Category: Books

It was sim­ply and well writ­ten and I was impressed with Hux­ley’s knowl­edge and insights into social con­di­tion­ing, yet as the author him­self said in his fore­ward, it has many flaws. I am now con­vinced that every utopia is at the same time an antiu­topia. Grant­ed, Hux­ley presents a world free of virtue or vice, that cre­ates an Eden for the clones: but all this is at the price of their human­i­ty. For all intents and pur­pos­es the major­i­ty is a rigid­ly cas­ti­gat­ed hive mind whose abil­i­ties and dis­abilites have been for­feit­ed by the hatch­ery. Pre­des­ti­na­tion blows. It is a world with­out moral­i­ty, with­out choice and with­out free­dom. Like The Sav­age, I choose mis­ery and free­dom when the oth­er option is only the lit­er­al life of an ant or work­er bee.

A world is too stag­nant, too sta­ble, if there is no black or white but only grey. Every­thing becomes vanil­la fla­vored. No vice means no virtue, no ugli­ness means no beau­ty. These con­cepts only exist in dichoto­my. A human cre­at­ed world that removes the pas­sion and leaves only hypnopaedic bio­log­i­cal exis­tence is not for me.

Hux­ley acknowl­edged this lim­i­ta­tion and said if he had to write Brave New World again The Sav­age would be giv­en a third choice: life in exile among the few sane per­sons on the Reser­va­tion.

Now I am start­ing in on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I hope she isn’t too heavy hand­ed. I have met one of her advo­cates and he was a lit­tle on the abra­sive side. but maybe that is just him.