It’s been coming since 1931.
To read Brave New World in 2023 is an interesting experience. In one sense the book is very much of its time, in its technological descriptions, its social tapestry and its political concerns: overpopulation, eugenics, Soviet-style dictatorships. But its broad prophecy was eerily incisive in two particular areas: the intrusive power of technology, and the promotion of pleasure as a means of social control.
In Orwell’s 1984, sex for pleasure is forbidden: the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, precipitates his downfall by illicitly sleeping with a woman. In Brave New World, by contrast, sex is openly promoted as a public good. ‘As political and economic freedom diminishes’, notes Huxley prophetically in the novel’s 1946 foreword, ‘sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.’ In the Brave New World children of seven are trained in ‘erotic play’, and marriage and family life are not so much forbidden as mostly just forgotten: notions of lifelong intimate relationships or of home life are demonised from birth by state propaganda. Instead ‘everyone belongs to everyone’: sex is a distraction and a sedative, alongside the official drug soma, taken willingly by everyone everywhere as a means of preventing loneliness, discontent or any thought of sedition.
And
The 2020s are giving us a foretaste of a near future in which, again in Huxley’s words, ‘permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.’ The intimate links between government, the few tech companies which now control much of our information flow, globalist actors like the WEF, EU, IMF and endless ‘NGOs’ funded by unaccountable billionaires, and vast transnational corporations has created an unprecedented locus of global power. Meanwhile, the rapid onrush of technologies which interfere with our understanding of reality itself, from deepfakes to AI chatbots, is creating a new sensory world. This is what I have been calling The Machine, and it is heading towards the kind of globalised Total System that Huxley envisaged nearly a hundred years ago.
Leave a Reply