Twenty six years after its publication, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he takes stock of the post World War II period. While that book is indeed a creative warning, it is still fiction and a work of art more than anything else. However, this post isn’t about Brave New World. If you haven’t read it, I suggest making it your next book. As such, it was a much more hopeful and nuanced novel than I expected it to be. All of the drugs, brainwashing and conditioning couldn’t totally break the human spirit. To the point that the controllers had to designate certain islands for the iconoclasts which inevitably emerged from within the “Alpha” class. As much as the “Controllers” in Brave New World were indeed in control, the human spirit still managed to bubble to the surface. Indeed, it was a very human book, as ironic as that might sound. While there were obvious elements of that, it was a much more enjoyable read than I anticipated. I was prepared for a more fearful and overwhelmingly dark and twisted experience. I loved this book and was very pleasantly surprised. Not only is the book frequently mentioned to make political and social statements about contemporary times, the novel’s concept always caught my interest. It’s always felt a bit bizarre and, indeed slightly embarrassing, that of all the books I have read in my days, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World was not amongst them. – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958 Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature the quaint old forms -elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -will remain.
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