Brave New World
A future where everyone is happy, because they have been bred and conditioned to be. The classic novel about what we might give up for comfort.
What it’s about
In the World State of A.F. 632, people are grown in hatcheries, sorted into castes from Alpha to Epsilon, and conditioned from birth to love their place. Stability is kept not by terror but by pleasure: easy sex, endless consumption and a drug called soma that dissolves any bad mood.
Bernard Marx, a misfit Alpha, brings John, a young man raised on a Savage Reservation, back to London. John’s ideas come from Shakespeare, and his clash with the World State, argued out at last with World Controller Mustapha Mond, asks whether happiness is worth the loss of freedom, art, truth and pain.
Key ideas
- 1
Control through pleasure
The World State rules by keeping people content, not by frightening them. Comfort can be a more effective cage than fear.
- 2
Made to fit
The Bokanovsky process and caste breeding produce people shaped in advance for the jobs society needs.
- 3
Conditioning and sleep-teaching
Repeated slogans and early conditioning plant beliefs so deep that people take them for their own thoughts.
- 4
Soma as escape
A drug with no hangover means no one ever has to face a painful feeling, or ask what it might mean.
- 5
The right to be unhappy
John rejects the comfortable world and claims the right to suffer, because art, faith and real love need it.
Who it’s for
- Readers of classic dystopian fiction
- Anyone curious about technology, pleasure and control
- Readers who enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four
Other books by Aldous Huxley
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