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Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which the intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream again of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, one less “perfect” and more free.
“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…” He was going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.
“But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?” asked an ingenuous student. “Ass!” said the Director, breaking a long silence. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?” It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion. “The lower the caste,” said Mr. Foster, “the shorter the oxygen.” The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
“that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.”
“Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still.
Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended.
“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 hypnopædia…”
“Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.”
“That horrible Benito Hoover!” And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse.
“Able,” was the verdict of his superiors. “Perhaps,” (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) “a little too able.”
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.
When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”
the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep….
Feeling that it was time for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and shouted: “I hear him; He’s coming.” But it wasn’t true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody—in spite of the music, in spite of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.
What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head,
The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.
“That young man will come to a bad end,” they said, prophesying the more confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the end was bad.
Bound by strong vows that had never been pronounced, obedient to laws that had long since ceased to run, he sat averted and in silence.
“What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!”
Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to meditate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him.
“I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else.
You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
“John…” Then “My Ford,” she wondered, “have I given this one its sleeping sickness injection, or haven’t I?”
added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity;
You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability.
“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.”
“Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
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.
all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were.
“The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” “And they’re happy below the water line?”
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.
“Yes; but what sort of science?” asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. “You’ve had no scientific training, so you can’t judge.
hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing.
He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.” “A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,”
A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is.
The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it.
After those weeks of idleness in London, with nothing to do, whenever he wanted anything, but to press a switch or turn a handle, it was pure delight to be doing something that demanded skill and patience.
He was digging in his garden—digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
Besides, thy best of rest is sleep and that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams?…
this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane.
from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world’s teeming illiterates possess,
And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.
(there will be more than five and a half billions of us by the time my granddaughter is fifty),
In the course of the last four centuries quite a number of people sailed from the Old World to the New. But neither their departure nor the returning flow of food and raw materials could solve the problems of the Old World.
