Brave New World Revisited

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Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes precarious, the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. In consequence, human numbers are now increasing more rapidly than at any time in the history of the species. Huxley was outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and the inward-looking nature of many Americans; [24] he had also found the book My Life and Work by Henry Ford on the boat to America, and he saw the book's principles applied in everything he encountered after leaving San Francisco.

It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world’s overpopulated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule—probably by the Communist party. Identifying the enemy of freedom as propaganda, Huxley finds the solution that eluded him in Brave New World. Helmholtz Watson, a handsome and successful Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering and a friend of Bernard. Drugs - not least the magical trinity of empathogens, entactogens and entheogens - and eventually genetic engineering will open up revolutionary new state spaces of thought and emotion.But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Written almost thirty years later, Brave New World Revisited is a re-evaluation of his predictions based on the changes he had witnessed in the meantime. In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery out of existence; that's what robots are for.

An optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this figure (a little under two billions, if I remember rightly) generation after generation. Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. For his part Wells published, two years after Brave New World, his own Utopian Shape of Things to Come. Soma is a narcotic that raises "a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Nearly thirty years later in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley checked the progress of his prophecies against reality and argued that many of his fictional fantasies had grown uncomfortably close to the truth.

Helmholtz and Bernard rush in to stop the ensuing riot, which the police quell by spraying soma vapor into the crowd.