The disturbingly spectacular Brave New World by Aldous Huxley takes place in a futuristic dystopian society where citizens are genetically engineered, socially conditioned, and medically controlled by the “happiness” drug, “soma”, to maintain communal harmony. Their manufactured society is rid of individual thought, and individuality – in turn it is made up of emotionally shallow humans who are made to feel happiness.
If I’m being completely honest, this is the post I’ve struggled writing the most so far. I wrote it, deleted it, wrote it again, decided it was horrible, took a few weeks away from it, and forgot it existed for a little while. That was until I was in the car on the way to a college visit and about thirty minutes into the ride Amazon Music decided to do its own thing and play music I haven’t listened to in five years. In the midst of that nostalgically curated journey, I stumbled across Katy Perry’s Chained to the Rhythm and found myself deeply immersed in the lyrics making an unexpected connection to something I had placed in the back of my mind.
Brave New World: the work that left me so confusingly intrigued that I couldn’t put it down. I actually started reading this book during my midterms in February after having it sit on my shelf for six months. My copy of the book was actually gifted to me by my cousin who found it on the street when she was walking around in Brooklyn. Fun fact: whoever was reading it before me, left some annotations for me to go through in the first few chapters.
Anyway, let’s talk about the ‘why’. Brave New World is banned in Ireland and challenged in various US states and countries around the world for alleged promotion of drugs, anti-family themes, and sexually explicit content. I’m not even going to touch on that last one – it’s an excuse for people to avoid concepts that make them uncomfortable and I will stand by that no matter what.
The premise of the book is about a society functioning on a drug that makes its citizens permanently happy. I see how that could be concerning, but that’s the whole reason why it was written. I recently watched a 60 Minutes episode that Margarett Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) was on. She talked about the real reason books like hers are written. They’re meant to be concerning, they’re supposed to make the reader uncomfortable, they’re not supposed to be easy reads. They are warnings. The reason they are written is to plainly say “Hey guys, this could possibly happen if we aren’t careful,” not “Hey guys, this book is the concrete guide to how we should live our lives.”
Like the one in Brave New World, every society aims to create that profound “Community, Identity, Stability” element, but it’s important to be mindful of how we go about it. I recommend you read this unpleasant narrative, you may notice some similarities to how some things function today. I also recommend you look up the lyrics to Chained to the Rhythm, there’s a hidden warning folded up in that upbeat melody.
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