Brave New World and the Church of the Thinking Hedonist
This is a repost of a comment I made on Goodreads in a discussion of Aldous Huxley’s book, Brave New World.
I always like to think of Brave New World as the third book in a political commentary on Marxism-Leninism starting with Animal Farm (the revolution) and 1984 (the technologically developed Leninist state). Brave New World, IMO the scariest of the three, is communism where “from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs” is realized NOT through coercion and deception, but by adapting and educating humans to want to perform their assigned social roles.
So, to the extent the deterministic vector of science deprives us of free will, while quantum physics returns its possibility, Brave New World does its best to deprive us of any fruits of the possibility of expressing free will.
In short, great book; but one whose vision sickens me.
On the other hand, nearly everyone in that society is happy. So why do I object to it?
Am in the middle of exploring that personal question in a long far-future short story (novella?) where an apostate “Amish Reborn” girl, now an auditor at Agnostics, Inc., working a file for the meta-Church of the Three Commandments, plays a key role in the election of the new High Priest of the Church of the Thinking Hedonist. 🙂