"You can't make flivvers without steel- and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave."
This is a quote from the Controller, Mustapha Mond, in Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World. A book about the future of society, a society where every person is created scientifically in test tubes, placed in different social classes and created to do a particular job. There are no parents, no strong connections to people, no unhappiness or true feelings.
This society is conditioned to act, feel, and behave in certain ways, and they don't question it at all. They accept it because that is all they have ever known, they don't know freedom or justice, love or pain. It is a sort of Utopia- a place where everyone is happy.
Huxley had this piece of work published in 1932; the thought process, view on future society, and the book as a whole seems to be way ahead of its time. Helicopters are the main form of transportation and technology is used immensely in the daily lives of the citizens of this made up society.
In the book everything is "new", there is no old literature to learn from, no religion, no art or studies of science. The science that is performed is very limited and controlled, so that only certain discoveries can be made.
Growing old is something that is unheard of, dying is just another part of this structured life, and no one mourns the dead. In fact, no one loves. No one forms a strong connection to another, and marriage is a foreign concept.
Thinking of the constant fears, worries, and struggles we face throughout our life while reading this novel puts everything into a different perspective. Without tragedy and worry, fear and pain, we would not feel love and happiness, we wouldn't know joy and passion. We would only know one side of the spectrum and we wouldn't be able to comprehend the other.
Some of us may not fear death, it is inevitable, but we fear loss, we fear losing someone close to us, and we mourn when we do lose someone. But we wouldn't feel that if we did not feel love.
Is a perfect Utopia, a place where everyone is happy and nothing bad or scary or tragic ever happens a place that we should be? Should we feel nothing in order to be happy at all times? Is that true happiness? Or is that just happiness that is constructed in a test tube?
If you cannot experience the pain, fear, and worry of everyday life, do you actually know true happiness?
Huxley does a wonderful job of getting you thinking; how society should be run, how it is run, and if it would be worth losing everything to experience "happiness" all the time.
I won't give away the ending of the book, because when you read it and get to the end, you realize that what the book calls "civilization" is just another word for ignorance. The society in this book has no empathy, no feeling for fellow humans. They see everything as entertainment, even other peoples pain, a pain they do not understand, that is the greatest entertainment to them. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone, it gets you thinking and gives you some satisfaction of feeling everything, even the bad.
By giving up our daily struggles, we lose our daily joys, we lose what it means to be truly happy, regardless of all the mess in our lives.
