Genetics are managed, education and personal development is standardized, and people live by a prescribed set of cliches, proverbs and principles that are piped into their brains as they sleep, in what are called “hypnopaedic proverbs,” from childhood through and into adulthood. It is all done to standard – by the state. Huxley describes a world that seeks to homogenize differences in people, by taking out genetic variables through test-tube fertilization and testing, and eliminating the variable of how children are raised by different parents – no parenting is involved in procreation, nor in education. Which is in part of why Yuval Harari noted that this book is of ever-increasing relevance. Though I believe Huxley was creating a parody of the ideal world to which Soviet and western Communists in the 20s and 30s aspired, these same general ideals are insidiously creeping into the ideals of Western democracies today. Not great literature, and the satire is perhaps a bit corny by today’s standards, but amazingly prescient and original, given that it was first published in 1932. Then into this ideal society enters the disruption of a more primal Savage. Afterwards the story involves two individuals who are somehow dissatisfied living in a world designed and structured to make everyone happy and satisfied, always. The story begins with a tour of an incubation facility for artificially inseminating harvested female eggs, and then describing a process for creating multiple versions of the same genetic identity, and then how they provide the growing fetuses with more or less of critical nutrients to create various levels of motivation and intelligence – a test-tubed-created class structure and a happy and stable society.
Summary in 4 sentences: This is a science fiction novel published in 1932 with the story taking place many centuries into the future in the “ideal” society that Huxley saw many in Western culture striving to attain. That intrigued me and inspired me to read it again, and to convince some of my friends to join me.
Why this book I had read it some 45 years ago, and then, listening to Yuval Harari’s 21 lessons for the 21st Century recently, he noted that Brave New World is more relevant today than when it was written and is continuing to increase in relevance.
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