Current mood:

cynical

Craven Modern World

“The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t have” – Mustapha Mond from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

“The world’s unstable, as usual. People aren’t getting any happier, they get what they can, and they always want what they can’t have” – me, from this entry

Are we more than our conditioning? Are we more than a series of predictable reactions to stimuli that accumulate over time? The effectiveness of hypnopaedia turned out to be inaccurate, but when you think of the way commercials drum repetitive slogans and jingles into our heads, you start to realize that we don’t need to be asleep to be hypnotized…it happens all the time. I had an illuminating experience where I felt I had escaped from the “grasp” of the commercials and was finally viewing them with a full awareness of the effect they were attempting to have on me. But I think before then…and especially as a child…you never question what’s basically spoonfed to you, especially if it tastes good. Kids watch cartoons and don’t want to miss a minute, so of course they are going to sit through the commercials, which makes them want sugar coated food that shortens their attention spans and hence makes commercials even more salient to their conditioned minds.

Huxley showed us a world where we are forced from birth to believe certain things, to act a certain way, to live a fixed lifestyle. In our world it seems we have more of a choice but we choose ignorance, we don’t need the government putting alcohol in our fetal test tubes or teaching us in our sleep—we can drink ourselves to death and absorb as much advertising as we like and we do so willingly. Perhaps I’m being overly cynical but I’m thinking that is a natural response to reading this book—a reexamination of our nature. Of my nature.

I honestly began to question my stance on eugenics and social Darwinism. I started to think of India’s caste system and how it was justified by religious leaders for so long. I thought back to a comment made by a friend about population control a few months ago and as much as it bothered me, I still saw some truth in it, which in turn bothered me about myself, which of course made me uncomfortable and continued to bother me until reading this book, which made me more uncertain. It’s Flagpole Sitter by Harvey Danger…”been around the world and seen that only stupid people are breeding, the cretins cloning and feeding”. It’s true, and if you agree with it, you're considered a selfish asshole.

To a certain extent some of the realities Huxley predicted have come true, although in the modern world they have taken on different forms. Perhaps the scariest to me is the intoxicating soma, which makes me think of the Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper” and the Ramone’s “I Wanna Be Sedated”. The quick fix pill is always going to be there for us to sweep our problems under the carpet and our demons into the closet, but its avoidant behavior like this that stifles personal development. Ironically, the same solution applied to individuals through soma holidays is applied to the greater society through the shipment of its deviants to far away places.

It seems to me that Huxley’s “utopia” is in a state of stasis. They have traded change and development for stability, and although they appear to be advanced, they are really running on a conveyor belt that keeps them running mechanically in the same place. If you think of life as a hierarchy of needs like Maslow’s pyramid they are stuck at a low level—they have the security that comes with social belonging, but their inner potential is predestined and self-examination (which would come naturally with the seclusion they dread) is practically non-existent, so they never rise. They are called “Alphas” but the only thing that separates them from the other castes is their training and ability. They are capable of more “advanced” interactions socially but fail to escape their own mediocrity.

But I got to thinking of them as not just “us” in the future, but rather another culture we are looking in on much in the way they are looking in on the folks at the reservation. Its easy to quickly judge the whole novel as an image of “this is what could happen to us if we stay the present course” but from the culturally relative perspective its more complicated because they have just as much justification for their “ways” as anyone else. The system seems to make everyone reasonably happy, but I still have a sense that this happiness is rooted in ignorance and doesn’t go anywhere. Its never really threatened…so how can it be appreciated? Its Joni Mitchell…”you don’t know what you got till its gone” and they never really lose anything. One reporter says to the Savage that “pain is a delusion” but doesn’t true stability require pain to balance out pleasure? Doesn't the pain make the pleasure that much better?

Huxley is definitely poking fun by calling John “the Savage” and then making him out to be more cultured than the Alphas he encounters. I think what they fear from him is his unpredictability (something more closely associated with animal instinct i.e. the white tiger biting Siegfried…or was it Roy?)…the fact that he could do anything at any time, the fact that he doesn’t have to play by their rules. But these things, although primal, do make us more human. Our very unpredictability is what drives us towards new and exciting experiences and discoveries.