Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is perhaps the most relevant and important classic for the modern day – only it failed to predict smartphones. This has a canonical explanation in that science is heavily controlled practically to the point of stagnation in favor of stability in the World State. This explanation makes the book immune for most evaluation of its predictions but lift attendants in the year 2540 date the otherwise still current book back to the 1930s. However, the carefully crafted principles of its World State parallel those of our emergent attention economy scarily closely. Only we do not even aim for happiness but settle for mere engagement instead. This is achieved by powerful AI-powered algorithms that treat us as mere statistics and serve us often enraging, hyper processed content, and sinisterly clever user experience design, that heavily utilizes cutting edge psychological research to exploit primal tendencies such as the need for social validation, loss aversion and dopamine-driven feedback mechanisms, that can be hijacked by intermittent rewards. This all addicts and distracts us just as if not more efficiently as soma and we do not even get the holidays associated with it.

In that sense, it could be said that we have been tricked into the worst of both worlds, such that even the World State would be an improvement, but there is still hope as, unlike in Brave New World, our world is far from stable. Granted, that means war even in Europe and great uncertainty of the shape and even the very existence of our future as a result of the wars, climate change, the advent of generative AI and various other issues but the potential lies precisely in the future’s undecidedness. Still, the level of control over the immediate future exercised by the World State, thanks to its hedonistic self-enforcing social order, sounds tempting until you remember its cost: loss of individuality, diversity, potential, unique perspectives, salient experiences, truth and beauty, ultimately leading to purposelessness.

Brave New World packs a lot of dense thematic material in only a couple hundred pages about the nature and role of happiness, purpose of life and function of social institutions in light of these by subverting almost everything the typical reader might be accustomed to by asking why parenthood, monogamy or God would not be just as absurd as pigs flying. Why should children not engage in erotic play if viviparous reproduction (birthing live offspring from inside the mother’s body) no longer occurs and non-alpha people practically cannot be dangerous? Why delay gratification? Is there any difference between ‘natural’ and conditioned or chemically induced happiness? What is the point of happiness? Are there differences between satisfaction, happiness and fulfillment and if so, what are they? What is the optimal state a human being should exist in? Does there exist such a state or are the fluctuations the point? What is the purpose of life? Why exist? Who is society for? What is a life worth living? Why differentiate between relationships? What is the point of relationships? Why feel? Why seek knowledge? Why live?

These are only some of the questions I quickly remember having pondered while reading and rare is the book that positions these questions as explicitly to the very center of the plot and setting. Furthermore, their exploration is far from one-sided. Additional themes include religious fundamentalism, malleability and persistence of human thought patterns, absurdity and falsity of dichotomies as well as passion and forgiveness. Where the average reader is likely meant to identify with the Savage the most, he too loses us in the end where he was so close to genuine happiness but could not allow himself to have it. Profound observations are made on every level from individual to societal. To illustrate both the clever language as well as some of the most resonant observations to me, here is a small sample of my favorite quotes:

“Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.”

“You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

“You can carry at least half of your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that’s what soma is.”

The book is masterfully written on every level from the individual word choice – many of which from ‘decanting’ and ‘surrogate’ to ‘pneumatic’ perfectly create a sense of uneasiness when used in typically organic contexts – to world building and plot structure. Whereas often the depth of a character is proportional to their importance to the plot, here it is a function of their social conditioning in the world of the book, such that one can easily tell the class to which they belong to by their thoughts and their expression. The dialogue in the climax of the novel between the Savage and the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, Mustapha Mond might be the greatest piece of literature I have read thus far. Whereas most people of the World State are so conditioned as to not know anything but hypnopaedic slogans, the Savage and Mustapha Mond share the same axioms but draw the opposite conclusions. Furthermore, Mond’s intellectual, philosophical and scientific superiority seems absolute in comparison to the Savage’s anecdotal attacks on the world order maintained by Mond, who is able to logically shoot down his every argument until they are reduced to asking for the right to misery. The only way to defeat him is to pick a different, just as arbitrary goal, thus forcing us to draw the conclusion that happiness cannot be the ultimate end for human existence, leaving us with the question of what is then?

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World might just have become my new favorite book. Given its incredible thematic density and crucial relevance to the modern day, I have to give the forbidden universal recommendation. Every member of society should be warned that, if left to its devices, the tendency of all advanced civilizations seems to be to structurally converge to a hierarchical perpetual machine such as the World State in Brave New World, whether via government overreach or corporate gigantism, and that the magical portal of access to all knowledge in the world in most people’s pockets is always only a single tap away from turning into the most potent soma pill, usually without the nice feeling.