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Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: Ch.I-VIII (Dystopian Double Bill) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-08 21:14:09
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Content

'Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. He imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word.'

Today we have time travelled to the World State of A.F. 632. We have our bottles of soma and our contraband copies of Brave New World and are taking a little vacation to the Savage Reservation.

We're discussing mass production, conditioning, dystopian literature as satire, perennial philosophy, social predestination, biological determinism, books and nature vs consumption, feeling like an outsider, political and social systems, soft totalitarian technocracies, and much more.

Please do feel free to enjoy the discussion even if you haven't read these parts of Brave New World yet. Huxley's work is a novel of ideas and, as such, you can enjoy our talk before, during, or after your reading in the way that best suits you.

Timestamps:

0:00 ‘oh brave new world!’

2:00 individual as island universe

4:00 The Doors of Perception

6:00 Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy

8:00 island metaphors in utopia

10:00 do we ever reach dystopia?

12:00 did Huxley predict correctly?

14:00 analysing Huxley’s foreword

16:00 ‘Brave New World Revisited’

18:00 welcome to the World State

19:00 ‘a squat grey building…’

20:00 Community, Identity, Stability

21:00 on reading a novel of ideas

23:00 the importance of Henry Ford

25:00 assembly lines & consumption

27:00 mass production in biology

28:00 on Bokanovsky & Podsnap

29:00 the influence of H. G. Wells 

32:00 satire & parody in dystopia

34:00 mankind’s fear of mortality

35:00 ‘to owe our health to disease’

36:00 when knowledge is ignorance

37:00 Social Predestination Room

39:00 do we really have free will?

40:00 the dystopian caste system

42:00 how conscious are we really?

43:00 ‘fertility is merely a nuisance’

44:00 the secret of happiness & virtue

46:00 neo-pavlovian conditioning 

48:00 books & nature vs consumption 

50:00 Huxley’s subtext & world-building 

52:00 the extinction of liberalism

53:00 what does democracy mean?

55:00 monarchy, oligarchy, autocracy

57:00 anarchy, theocracy & chaos

58:00 capitalism & free market art

1:00:00 what does socialism mean?

1:01:00 what does communism mean?

1:02:00 is meritocracy actually possible?

1:03:00 soft authoritarian technocracy

1:05:00 ‘the campaign against the Past’

1:07:00 conditioned class consciousness 

1:09:00 Huxley’s thoughts on Freud

1:10:00 the idea of ‘history is bunk’

1:12:00 ‘appalling dangers of family life’

1:15:00 a world where monogamy is scorned

1:17:00 Bernard Marx vs Lenina Crowne

1:19:00 ‘I am I, and I wish I wasn’t…’

1:21:00 why do people want to take soma?

1:24:00 the downsides of taking soma

1:27:00 Helmholtz Watson’s propaganda

1:29:00 on style vs substance/meaning

1:30:00 ‘words can be like x-rays…’

1:32:00 Bernard at the Solidarity Service

1:35:00 Huxley’s thoughts on mysticism 

1:37:00 self being at one with existence

1:39:00 individual alone in the collective

1:41:00 needing sacrifice to know love

1:42:00 time is for walking & talking

1:43:00 nature makes you feel yourself

1:45:00 ‘everybody’s happy nowadays’

1:46:00 ‘I want to know what passion is’

1:47:00 ‘the individual is the only reality’

1:49:00 passion is a threat to social stability

1:50:00 travelling to the Savage Reservation

1:52:00 longing for trials, affliction & suffering

1:54:00 John the Savage caught between worlds

1:56:00 we need rituals for meaning & maturity

1:57:00 crucifixion as a cure for unhappiness

1:58:00 physical scars speak to inner character

1:59:00 you need to die in order to be reborn

2:00:00 heading back to the brave new world

Resources to Explore:

  • Aldous Huxley: If you're enjoying Huxley's extended dystopian thought experiment in Brave New World, you might find it interesting to check out his Brave New World Revisited. He wrote this work of non-fiction almost thirty years after his novel to explore how the world was moving closer to his vision faster than he thought. His last work, Island, would be a utopian counterpart to Brave New World. If you found our discussion of his non-fiction works interesting, then you might like to check out The Doors of Perception or The Perennial Philosophy.

  • Music: 'After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.' So wrote Aldous Huxley in his collection of essays, Music at Night. One can tell the idea of a world in which passionate music is whisked away, along with art, literature, and history, caused Huxley deep pain. Treat yourself to a listen of one of Huxley's favourite classical pieces: Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (particularly the Benedictus of the Sanctus movement). Huxley would say that Beethoven gives expression to the mysterious blessedness lying at the heart of life.

  • Documentaries: In Brave New World, citizens of the World State make the sign of the T on their stomachs in honour of the mass manufacturing of Ford Motors' Model T. In the World State, this iconic car manufacturer has become Our Ford. If you're interested in going deeper into the history of Henry Ford, and get a feel for the time in which Huxley was writing, you might enjoy this documentary. If you find yourself more interested in the psychological allusions in the work, then you could check out our discussion on Sigmund Freud or enjoy this video on Ivan Pavlov.

  • Radio Drama: We spoke about the influence of H. G. Wells and how Brave New World began life as a parody of Men Like Gods. Wells is a fantastic and prolific writer of speculative fiction and is rightly considered one of the fathers of science fiction. He managed to write four of the most influential works in the genre in a three-year span of enormous creativity: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau (my favourite), and The War of the Worlds. There are many great editions (like this one and this one) that include these stories in one volume. But if you're ever in the mood to listen to some radio history, then Orson Welles' dramatisation of The War of the Worlds in 1938, which terrified listeners into believing a Martian invasion was upon them, is marvellous fun.

  • The Power of Myth: We spoke about the need for trials, hardships, and rituals of initiation when we met John the Savage. If you find this interesting, then the writings of Joseph Campbell, like in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, are always fantastic to dip into. In a PBS series from 1988 with Bill Moyers, Campbell spoke passionately and compellingly on Jungian psychology, archetypes, mythic rituals, and the hero's journey. He talks about the importance of initiation rituals here and the idea of following your bliss here.

  • Film Appreciation: Treat yourself to a screening of a great science fiction film this week and enjoy the cross-pollination of cinema and literature. For a classic film choice, check out the masterpiece of early cinema that is Fritz Lang's Metropolis from 1927. Quote: 'It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme?' 'In their proper place!' For a comedic classic, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times from 1936 captures the anxiety of living in the industrial world of assembly lines. For a highly complementary cyberpunk movie and modern classic, The Matrix from 1999 would be a fun one to return to. For a more recent masterpiece, check out the eerily prophetic 2013 Spike Jonze directed Her.

  • Book Club Reads: All the great works we read build upon each other. Reflecting upon previous reads, and connecting them to your current book, is a powerful way to build rereading into your program. Whilst reading Brave New World, one can't help but think of the topics we tackled when reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and John Milton's Paradise Lost (to name just a few). If you've not come to those great books yet, you might find it interesting to dip into some of those lectures and see if they're works you'd like to tackle in the future. What themes from other works have you been pulling into your reading of Huxley? Do you find any of our previous reads this year (Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare) have left some cognitive or emotional residue that informs this work too?

Reading Assignment:

Our next discussion will cover the second half of the novel, taking us from chapter nine up to and including chapter eighteen, which is around another hundred pages in most editions. And we will be discussing this part this coming weekend.

Now we're going to find out what John the Savage makes of the Brave New World. So continue bringing yourself to Huxley's dystopia, making notes on any themes or ideas that capture your attention and imagination.

Questions for You:

1) What is the most dreadful aspect of the brave new world for you?

2) Did Huxley get it right with his dystopian vision of the future?

3) What do we lose when we remove trials, hardship, and suffering?

4) Is happiness worth the sacrifice of freedom?

5) What is the significance of Shakespeare in this novel? And why does the World State remove literature, art, religion, and history?

If this is your first experience with Brave New World, I would love to know how the work is meeting your expectations. If this is a reread for you, what is it like engaging with this dystopian vision again? And please do share with us your favourite passages, characters, and ideas from the novel so far.

Happy reading, everybody!

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Comments

Ylva

Has anyone else read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin recently? It feels rather relevant to me if I compare our two dystopian novels.

Walker Rowe

I'm late to the party. I went for a detour to read Balzac's Pere Goirot. I thought it would be a quick read. Hardly. So, I've finished that and have resumed BNW from where I left off: page 30. I find I can't do what Ben does so well which is to read multiple books at the same time. But I am reading Le Petit Prince a chapter at a time in French as well, as I know French quite well and want to improve it to level C1.

Greg
>>177205381

Yes! I love that short story. It’s definitely relevant. I immediately relate it back to the Brothers Karamazov because I read somewhere LeGuin took her inspiration from a set piece in BK. I’m trying to be careful about spoilers. Do you know what I’m referring to in BK? It’s been a year since I read the LeGuin story. I found it very poignant. It forcefully asks the reader to examine their life, our collective world building, to ask whether we are inflicting suffering in unseen ways, on people out of sight to us. LeGuin I think wants to emphasize the individual examination and moral choice to be made. I get less of the individual moral choice from Huxley. If it’s there, it’s more subtle, maybe lost on me. I take BNW to be a vivid warning of unchecked impulses to avoid discomfort and indulge our appetites for pleasure, enabled by technology. Huxley also has strong things to say about the role of art, beauty, literature, knowledge, etc. in human living. That’s a quick take.

Valentina

1 hour 35 minutes to approx 1 hour 39 minutes of the lecture is my favourite part. I have been reading Thomas Aquinas -P126 of his selective writings. It says ‘Is it licit to treat the divine by way of investigation? ….Ecclesiasticus 3.22 ‘Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy ability.’ Then what is the point of living?

Peter F

Notice the sober ones (Bernard...for the most part, and Savage) recognize the lies of the Brave New World. So it is with us when we step out of the Soma of social media and media manipulation.

Patrick Ellsworth

I have to finish my reread of BNW tonight. I like it more the second time around. My first read, I focused on the world building and how Huxley's vision related to us. This time around, I'm looking at the characters and the conflict. While the characters are almost without exception flat, I find Bernard to be quite human. He's disgusted with the World State until he returns with John the Savage and starts receiving the attention he always thought he deserved. At this point he fits in and he has no complaints. When John starts refusing to comply, however, Bernard regresses to his former miserable self. How human. He has his grievances and there is internal conflict and a bit of conflict with the State, but perhaps the most human thing about Bernard is that he's an absolute coward.

Lisa

Dani Perez

In future could there be transcripts of these lectures if there isn't any already?

Gonzalo Broto

I was very surprised when you mentioned Marcus Aurelius in the lecture, Ben, because I read his “Meditations” right before starting “Brave New World” (what a serendipity), and I kept seeing his ideas everywhere; it felt as if Aldous Huxley was trying to build his utopia taking all the stoic ideals and stretching them to their absurd extreme! A few examples: when the Director said in chapter I: “that is the secret of happiness and virtue−liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny”, I kept hearing Marcus Aurelius’ idea about how we all need to conform to our fate, no matter how hard it might be, and to live with it in contentment. Later on, in chapter III, when the Controller said “to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all”, that reminded me of the constant admonitions to check our desires and emotions and to be always moderate and calm. How about the famous quote “everyone belongs to everyone else”? It’s easy to see the importance of the community above the individual here, so important to Marcus Aurelius as well; or when, in chapter VI, it is written: “It’s the sort of accident that might have happened to anyone”, which brought to my mind the idea that everything follows the rules of nature and there is no point in complaining against them, our duty is to accept the norms, the accidents and death itself with obedience and as a matter of fact. Similarly, when Huxley writes that “the social body persists although the component cells may change”, I remembered the emphasis that Marcus Aurelius places on transformation as the essence of nature, where nothing is created out of a vacuum or disappears into nothingness: everything is a rearrangement of the substance of the universe, and that is precisely why, in chapter II, when it is explained that in this New World “characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime” and their physical appearance does not age, we can immediately feel how unnatural that is, how unreal and non human. Perhaps the recency bias is playing tricks on me and I’m reading too much into mere coincidences, but I had fun spotting these similarities nonetheless. Now, on to the clash between savageness and civilization!

Greg
>>179209857

Hi Gonzalo. Thanks for bringing these ideas to the conversation. I haven’t read Marcus Aurelius so I found your post both interesting and well-written. The last point, in particular, about transformation — everything is a rearrangement of the substance of the universe — this makes me think of our Ovid reading of Metamorphoses, and also Lucretius On the Nature of Things (of which I have only a passing acquaintance). I hadn’t really stopped to think about it, but it seems this idea of transformation and the rearrangement of substances/atoms is a deeply held cosmological view of the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures, that finds expression in both their art and their science.

Tamera Cameron

The main thing I got from this first part is that I started to notice the slogans that we all know, repeat, and take for granted. One example is "vaccines are safe and effective". And if you question them, people have a similar reaction to Lenina and all the others. It causes anger, discomfort, moralizing, and sometimes ostracizing. It makes you realize that we are also conditioned to believe many things from birth.