Brave New World resonates very differently than 1984.

1984, you tend to see people who are sort of Twitter blue checks quote 1984 all the time,

myself included, the reason being because it's so indicative of societies in which the government

has tyrannical control.

But the reality is that Brave New World is much more descriptive of the failings of sort of liberal

democracy than is

1984.

1984 is about how a repressive tyranny can take over every area of life and then provide

nobody happiness, but instead sort of restrict everybody into service of the giant

centralizing power.

It looks more like communism or more like fascism.

Brave New World is something completely different. Brave New World is really about how a liberal democracy

can essentially drug itself into tyranny, how a liberal democracy can rely so much on the

individual pleasure and pain principle that it can blind itself to the realities of a desire for

something higher and what is lost in that process. The part that's fascinating about Brave New World is it's sort of left as an open question. The question is whether the Brave New World is really as terrible a place as Huxley makes it out to be, or whether it's paradisiical. And how you read Brave New World, it's hard for me to believe that if you're of the left and you believe that the height of human endeavor

is sexual self-fulfillment, that you read Brave New World and you come away with a picture of the Brave New World as a terrible place. It's technologically sophisticated. People can't have sex with whomever they want. People have drugs to make them happy. Soma. People are able to sleep well at night. People are able to engage in whatever orgiastic pleasure they choose, what exactly would the left object

to in Brave New World? It's a question that I find myself asking when I read Brave New World

World because the ideal society they've created other than the fact that nobody seems to vote.

It's a peaceful society. There's not a lot of wars, not a lot of crime. They've gotten rid of

the heights of human achievement, but in return they've been granted a sense of complete social stability. And so in this sense, the book reads very conservative because it's a critique of this. But this is the open question of the book, is sort of Mustafa Amand's question. If you want stability and you want low crime, do you have to trade away the heights of human achievement? And maybe what we instead do as a society is we

focus in on genital pleasure, which obviously lies at the center of Brave New World. So the fact

is that when you read Brave New World, again, I wonder for young people who read Brave New World,

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