Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

Praiseworthy is the innocence and constant cheerfulness of a child: tiny, unripe, immature, yet possessing what is almost denied to the adult world, dull and sad, built on pain and suffering. When you are a child, you are alien to passions and feelings that do not directly concern your five senses: a rationality that exists but is still dormant in those tiny brains not yet blossomed and flourishing. You play, you laugh, you cry if you fall, if you hit your head against something hard or sharp, at most if you receive a stern reprimand. You ignore the sense of death; if you are told to make the sign of the cross in church, you wonder why all of this is necessary, the need for a God that comforts and warms limbs withered by raw matter seems light-years away.

Suddenly, you grow, mature, forge mind and bones, brain and muscles: colored pencils turn into lofty blue, black, and red pens, into protractors and sixty-centimeter rulers, the thin storybooks become thick volumes of science, philosophy, literature, civil code, criminal law, finance, economics. Beards and pains emerge, nervousness and apathy, anxiety and desolation. The group of children splits into individual minds, they opt for individual sciences, arts, and philosophies, each one is a tiny microcosm inserted into analogous microcosms. The happiness that every child finds in a ball, an ice cream, or a stuffed animal now takes on different connotations depending on the individual; a labyrinth of paths unfolds to reach it: some choose asceticism, some implore Science, Ethics, or Lady Luck, some trust in matter, some pass through pain first.

Year 632 After Ford: happiness is ONE and no alternatives are foreseen. The society is made up of a mass of humanoid mannequins, robots with skin and guts, immersed in an endless childhood. Eternal children. Bipedal beasts, moving and speaking. Happy, cheerful, addicted, conditioned. Drugged.

Big Brother is Science: unique, immutable, incorruptible, eternal, sovereign. May Ford bless us! He has revolutionized repressed and frustrated hominids in search of Truth! They spoke of Freedom, Art, and God, a category absolutely incompatible with machines! And, above all, they were born. Yes, they were born, they were birthed, they had a father and a mother! Ford, what horror! Sex as a procreative and generative tool! Unacceptable. Sex is the infantile fulfillment of instinct: intercourse without feelings, penetration devoid of love. Possibly promiscuous. Sterile, clean, and pure. Freudian eroticism.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, available also in Plus and Minus versions: castes of humans, from the most noble to the most beastly. Each specially manufactured with test tubes, gametes, and concoctions. Almost infinitesimal reproduction of embryos: an abnormal mass of twins, identical, precise, perfect. Babies emerging from sterile vials, like a bland lab compound. Empty vessels to be filled: they are conditioned to appreciate death, they learn in their sleep, they acquire universal happiness, shapeless pieces of clay to be molded. And if that is not enough, here is a nice dose of soma, ingested as, when, and where you prefer.

The past is absolutely useless; Ford, the mentor of the new technological Enlightenment. Before the Nine Years' War, Earth was full of failed and unhappy little men scribbling pages on achieving happiness: asceticism, transcendence, religion... old stuff, revolting works: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet... trash produced by sad amateurs, by deviant, pitiful beings. What is the use, nowadays, of these pamphlets if hypnopaedic conditioning and soma do their job splendidly? You have pre-cooked poetry, a symphony already composed and only to be played with collective property instruments.

Science has modified you, but you are not allowed to modify it: it is the permanent revolution that must not turn into a counter-revolution. It has given you universal joy, no wars, hates, conflicts, the peace of the senses and the body. You have everything: what good is another reality? Another happiness? Another model? Another Science? Forget rationality. Satisfy only the five senses. Observe, listen, smell, taste, touch. Don’t think.

This is the New World. Brave New World.