Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World has long been installed, along with Zamyatin’s We (1920–21), Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and Orwell’s Nineteen

On a number of occasions Huxley had scoffed at H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923), with its rosy portrayal of a utopia peopled exclusively by ‘active, sanguine, inventive, receptive and good-tempered’ citizens, and his use of the term ‘Wellsian’ here encompasses all those aspects of the progressive outlook which he found most rebarbative or preposterous.

dictatorship. Any form of order is better than chaos.’

For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

Major instruments of social stability. Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg. ‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’

The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

‘But in Epsilons,’ said Mr Foster very justly, ‘we don’t need human intelligence.’ Didn’t need and didn’t get it.

Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made to revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.

Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgement of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat,’ concluded Mr Foster. ‘Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.’

‘And that,’ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.’

‘What are you giving them?’ asked Mr Foster, making his tone very professional. ‘Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness.’

The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the

eleven hundredth metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. ‘To improve their sense of balance,’ Mr Foster explained. ‘Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that they’re half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads.

‘Put them down on the floor.’ The infants were unloaded.

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks – already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ‘They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.’

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

‘What’s the lesson this afternoon?’ he asked. ‘We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,’ she answered. ‘But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.’

‘Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!’ The Director almost shouted in his triumph. ‘Suggestions from the State.’ He banged the nearest table. ‘It therefore follows …’ A noise made him turn round. ‘Oh, Ford!’ he said in another tone, ‘I’ve gone and woken the children.’

Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.’

For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. ‘Just try to realize it,’ he said, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. ‘Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.’

Home, home – a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, ‘My baby, my baby,’ over and over again. ‘My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps

Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers – was therefore full of misery; full of mothers – therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts – full of madness and suicide.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, everywhere a focussing of interest, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

‘But everyone belongs to everyone else,’ he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb. The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a

statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic,...

Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty – they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?

No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.’

‘And after all,’ Fanny’s tone was coaxing, ‘it’s not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry. And seeing that, you ought to be a little more promiscuous

‘Stability,’ insisted the Controller, ‘stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.’

Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. ‘But one’s got to make the effort,’ she said sententiously, ‘one’s got to play the game. After all, everyone belongs to everyone else.’

‘Fortunate boys!’ said the Controller. ‘No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy – to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.’

But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.’

‘Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive.

Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.’

‘Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.’

In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered. ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love …’

‘But old clothes are beastly,’ continued the untiring whisper. ‘We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …’

‘In the end,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia …’

‘All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.’

‘Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.’

‘One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments,’ said the Assistant Predestinator, citing a piece of homely hypnopaedic wisdom.

‘Work, play – at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking – thinking!’

‘He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke – asked him who his mother was, or something like that.’

The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.

Indeed, a faint hypnopaedic prejudice in favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made proposals,

What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

The Bombay Green Rocket dropped out of the sky. The passengers alighted. Eight identical Dravidian twins in khaki looked out of the eight portholes of the cabin – the stewards.