Talk:Brave New World Revisited
You've heard almost everywhere of _Brave New World_, the famous novel , yet have you heard of the much more rare book, "Brave New World--REVISITED" (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), which provokes thought on topics that are much deeper than mere critique of the Russians? Here are excerpts from this exceptional book, at last! (slightly edited for easier reading and such) Chapter III. Over Organization
"The Power Elite...influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. (p.19)
"We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr.Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to meantal health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increeasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure." (p.20) Me, the editor, wonders what this frantic drive is about, and i come up with the idea that the people who buy into the Given imagination even to the detriment of their sanities, would frantically drive for whichever so-called "Norm" was Given to/coerced for them to be. What do you think?
Huxley, quoting Fromm: "Our 'increasing mental sickness' may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But 'let us beware', says Dr.Fromm, 'of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.' The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
'Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.' They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish 'the illusion of individuality,' but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But 'uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too...Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for metnal health is destroyed.'"
"In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique.
Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.
"Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrarting on what they have in common and finally abstracting some kind of 'law,'...(gives examples) (p.21)
"Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, th equivalent of a beauktifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines.
"The 'Will to Order' has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience...[and] it sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm...by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. (p.22)
"The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
"Organization is indispensible; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensible, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.
"As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other. (p.23)
"During the past century (1850s to 1950s--ed) the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, indviduals have had to deindiviualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.
(...) "Subject to this kind of [alienated] life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning. (...) "Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible. That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refused to cooperate with the blind forces that are propelling us. For the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread.
"As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system--the sytem in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are "adjustment," "adaptation," "socially orientated behavior," "belongingness," "acquisition of social skills," "team work," "group living," "group loyalty," "group dynamics," "group thinking," "group creativity." Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man.
"According to [this] Social Ethic, Jesus [of Nazareth] was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their purposes.
"This ideal man is the man who displays 'dynamic conformity' (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, and unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. (p.25) (...) "[An organization] is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence persons is to subordinate ends to means. What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin.
"Under their hideous rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixuture of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of minds.
"In the more efficeint dictatorships of tommorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin. The future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers. 'The challenge of social engineering in our time,' writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, 'is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers'--and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.
"To the question quis custodiet custodes?--Who will mount guard over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers?--the answer is a bland denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D's in sociology that Ph.D.'s in sociology will never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad's, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure--and their heart is pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.
"Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character.
"Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings?
"For example, Professor Elton Mayo ([of the Mayo Clinic?--ed]) tells us categorically that 'man's desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest human characteristic.' This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described in Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited constitution.
"Any social organziation based upon the assumption that 'man' (whoever 'man' may be) desires to be continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the [torture] rack could they be adjusted to it.
"Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! 'Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity.' Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors.
(...) "The impersonal forces of...over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original...but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.
Chapter IV. Propaganda in a Democratic Society (forthcoming)
chapter XI. Education for Freedom
p.103 In the world we live in, as has been pointed out in earlier chapters, vast impersonal forces are making for the centralization of power and a regimented society. The genetic standardization of individuals is still impossible; but Big Government and Big Business already possess, or will very soon possess, all the techniques for mind-manipulation described in Brave New World, along with others of which I was too unimaginative to dream.
Lacking the ability to impose genetic uniformity upon embryos, the rulers of tomorrow's over-populated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children. To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating technqies at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and threats of physical violence.
If this kind of tyranny is to be avoided, we must begin without delay to educate ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government.
Such an education for freedom should be, as I have said, an education first of all in facts and in values--the fact of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity which are the ethical corollaries of these facts. But unfortunately correct knowledge and sound principles are not enough.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood. A skillful appeal to passion is often too strong for the best of good resolutions. The effects of false and pernicious propaganda cannot be neutralized except by a thorough training in the art of analyzing its techniques and seeing through its sophistries. (...)
p.105-107 Such an education in the art of distinguising between the proper and the improper use of symbols could be inaugurated immediately. Indeed it might have been inaugurated at any time during the last thirty or forty years. And yet children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
In this context the brief, sad history of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis is highly significant. The Institute was founded in 1937, when Nazi propaganda was at its nosiest and most effective, by Mr.Filene, the New England philanthropist. Under its auspices analyses of non-rational propaganda were made and several texts for the instruction of high school and university students were prepared.
Then came the war--a total war on all fronts, the mental no less than the physical. With all the Allied governments engaging in "psychological warfare," an insistence upon the desirability of analyzing propaganda seemed a bit tactless. The Institute was closed in 1941. [(You CAN find their name and insightful information on the Net, though--ed)] But even before the outbreak of hostilities, there were many persons to whom its activities seemed profoundly objectionable.
Certain educators, for example, disapproved of the teaching of propaganda analysis on the grounds that it would make adolescents unduly cynical. Nor was it welcomed by the military authorities, who were afraid that recruits might start to analyze the utterances of drill sergeants. And then there were the clergymen and the advertisers. The clergymen were against propaganda analysis as tending to undermine belief and diminish churchgoing; the advertisers objected on the grounds that it might undermine brand loyalty and reduce sales.
These fears and dislikes were not unfounded. Too searching a scrutiny by too many of the common folk of what is said by their pastors and masters might prove to be profoundly subversive. In its present form, the social order depends for its continued existence on the acceptance, without too many embarrassing questions, of the propaganda put forth by those in authority and the propaganda hallowed by the local traditions.
The problem, once more, is to find the happy mean. Individuals must be suggestable enough to be willing and able to make their society work, but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of professional mind-manipulators. Similarly, they should be taught enough about propaganda analysis to preserve them from an uncritical belief in sheer nonsense, but not so much as to make them reject outright the not always rational outpourings of the well-meaning guardians of tradition. (...)
XII. What can Be Done? (...) p.110 Given unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy.
Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms--elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest--will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. [(re: "manufacture of consent"--ed)] All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial--but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
How can we control the vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? On the verbal level and in general terms, the question may be answered with the utmost ease. Consider the problem of over-population...
p.113 To find a solution to the problem of over-organization is hardly less difficult...On the verbal level and in general terms the answer is perfectly simple. Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government.
Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great priviledge. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntary co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.
Over-population and over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human life of mulitple personal relationships has become almost impossible. Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the metroplis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and cooperate as complete persons, not as mere embodiments of specialized functions.
[(Goes on to discuss the values of the following persons and projects: Hilaire Belloc, Mr.Mortimer Adler, Dubreuil, the Syndicalists with their blueprints for a stateless society organized as a federation of productive groups under the auspices of the trade unions; Arthur Morgan and Baker Brownesll; Professor Skinner of Harvard and his Utopian novel Walden Two; in France, Marcel Barbu and his followers set up a number of self-governing, non-hierarchical communities of production, which were also communities for mutual aid and full human living; in London, the Peckham Experiment.)] (...)
Enjoy!
I removed the above from the article, because it appeared to express a point of view (see NPOV), and it went overboard on quotes, in my opinion. It's also unclear what is being quoted, and what is commentary on the quotes. Needs work. Martin 20:36, 17 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited What is utopia? Soon enough, we find that there is not a dictionary large or well-written enough to describe what exactly this political, social, and psychological concept is. Therefore, there remain, in essence, thousands of different questions in regards to utopian civilization. The only concise description that dictionaries can give is “a perfect society”, but there is no true understanding in such concise verbiages of what this marvelous-sounding word denotes. What does “perfect” really mean in a societal sense? Where will this perfection really be achieved? When could it be achieved? And how? For these reasons precisely, several novels have been created to define for us what utopia is, and especially, what it should not be. As fear of such civilization grows and optimists have seen what could go wrong with such a prediction, a new field of dystopian literature has arisen. Basically, dystopian societies are the antithesis of those which are utopian. Under dystopian societies, totalitarian government keeps very close, usually oppressive control over the citizenry. Years ago I became especially fascinated by the subject of utopian literature. Learning what could possibly happen to human civilization in the future engrossed me and consumed many of my hours. I would read books like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described Winston Smith’s experiences under the omnipresent Big Brother. I was also absorbed into novels like Fahrenheit 451, in which novelist Ray Bradbury warns readers of a future without literature. Such books as these inspired in me a special anticipation for the future, rather than the dread that such dystopian books would bring about. As of now, readers are becoming, day by day, continually more surprised at how far from utopia we are becoming, and perhaps unfortunately how close we are coming to what authors feared in dystopia. Today novels of authoritarian societies are becoming less surprising and eventually the novels will have no surprising effect at all; the novels may eventually just become definitions of reality rather than frightening predictions of the future. Newer books are constantly attempting to replace the old ones with “better” and perhaps farther-seeing predictions, however there is something about older-such texts that continues to haunt many. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World is known for blurring the lines between utopia and its exact opposite dystopia. The work tells the story of how one man named Bernard Marx and his pursuit of showing the people that they were not really happy, but simply intoxicated from a perfect drug. The text may be utopian in the sense that everyone is “happy”, but this happiness is not real. The happiness is actually the subject of how the people of the society are being oppressed; oppression is a characteristic, usually, of strictly dystopian societies. However, today, the novel is seen entirely as quite a horrid way to keep the populace satisfied, and therefore the control that rulers have over the people by manipulating their emotions is acknowledged as pure dystopia. What I never knew was how much faster we are reaching dystopia than anyone had ever imagined. In 1958, Huxley published a series of essays entitled Tyranny over the Mind in the popular magazine Newsday, later compiled in a book and titled Brave New World Revisited. The book was essentially coverage of the latter title. After more than thirty years, Huxley revisited his original speculative work and analyzed, once more, its accuracy and plausibility for more modern times. The book consists of eleven essays on what may happen and concludes with a peculiar chapter titled “What Can be Done?”. The first three essays discuss the issue of people and the social organization of people. Essay one is given the title, simply, of “Over-Population”. Within the chapter, Aldous Huxley covers the concern of having many more human beings populating the planet than it is probably meant to handle. Eventually, if nothing is done to reach zero population growth, the number of humans will reach Earth’s carrying capacity and the only thing that will be able to stop a complete collapse will be a well-managed totalitarian action. The second essay covers one of the most controversial concepts in Brave New World – the decanting of babies from bottles. The totalitarian government that saves the falling human race will have to take growth into its own hands and manage the number of children born. The third chapter expounds upon the reasoning behind Huxley’s division of this decanted babies into forced castes created by systematically administering drugs and limiting oxygen and nutrients to fetuses. The management of individuals will also be made easier by forcing careers upon specific castes. The next three essays in Revisited illustrate the persuading of a government on its people to believe that it is always right; this clean persuasion commonly known as propaganda. The first essay of the three covers how a democracy could, however not too successfully, use propaganda to keep a higher degree of control over its people after a crisis. Rather than consciously being created, the system of propaganda in democracy slowly builds into something that may possibly be a threat to the peoples’ liberties. However propaganda under a dictatorship, the subject of the following essay, works especially well in comparison because it is consciously coordinated and the people do not even have any sort of liberties to lose. The actions and perchance the thoughts of people can be regulated successfully through the full government control of the media under an authoritarian regime. Rather than describing in what cases propaganda can be employed, the third essay of the second three describes how governments can use propaganda. Identified as “The Arts of Selling”, the essay describes the two faces of propaganda – Dr. Jekyll under a Democracy, who uses John Dewey’s conjecture the human’s reasoning capacity to make people understand what message a person is spreading, and Dr. Hyde under the totalitarian society, who, with his “Ph.D. in psychology and [his] master’s degree as well in the social sciences” is able to instigate more influential change through manipulation of the human mind itself (Huxley 48). The Dr. Hyde idea continues in the next four essays, moving the subject of persuasion from the outside to persuasion that makes closer contact with the human mind of the individual rather than that of the crowd; eventually this contact breaks the barriers of the skull and changes the psyche of the people from the inside. The first of the four essays, number seven, is titled appropriately “Brainwashing”. The chapter elucidates on the way that if enough pressure is placed on the individual to the climax of emotions before the nervous breakdown, the person can easily be convinced to follow the commands and sayings of the brainwasher. The next essay covers a much easier and maybe more effective way of controlling the people through chemical persuasion, that is, the use of widespread drugs to keep the citizenry satisfied as much as they would like to feel satisfied. The paper explicates the way in which the fictitious drug soma was used in the original Brave New World to effectively prevent any sort of revolt from the oppressed populace, and afterwards describes real-life possibilities for the “perfect” drug. The next essay describes a method that Huxley himself regrets for not having used in his speculative work – subconscious persuasion, particularly in the form of subliminal imagery. The essay covers how the person’s emotions toward a subliminal image reflect the image’s context, that is,
‘Drink Coca-Cola’…would be superimposed upon the lovers’ embrace, the tears of the broken-hearted mother, and the optic nerves of the viewers would record these secret messages, their subconscious minds would respond to them and in due course they would consciously feel a craving for soda pop (81).
A final essay on the subject of persuasion of the individual covers what is commonly known as sleep-learning, or, as Huxley coined, Hypnopædia. Contrary to the innocence of the way that many hopefuls today will listen to an audio track of information which they wish to learn by the next day, the governmental officials at a baby-decanting and child-raising plant in Brave New World and futuristic Huxleyan will subject sleeping infants to common phrases and mores of society and culture thousands of time until it is imprinted permanently into their minds. It was unbelievable to Huxley when he wrote Revisited, and even more incredulous now how close we may have come to the society that truly did incite fear in readers in 1932 of Brave New World. The book made very accurate predictions, particularly on the influence of televisions on the people. Today, television serves as a powerful form of propaganda for politicians and even leaders such as the president. President George W. Bush will occasionally give a speech to assure the people of a safe future without “weapons of mass destruction”, but we as laypeople simply do not know much about the validity of his statement; therefore, we assume that it is true. The use of the peoples’ lack of knowledge to the propagandist’s advantage has proven to be an excellent source of control for “tomorrow’s dictator”. Even the television commercial has proved itself a source of, especially today, subconscious persuasion. We do not pay attention to commercials which advertise products and services, but this, in theory, turns our psyches into a more accessible target of advertising. In a way, our not consciously paying attention is a boon for propagandists; it enables them to more effectively bring messages to millions. If Huxley were to see the situation of population and how it is being handled today, there is really no telling of what his reaction would be. At the time of the original novel’s writing, 1932, the world population was a mere two billion, which, when the number turned to the second billion, scared many into believing that soon the human race would end due to the number of people. In 1958, however, at the time of Revisited, there were almost three and a half billion inhabitants of the planet. This shocked Huxley and moved him to make the issue of overpopulation a focus of his compilation. However the shock hits hardest when we observe the ridiculous population of the world today – 6.563 billion and rising at about 15,000 more every hour; that’s three every second (Levine). Only when we realize what difference there is now does the shock truly astound. If there were a Brave New World Reexamined, Huxley today would be in endless worriment for our predicament. There is really no need to mention statistics for population in the future (Appendix A). Another correct prediction of Huxley is in concern for the use of drugs. More people today are using drugs which resemble soma than ever. Huxley himself acknowledged the similarities between Cannabis sativa, or marijuana, and soma; marijuana has few negative health effects and creates a sense of happiness just as soma creates artificial happiness with no negative effects on health. Huxley also correctly predicted the widespread use of hallucinogenic and antidepressant drugs exactly, but he did not know yet that the use of these drugs would not be instigated through the government’s encouragement but through peer pressuring, the media, and the people’s feeling of “need” of it in times of emotional unbalance. However what strikes me personally as fascinating is how little instruction there is or expounding there is on the thought of preventing such events as Huxley predicts. There is virtually no presence of any direct warning of the consequences and how negative such a society may be, besides how people morally crave freedom. There is only one fragment at the end of the compilation that tells the reader
Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still cannot believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them (123).
What is so supreme about freedom? How is a human not a human when he has no freedom? Huxley’s lack of expansion on such questions makes it obvious that his editor or some outside force probably forced it on him to include this last section in his essays, just to show the reader that Huxley was a capitalistic person and not un-American as critics would otherwise believe. Many other works of literature have been created to speculate the future of earth as a possible utopian or dystopian society. One such work is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin; it is considered the grandfather of dystopian satire. The story is different from BNW, however, in that it only covered protagonist D-503’s regular life rather than defining, as Huxley’s story did, rebellion against the dystopian society. Another novel, famous as the best-known work of dystopian literature, was George Orwell’s 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It serves as a pure dystopia, under which the peoples’ rights are limited and there is continual misery; Brave New World contrasts with this in that it has perpetually blissful individuals who extend their human rights to the fullest. As we can see, the level of questions brought up is unparalleled by other works of speculative utopian and dystopian literature. And the answers found in Huxley’s Brave New World revisited are found, in their purest form, within no other work of literary art.
