Following a long stretch of time when I was unable to commit to reading (I know, shocking) I decided my return to literature deserved a classic, and being I was gaining traction with futuristic verging on science fiction books, I picked up Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I remember my first hazing experience in college, where one of the leaders of the group posed as a teacher on a supposed first class, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax, and told us this book was mandatory reading that semester. More than 10 years would pass before I actually read the book. It's one of those cases where one has to actually wanted to and be prepared to the experience.
I'm not I was. Knowing nothing about the book and imagining it to be a classic, I was not prepared for the world I was about to enter. This takes place, from my poor math skills and given that the calendar for this story has the zero starting point as the release of the Model-T car by Ford, in 2540. It is the future, and what an intriguing one. This future is so devoid of all things that I would define right now as making us human, it makes for an effortful exercise in understanding. Life as we know it is much different. Babies are produced like any other commodity, and from the artificial placenta conditioned in laboratory-like settings to perform certain tasks and achieve a predetermined status in society, and as opposed to George Orwell's 1984 or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, it is all done so under the guise of a pretty pleasurable and happy life. It seems so.
The book starts with a tour through a facility where humans are produced, with the lead explaining how some future citizens of the World State are put off by what they're not meant to like or be skillful at if they are to occupy a predetermined place in society, in a way similar to Skinner's operant conditioning. From there, we turn to the main characters, people from the upper class, living a life of guilty pleasures without the guilty part, and sedated by a state-issued drug called soma. One of those pleasures is, of course, sex, which is incentivized and even pushed onto people as a frequent activity to perform promiscuously from an early age through sex classes, from which I could only gather that kids are motivated to touch each other freely.
As one would expect, the conflict that gives way to the climax, pun intended, of the book is through someone who questions how society works, a man called Savage, because he was raised in the outskirts of said society, and said conflict unfolds into a pretty non-cathartic conclusion, which was really the only problem I had with the book. I was very much invested in the functionality of the World State, of how Ford was god and was praised as such with numerous "Thank Fords," of how happiness might be achieved, as is put forth by one of the elite, if one is given a purpose and a means to achieve it. I have to say I wanted to know more about such society, more about the main character's lives, and could easily have read 500 more pages about the context.
I really loved the book except for the ending, but it did ironically make me think, would it be so bad to live in a society like this? I could play out a scenario where it could be possible we turn out like this, grim as it may sound, much like I imagined it could be possible to see the events of The Handmaid's Tale play out or even a society like the one described in 1984 become true. Such is the magic of Brave New World.
