I’ve always been rather suspicious of Aldous Huxley, even though his semi-phrophetic Brave New World was a wake-up call of a kind to a world that even then, in 1931, was well on its way to disaster. His subsequent Brave New World Revisited, a non-fiction work extending and commenting on the ideas he introduced in the earlier book, was one of the eight books I had to study in the mid-1960s for my A level English course.
Born in 1894 into a famous scientific and literary family, Huxley became a member of the Bloomsbury Set, through which he met Bertrand Russell. He was a friend of D.H. Lawrence (one of whose books, Sons and Lovers, I had to endure reading through several times for the same cherished A level qualification), and actually taught Eric Blair (who wrote 1984 under the pseudonym of George Orwell) at Eton in the 1920s.
But back to Brave New World. In this short book (201 pages), Huxley postulates a nightmare world set not so very far into the future. In fact he set it at 600 years ahead when he wrote it in 1931, revising it to only around 100 years just 15 years later.
Huxley’s main thesis in this novel is that if we don’t control science then we will end up being controlled by it. In Brave New World there is a World Government with regional directors, which controls everything, from how many people are born and their genetic makeup and characteristics, to the activities carried out by everyone, whether industrial/productive or recreational.
The sole purpose, supposedly, of this set-up is to ensure that everyone is “happy”. And that is achieved by relieving everyone of any kind of hardship. All decisions, all challenges, all distractions, are eliminated, and if any of the mechanisms by which that is achieved fails, then there is always soma, the drug fed to everyone at regular intervals to keep them calm and relaxed. A kind of marijuana in tablet form, that induces a mindless contentment, and keeps the population docile.
Everything to do with the natural instincts towards proper social cohesion – marriage, family, childbirth in particular, is abhorred, and regarded as obscene. Sex is seen as a harmless pleasure to which everyone is entitled, even children, and has nothing to do with settling down and raising a family. Huxley certainly foresaw the permissive society of the sixties, with its sexual promiscuity, and its logical result.
Reproduction is purely a mechanical process of collecting ova and sperm from selected individuals and fertilising it all in a laboratory. Natural birth is outlawed and birth control compulsory. The individual, whose happiness is supposed to be the sole purpose of human existence is in fact of no significance whatsoever when it comes to the requirements of the World State.
We’re introduced straight away to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the Director himself is showing some new students around. The embryos are shunted along, day by day, and treated with all the chemicals required, at the appropriate times, to make them into ideal world citizens specially adapted for the tasks that await them.
The luckiest are the Alphas, who can expect to be among the elite of the ruling class, living a life of luxury, being waited on, and helping run the planet. The unluckiest are the Epsilons – the slave class of morons, who do all the monotonous, unpleasant, dirty jobs. They are produced usually by the hundred in the form of identical clones.
Uncannily accurate in a way. Today we have the Superclass of David Rothkopf, and a growing underclass of raceless, moronic hip-hop drug addicts who haven’t a clue how to behave in a civilised manner. The difference is, of course, that at least the Epsilons of Huxley’s Brave New World contributed their labour to society, whereas our own moron class contributes nothing, but is actually supported by productive, intelligent White people.
That brings up another point. Race is nowhere mentioned in the novel other than in passing references to negroes and nationalities here and there. In 1931 race wasn’t the issue it has been for many years now, but it does seem strange that it was so completely missed by Huxley. Perhaps that was intentional. But I digress.
Grown on a bed of peritoneum and injected at intervals with placentin, thyroxin, and any one of several other chemicals, the embryos of Brave New World are eventually “decanted” as babies, and mercilessly conditioned and brainwashed with sleep-messages, according to their predestined role in life. Those that will be tropical workers are conditioned to hate the cold and love heat, and innoculated against tropical diseases. Embryos of future moronic sewage workers, for example, are deprived of oxygen at times to ensure their intelligence is not too high for the destiny in store for them. Anything to prevent their unhappiness.
One problem that this horrific society has failed to solve so far is the wasted years of childhood. Whilst they can make children become sexually mature at four, and grown to full adult size by six and a half, they haven’t managed to make these poor children mentally mature as adults at an equally early age. What a pity!
The plot itself is really of marginal importance in a book like this, written as a warning to civilization, to all of us individually, of what we may be sleepwalking into if we don’t do anything to oppose it. It’s always extremely difficult for anyone, even someone like Huxley, who was well-informed of all the latest scientific developments of his day, to forecast the world of the future – how it will function on an everyday level, how people will travel and communicate, but that doesn’t really matter.
What matters is whether the warning is justified, and whether, if it is justified, any notice will be taken of it by anyone who is in a position to do anything to prevent it. And, of course, whether he is warning us of the real danger, or just one of its by-products.
Even now, our children are brainwashed into believing in organisations like the United Nations and the so-called European Union, both of them embryo World Governments. To make it worse, we do nothing while the more intelligent of us (Whites) fail to replenish our numbers generation by generation. Meanwhile, the least intelligent (non-Whites) nearly all have four, five, six children or more, all supported, financially and socially, by . . . the diminishing number of intelligent people.
This is the actual problem we have to deal with, rather than Huxley’s Brave New World nightmare, but it is no less horrific, and the price, for our grand-children, of our shrinking, cowardly, away from it doesn’t bear thinking about.
John Northwind