AN INTERWAR DYSTOPIA: ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD
AN INTERWAR DYSTOPIA: ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD

Summary/Abstract: Back in 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote a foresighting dystopia that he ironically named Brave New World, using a quotation from Shakespeare (among a profusion of other such quotations used in the book). He created a warning, sardonic and worrying text about the future of our civilization led by technology and engineering even in genetics and family matters. He warned about the disappearance of family, culture and art, religion, love and passion of any kind, of the over-prevalence of sex even in very young children, of the infantilization and reduction of humans to inferior creatures, created and educated by neo-Pavlovian conditioned reflexes and by hypnopaedia to indulge in sexual pleasure and to seek refuge from sufferance in antidepressant euphoria-producing drugs, irrespective of overdosage risks. Life in such a society would be organized in castes delineated by their intellectual limitations, meant to cover the whole range of economy tasks and to produce a people of consumerists. The failure of such a system is symbolized by the tragic suicide of the protagonist, closing the book. Huxley’s clear- sighted warning about the future of mankind in a technologied era has echoes in our time..

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