by José Miguel Galarza. English Dpt. · EOIP

ALDOUS HUXLEY

CENTENARY

1894 · 1994

BRAVE

NEW

WORLD

You are all probably well acquainted with the for long perused novel by Aldous Huxley where a dystopic society is portrayed. This 1932 novel was the fable where “soma”, “the seventh century after Ford”, “Alpha”, “Beta” and “Epsilon” individuals shared roles with “Savage Reservations.”

What Aldous Huxley was foreseeing became true before he had really thought. It was in 1958 when he published “Brave New World Revisited”. He was surveying the society of DDT, penicillin and consumerism in the light of his earlier predictions. He was putting in the form of essay what others had only seen as a fable or satire.

It would be daft to try a commentary on the whole work in just a few lines. But the worldly state of affairs, on the verge of a Big Business war, may require some considerations which can easily be drawn from either the Foreword or the twelve chapters of this highly recommended essay from the mid-twentieth century.

FOREWORD
“Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing”;

We must bear this statement in mind. For reasons of simplicity, economy, or shortage of time we tend to simplify what should require longer deliberation. This must apply to my own considerations. For obvious reasons, on this paper I will just refer to a single chapter: “IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society.”

It is the year 2003. The Big Govern- ment is trying to convince the developed citizens that we must go to war. Us? No, please! Our boys and girls in their camouflage uniforms and with their intelligent weapons designed by over-paid scientists.

I will quote some paragraphs from Chapter IV with the brave end that you will be allured into reading the whole book. It is worth it in a time where the Big Government and the Big Business are so evident.

CHAPTER IV
“... Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. ... A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asiatics. In the light of recent history it would be foolish to suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen again”.

“... and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody’s enlightened self-interest, but it is dictated by, and appeals to, passions, blind impulses, unconscious cravings for fears”.

“In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation”.

“A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time ... in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera ... will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it”.

“As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions...”.

I hope this can help you to make some comparisons and find similes. Not only in world affairs but in closer ones as well. And remember, you’ better read it yourself.