Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

“Now it is Nineteen Eighty-Four” sang Jello Biafra with the Dead Kennedys. Perhaps he was too optimistic. Perhaps, upon reflection, we have abandoned the 20th-century dictatorships to plunge into a Brave New World, the one predicted by Aldous Huxley; the masterpiece of the English author takes us to a reality without servants or masters, where every struggle for freedom is impossible because there is no enemy to fight. Each person is an oppressor of themselves: no one can imagine an alternative society, because Huxley's man does not know history and has no memory, he is just a cog in the most dreadful of systems: he is an intrinsic part of the machine, and cannot disable it without simultaneously killing himself.

Brave New World is the perfect dystopia, horror without a possible antithesis: man self-governs and therefore no one needs to supervise him, for he is born and wants to be a slave; here lies its superiority over Orwell's 1984: Huxley understands that power is more lethal not when it represses dissent, but when it incorporates it into its own body and destroys it; he wants to tell us that capitalism will not extinguish man with terror, but by lulling him like a child, shaping him with every kind of pleasure, until reducing him to an automaton without personality. Huxley's work is complex, more anthropological than social, where the man of the future is outlined obsessively, through intertwined dialogues and a series of tics reiterated throughout the book: he is reduced to a perpetual state of infantilism to become a perfect consumer; deprived of all pain (from old age, the burden of God, and love), he abandons himself to a continuous consumeristic delirium, producing and buying until the arrival of silent hospital death, never having a moment to stop and think (The “soma” is like the Facebook wall...) and seek a sense to his life that escapes mercantile logics. The man of the Brave New World is an idiot who has no eyes to see the direction in which his existence is moving.

Fleeing any class-based invective, Huxley intends to formulate a universal dystopia, because classes may even disappear (and in 1932 it seemed more likely than in 2019), but the contradictions between man and power will always exist; if he feels secure about man and the misery that awaits him, he does not venture into the detailed description of the future dictatorship: he relies on allegory, narrating different aspects of the story through the eyes of the Savage (the alter ego of the reader within the story, the only mind not subjected to the well-being ideology), sparing the work from anachronism and trusting the reader's ability to read between the lines of this very bitter satire. Free from particularisms, Huxley's allegory dazzles us with its acuteness: during one of the key passages of the book, the children of the Brave New World are led to the floor of a room where a book (a symbol of culture) and a bouquet of roses (nature) are placed; the children, curious, begin to leaf through the pages and caress the petals. It is the moment of horror: electric shocks are spread on the floor and fictional explosions echo within the walls; at the end of the agony, the children, conditioned like Pavlov's dogs, associate books and roses with pain; here they are now recoiling horrified in front of culture (it undermines the order of society, ignorance is positive) and nature (what is capable of giving joy for free must be eradicated: men must be raised to become good consumers, always desiring new things and paying to have them.) Now, in our present, we could conduct an experiment: go to a suburban building, have a chat with a young person, and ask him to read a book; imagine his reaction: pure disgust – “what a boring thing”, he would tell us. Imagine, again, proposing a trip to the countryside, along the banks of a river, or why not, in the mountains. Our young person would flee before the sentence ends, we know that's how it is. Huxley's conditioned reflex is here: it has not arrived through brutal operations, but by creeping gently. It has done so with the innocence of tweets that discourage going in-depth on any topic; through ever smaller mobile phones capable of filling boring moments with less mental expenditure than a book; through the culture of appearance, partying, and shopping walks, to the point of leading us to consider forests as mere sources of timber for creating the aseptic furniture of some Swedish multinational. The Brave New World is here, and Orwell's Big Brother is a nostalgia of the 20th century, where revolutions could still change the world.