“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

In 1932, long before Big Data and Big Pharma came into being, and over a decade before George Orwell created Big Brother, an eccentric English author named Aldous Huxley published a dystopian novel entitled Brave New World. His dark vision stands as a chillingly accurate forecast of the dominant trends of 21st century society.

Brave New World vs. 1984

George Orwell, writing at the dawn of the Cold War and observing the horrors of Soviet Communism, famously warned against the danger of a system akin to “a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” Huxley, in contrast, envisioned a future in which, rather than being forcibly subjugated by the dictator’s boot, people who had been peacefully indoctrinated as children would voluntarily subjugate themselves through officially-endorsed entertainment, narcotics, and sensory indulgences.

In Huxley’s view, the human spirit is like a spring; the harder you push it down, the more vigorously it pops back up. Therefore, he surmised, it would be inefficient and cumbersome for a ruling elite to rely on violence to deprive the masses of their freedom and happiness. From their perspective, it would be far better if the masses did not perceive themselves as being deprived of freedom and happiness at all. In such a scenario, there would be no reason for them to rebel against their masters, making them much easier to control. Brave New World depicts a society in which, through technology, this methodology has been perfected.

Because the nuclear family is the fundamental unit of a free society, Huxley anticipated that rulers of the future would monopolize reproduction. In Brave New World, all babies are test-tube babies, genetically engineered to have sufficient intellectual capacity for only the functions they are intended to perform. After being born in the lab, children are indoctrinated into the dominant ideology in state-controlled schools, and graduate to employment in state-controlled factories and offices. To avoid the formation of meaningful bonds between individuals, promiscuous sex is encouraged, while contraception against, and abortion of, “gross viviparous reproduction” is mandatory.

Thus, while the government in Orwell’s 1984 relies on heavy-handed techniques such as constant surveillance, brutal punishment, and pervasive censorship, the leaders of Brave New World require no such crude measures. Instead, their citizens conform to authority because they are employed in jobs that ideally match their genetic potential, they take the mood-elevating drug Soma, and they enjoy having lots of sex and watching “Feelies” - a form of immersive entertainment that we would describe as virtual reality with full-body haptic feedback.

Today, as close to half of Americans are on at least one psychiatric medication, the global porn industry is valued at over $170 billion, children spend half their waking hours absorbing information from digital screens, and progressive intellectuals promote “family abolition” as a necessary step in the evolution of society, it would be difficult to argue that Huxley was not an exceptional fortune-teller.

Of course, given the 21st-century rise in censorship, surveillance, and authoritarianism, one could argue that Orwell was also right. But, in terms of conceptual themes, it seems clear that Huxley’s paradigm of an apathetic society indoctrinated into submission and sedated by drugs and entertainment closely resembles our daily lives, while Orwell’s grim vision of a command-and-control industrialized nightmare is still a bit of an exaggeration compared to most people’s daily experience.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, what did Huxley himself think? The answer is found in Brave New World Revisited, a slim volume of commentary published in 1958.

Huxley on Huxley

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley woefully observed that advances in propaganda, technology, and pharmaceuticals were catapulting society towards his dystopian vision farther and faster than he could have imagined. The friendly hand offering an apathy-inducing tranquilizer, rather than the steel-toed boot demanding obedience, had been his vision, and by 1958, it was already coming to pass.

Pharmaceuticals

Soma, the drug of choice in Brave New World, was pure fiction at the time Huxley conceived of it. However, by the time he wrote Revisited, “Fairly good substitutes for the various aspects of Soma have already been discovered … That a dictator could, if he so desired, make use of these drugs for political purposes is obvious. He could ensure himself against political unrest by changing the chemistry of his subjects’ brains and so making them content with their servile conditions. He could use tranquilizers to calm the excited, stimulants to arouse enthusiasm in the indifferent, hallucinates to distract the attention of the wretched from their miseries. But how, it may be asked, will the dictator get his subjects to take the pills that will make them think, feel and behave in the ways he finds desirable? In all probability, it will be enough merely to make the pills available.”

This sounds uncomfortably similar to our current status quo, in which high-energy children are diagnosed with ADHD and given tranquilizers to ensure their compliance, emotionally sensitive children are given antidepressants to numb their psychic pain, and adults are prescribed a smorgasbord of medicines to keep them productive and functional in circumstances that they would otherwise find intolerable. And, just as Huxley predicted, no coercion is necessary: patients clamor for their Xanax, Adderall, and Prozac, thankful that such assistance is available.

Propaganda

The science of persuasion was a hot topic in the 1950s, and seeing the power of these new methods, Huxley notes, “The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught ... Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.” Today, as people believe fervently in concepts that prior generations would have considered patently insane, we see how right he was.

Although we look back on the mid-20th century as a time of booming entrepreneurship, Huxley bemoans the consolidation of power by large media companies. “Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite.”

After a brief reprieve via the internet, we once again see the power of entrenched industry to crush the Little Man. One does not even need to be a political dissident to be silenced these days; as the publishers of the popular entertainment website Giant Freakin Robot have learned, all that is necessary is that you be, in some infinitesimal way, a threat to the bottom line of the major corporations.

Technology

The potential for technology to enable oppression was of grave concern to Huxley. Cutting-edge tech at his time was the color television, but he still predicted that the machinery of media would be used by the ruling class to influence the beliefs and behavior of the public. Perhaps in a jab at Orwell, he writes, “it has become clear that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.”

In our modern era of algorithm-driven content, addictive social media, and omnipresent smartphones that mainline hypnotic content directly into our brains, we see his warning come to fruition.

The Solution?

In Huxley’s view, the dictator’s tools are drugs, technology, and propaganda, all of which amplify the effect of childhood indoctrination. Therefore, if humanity is to have any hope of a better tomorrow, our mitigation efforts must begin with children today.

“Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements,” Huxley writes. “Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.”

Huxley’s allegation is difficult to refute. Critical thinking, the epistemology of truth, fundamental values, the nature and importance of freedom: these subjects are absent from most school curricula. Instead, children are too often left to draw their own conclusions about the nature of reality based on the content they consume online - a state of affairs that does not bode well for their moral or intellectual development.

Children are the key to the future. If we permit our children to be drugged, propagandized, indoctrinated, and chained to technology, we will continue inexorably on the path to the Brave New World. To escape this outcome, Huxley tells us, we must do the exact opposite. We must provide our children with “an education for freedom, and for the love and intelligence which are at once the conditions and results of freedom.”

It is in this way, and this way alone, that we can avert the fate Aldous Huxley foresaw for us a century ago.