Totalitarian Novels: Drugs and Genetics in Brave New World
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss how important struggle is in forming a human person before introducing Hillsdale College president Dr. Larry P. Arnn.
Totalitarian novels depict regimes that exert complete and pervasive control over the lives of their subjects. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and C.S. Lewis imagine the terrible possibilities of unchecked modern tyranny. Join Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale College students in this exploration of 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and That Hideous Strength.
The course includes four lectures and four conversations, each about 30 minutes long. It is structured with one lecture about each book followed by a conversation between Dr. Arnn and the students about themes from that book.
Huxley describes a world in which science has provided the ability to engineer children in test tubes to suit them to specific castes. The ubiquitous drug Soma suppresses ambition and aggression by providing euphoria without any side effects.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:18.5 | And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with totalitarian novels, lecture four, |
| 0:22.4 | Brave New World, Drugs, and Genetics. |
| 0:25.2 | And we're back to a discussion between Dr. Arne and the students. |
| 0:29.6 | One of the questions that struck me the most, |
| 0:32.0 | and I'd like to think about this, |
| 0:34.0 | is actually the last question when the students asked, |
| 0:37.4 | can someone be virtuous if he |
| 0:39.4 | subdues his desires with drugs? And we talked a little bit about dopamine in the earlier |
| 0:44.9 | discussion last week's episode. But, you know, when you think about drugs, don't think about |
| 0:50.0 | just illicit drugs or things like that, but all the things that sort of put this filter on life |
| 0:56.4 | in front of you. So, you know, social media, entertainment, things like that in general. So this book |
| 1:04.0 | touches on the subject of, can you actually be a virtuous human being without any form of struggle? |
| 1:12.3 | We can look to a couple different sources to answer that question first. |
| 1:15.6 | In Hillsdale, we love Aristotle. |
| 1:17.0 | So we'll start with Aristotle, who says that virtue is a habit. |
| 1:19.7 | It means you have to do something over and over and over again to develop the character |
| 1:24.2 | necessary to face the challenges of life. |
| 1:26.7 | If you're obscuring that or avoiding it with with drugs or distractions, you can't, |
| 1:31.4 | you're impairing your ability to develop virtue. |
| 1:33.2 | Right. And it's a habit that's formed by choosing. You have to actively choose that thing, |
| 1:38.3 | not just because you're doing it. But you have to choose that thing in order to form that |
... |
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