Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

The Savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look round.

Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself. “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage,” he said.

“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices.”

“But why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else.

Yes, that was true. He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet. “Well then,” he said, after a pause, “something new that’s like Othello, and that they could understand.”

you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now.

well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death;

“Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!”

“Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

“Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You’re making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel—works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.”

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.

“I was wondering,” said the Savage, “why you had them at all—seeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don’t you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you’re about it?”

“Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,” he answered. “We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable.

“It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work—go mad, or start smashing things up.

We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It’s obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.”

The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas.

Within six years they were having a first-class civil war.

“The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”

Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t.

Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them.

It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes—because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory.

science was something you made helicopters with, something that caused you to laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the Controller’s meaning.

The Controller sighed. “Very nearly what’s going to happen to you young men. I was on the point of being sent to an island.”

“Bring three men,” he ordered, “and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give him a good soma vaporization and then put him to bed and leave him.”

That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world.

All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.”

“Sometimes,” he added, “I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”

I’m interested in truth, I like science. But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since.

“That’s how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness. Other people’s—not mine. It’s lucky,”

“Well, religion, of course,” replied the Controller. “There used to be something called God—before the Nine Years’ War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose.”

The Savage took it. “The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments,” he read aloud from the title-page.

“A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,” said the Savage promptly.

Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter?

we are our own?

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’”

‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’

“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice.

“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,”

“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death…”

At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.

the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes,’

Doesn’t there seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?”

is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.”

“But value dwells not in particular will,” said the Savage. “It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein ’tis precious of itself as in the prizer.”

There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things—Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.”

“civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism.

Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.