false 3 0 false false Wed Mar 18 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 18 16:52:06 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 18 19:14:51 -0700 2009
Easily summarized as "dystopia," of the make-everyone-happy and capitalism-takes-over subsets. I know what Huxley's opinion was, but I'm not entirely convinced that this system (in which everyone is about the same happiness) is a priori so much worse than ours (where the third world/working class takes on the brunt of misery to make everyone else much happier).

I'm also not sure about whether the three escapes at the end of the book were intended to be solutions to the Brave New World system. I have a hard time seeing asceticism as the answer to anything. In any case, John could only choose to reject society because he was privileged to be (basically) an alpha. Could an epsilon ever do that? Of course not. And in Huxley's philosophy, privilege must be scarce: think of the story of the island of alphas. The three examples of 'escape' from Brave New World are an option only for a select few, which makes them not much of a solution at all.]]>