"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

You may not exactly be familiar with Aldous Huxley, but he was not only a man to be revered for his ideas, but also the descendant of Thomas Huxley, the man who helped Darwin put his famous theory together.

In any case, Aldous, who lived from 1894 to 1963, took great pleasure in criticizing his society, and in 1932 he published Brave New World, marking a certain change in Aldous’ orientation.

In this novel, he took greater care to examine spiritual, philosophical and political matters… the ideas he used in this book were later used by him as the basis for future novels, such as Eyeless in Gaza. Regardless, back to Brave New World.

In this novel, Aldous looks at what he believes to be the future of capitalist civilization which has been put together thanks to the advances in psychology and various kinds of engineering. In this world, the majority of the population is by design passive and submissive to those who call themselves rulers.

As you can guess, this isn’t set in the past, or today… it’s set somewhere around 600 years in the future… a future in which Henry Ford is revered as a deity. As If that fact alone wasn’t disturbing enough, the procreation in that society is actually controlled by genetic engineering, and people are born into roles and social classes from which they may never leave.

As the people grow older, they are taught to be happy with what society has done for them, with how they are classified. And so what do such people spend their time doing? Well, seeing as how the pursuit of purpose has been rendered obsolete, people focus their time on pursuing happiness and distracting themselves with recreational activities, such as sports, sex, games, collecting material possessions, without forgetting Soma, a mind-altering drug.

Apart from being an eerily pre-emptive criticism of how obsolete the War on Drugs is, this world serves as the background for the story of John the Savage, a man who has been captured in the New Mexican desert and brought to London. At first, he sees this great and idyllic civilization as being the greatest there is, a world where real justice, truth and peace reign supreme.

However, as time goes by, John starts to realize that his beliefs don’t sit very well with what how this society works, and so he decides to commit an act which puts the society’s ideology to the test, practically threatening it. Meanwhile, the people look on with a wide-eyed gaze, fascinated by what may come.

One of the most complete and revered dystopian novels, Brave New World was written by Aldous to warn people about scientific and technological progress. It is pretty obvious that he feared humans would be robbed of the qualities which make them free, unique, and human in the first place.

In addition, he was far from pleased by the direction in which mankind was headed, noting that we are becoming simpler and simpler, with the implication being that relatively soon, we won’t be able to think for ourselves, we will get taken advantage of, and we won’t care. All in all, it sounds like a cry for help more than anything to me.


Aldous Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963)

Aldous Huxley
(26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963)


Aldous Leonard Huxley was a writer of English origin and a rather renowned member of the Huxley family. His novels were always seen as somewhat out of the ordinary, with Brave New World depicting a dystopian London future and The Doors of Perception exploring the effects of a powerful hallucinogenic drug (amongst other things). He was awarded in 1939 the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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