespread, mostly non-violent, yet totalitarian, style of government. “A dictatorship, says Huxley, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice, to the powerful ‘hidden forces’, as Hitler called them, present in the unconscious depth of every human mind.” (p. 63).

Brave New World Revisited can probably be read alongside Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man!, Ortega y Gasset’s La Rebelión de las masas, and even Gilles Deleuze’s essays on the “société de contrôle”. An essential read, not only to put Brave New World in perspective but to understand the world we live in now.