Brave New World
A society engineered for contentment, and the question of what it costs to have nothing left to want.
A world without war, poverty or disease, secured by engineering people to want exactly what they get. Huxley’s 1932 novel sets its conditioned castes and its ration of soma against two outsiders who cannot be content, and asks what has been given up for stability. The counter-argument to Orwell’s boot: a tyranny that arrives as pleasure.
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P. J. O’Rourke
He posits the idea that the political system actually does perfect things for people and it turns out to be nearly as scary as the horror shows actually created in the 20th century in the attempt to create the new man, whether as Aryan super-German or Marxist and whatever Mussolini and Franco were up to. So Huxley was showing us that this is a rum goal however ‘well’ it turns out.
Interview · November 2010
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