Reading this book today, in this era, is a singularly depressing experience. Many of my generation, when we read this book at a more innocent time, thought of it like Orwell's 1984: it's a warning, and it probably wouldn't happen.
But these aren't warnings. They are playbooks. And they are happening.
The parallels and resemblances are astounding. Soma, the drug used throughout Huxley's futuristic society, has obvious analogies throughout modern American healthcare, starting with the first tranquilizers, and then mapping today to the entire cornucopia of soma-like meds people take to get through life. The various conditioning techniques of Brave New World very much get you thinking of the various forms of sociocultural conditioning we are exposed to today: from our school and university systems, media, and of course our governments. Honestly, many Americans today are as well-conditioned against reading books as any Delta-caste infant in Huxley's Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms. And as a culture we fill our days with ersatz activities that are no less silly as any of the books self-parodying activities like "obstacle golf" "feely movies" and "elevator squash."
In Brave New World, the State has turned human gestation and development into a mass production scheme, producing different "models" of humans. There are a few Alphas bred to run everything, with everyone else bred into various castes of varying degrees of hypocognition, so all the mindless work can be done by a mindless people, on a cognition spectrum that ranges right down to the stunted Deltas and Epsilons, produced deliberately with Downs Syndrome-level intellect.
As appalling as all this may seem, one of the key characters (in an excessive, extended dialog towards the end of the novel, see the next paragraph) makes a surprisingly persuasive argument defending just this type of civilization! In his argument you see how the predictable human urges of comfort-seeking, escapism and dopamine-seeking can be used to easily maintain a stable, compliant society. In modern American society we use a few additional tools (debt slavery, consumerism, etc.), but people comply all the same. Honestly, if you compare the aggregate happiness of Huxley's dystopia to modern American society, we come out wanting. Can you blame us for wanting our soma too?
A few criticisms. Huxley turns quite a number of good phrases in this book, he also lets sentences through that should never have survived editing ("Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lulled on the blue air above their heads" sticks out as an example). Almost all of the novel's characters are flat, although perhaps this is unavoidable, since Huxley's society manufactures them that way. The key rounded character, John the Savage, is implausible in many ways, but because Huxley needs to use him as a mouthpiece to question the mores of Brave New World, he says and does things inconsistent with his nature. Finally, Huxley badly breaks the "show, don't tell" rule of fiction writing in the book's climax, as Controller Mustapha Mond spends pages explaining everything to the readers via an endless conversation with John the Savage.
A few other thoughts. One can't help noticing the revolutionary communism influence in the character naming. The main female character is "Lenina," the main male character is "Bernard Marx," a common embryo surname is "Bakunin," and the process used to artificially produce all of the humans is called Bokanovsky's Process. A quick Google search will teach you that the Bokanovsky Huxley was likely referring to was a turn of the 20th century French politician who advocated for fully centralized state control of industry.
Finally, a thought on how any society (or possibly any grouping of humans) ultimately seems to evolve into a totalizing system where there are no half-measures, no way to be in the society but not of that society. In Brave New World the few characters who tried were either forcibly exiled or committed suicide; the rest couldn't wait to get back to comfort-seeking.
[As always, a friendly warning to read no further. What follows are just my notes and reactions to the text: your time is far too valuable to waste reading any of them.]
Notes:
[Note on the edition] This edition, the First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2006 (it has a creepy graphic of a headless man with a gear wheel for a neck on the cover), contains a useful short biography of Huxley, some commentaries on Brave New World, some brief blurbs on some of Huxley's other works (like Eyeless in Gaza and The Doors of Perception), a quite a striking letter Huxley wrote to George Orwell, responding to Orwell's 1984 and comparing their respective visions of the future.
Chapter 1
1) A fertility lab where eggs are stimulated to produce as many as 96 twins per egg, all done with equipment, no births are natural any more. A device of social stability, creating standardized men and women in uniform batches of different castes. "The principle of mass production at last applied to biology."2) "Community, identity, stability" the planetary motto.
3) Embryos labelled "T" for males, a circle for females and a question mark for "freemartins": sterilized females, which make up 70% of the total--"'For of course,' said Mr. Foster, 'in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance.'"
4) "'We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future...' He was going to say 'future World Controllers,' but correcting himself, said 'future Directors of Hatcheries,' instead. The D. H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile."
5) Starving the Epsilon embryos of oxygen to keep them "below par." "The lower the caste, the shorter the oxygen." "...in Epsilons, we don't need human intelligence." [Thus you can create a hypocognized drone caste to do your low cognition work.]
6) "That is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
Chapter 2
7) "Infant Nurseries. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms" where eight month old lower-caste babies are conditioned to loathe flowers and books by use of loud noises and electric shocks; "A love of nature keeps no factories busy." Various examples of conditioning of babies of various castes, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, etc.
Chapter 3
8) Children groomed in erotic play at ages 6-7; we meet Controller Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller for Western Europe and one of ten World Controllers. The reader is introduced to Henry Ford's phrase "History is bunk." Mond introduces the students to "historical" family life from the "pre-modern era": its unsanitariness, its dangers, the various foolish traditions of monogamy, family life, etc.; "No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable."
9) Minor dramas here between different characters interested in having sex with the same girl, Lenina Crowne.
10) The author weaves these two narrative threads with shorter and shorter cuts here; the reader learns snippets of past history, before the current "utopia" was created. "In the end the controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely sure methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia..." [Thus totalalized control is a lot easier when people have a believable illusion of free will].
11) We get our first references to soma. "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
Chapter 4
Part 1
12) Lenina embarrasses Bernard by openly asking him on a date in a room full of other Alphas, all of whom she had been with.
13) Huxley lets a few awful sentences through his own editing filter: "Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lulled on the blue air above their heads." Awful writing.
Part 2
14) Lenina and Bernard's date playing "obstacle golf"; Bernard is tortured by the idea that she's been with Henry Foster, and other men, even though she's behaving "as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave." [Here basically Bernard is a throwback to more eucivic values (which is why he doesn't fit in), while the Brave New World system of control involves propagandizing consequence-free sex and normalizing drug use (read: soma). Both serve as dyscivic forces that distract or anesthetize the individual under the system of control. Obviously, this analogizes perfectly to things like pr0n and psych/antianxiety meds today. It's downright shocking that Huxley wrote this in the 1930s.]
15) Bernard is an Alpha caste, but he is 8cm shorter than the "Alpha caste average" and in fact looks more like the average Gamma--and he's deeply insecure about it. He orders around the other castes much more aggressively: "Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority."
16) We meet Mr. Helmholtz Watson, "every centimeter an Alpha-Plus" but with enough intelligence to mentally step out of the utopian system: he was interested in more than the various ersatz distractions of the culture (escalator squash or whatever other sport, free sex, etc), despite (or maybe because of) the fact that his job is to write propaganda for this very system. He feels adrift, he's looking for something more. When Bernard spends time with Helmholtz, Helmholtz does most of the talking; he also feels pity and discomfort for Bernard.
Chapter 5
Part 1
17) Henry and Lenina have a date together: the reader learns about the crematoriums; Henry explains the phosphorus recovery process (a kilo and a half per adult corpse!) of recovery phosphorus that can be used for fertilizer.
18) "Everybody's happy now." "Yes, everybody's happy now."
19) They go to a nightclub/dance club, take a second dose of soma, and afterwards go back to Henry's home, inebriated and fully disinhibited, but yet even under full disinhibition, Lenina makes sure to use her contraceptives, following the programming all fertile women are subject to since childhood.
Part 2
20) A kind of religio-fertility rite here where a group of people pass around soma-infused ice cream to emotively manipulative music; Bernard is obsessed with one of the women because she has a unibrow.
Chapter 6
Part 1
21) Lenina is unsettled by Bernard; he likes to be alone, he's different, he doesn't take that much soma, he dislikes crowds, he dislikes "Electro-magnetic Golf"; he asks what it would be like without all the conditioning; she's appalled by the blasphemy of it all. She doesn't get him and all his questioning; she is "determined to preserve her incomprehension intact."
22) Bernard is a sort of ascetic, he wants to avoid soma and "try the effect of arresting my impulses."
Part 2
23) Bernard gets a permit to go to the New Mexican Reservation. Upon getting it initialed by his Director, the Director shares a story about a girl he was with who disappeared when they were there together twenty some years before. The Director is embarrassed by his story and covers for it by lecturing Bernard for his outside-work comportment.
Part 3
24) Bernard and Lenina arrive in New Mexico; Bernard warns her that it will rugged there, that there are no Escalator Squash courts, not even hot water.
25) "There is no escape from a Savage Reservation" the Warden lectures them.
26) Bernard learns he will be sent to Iceland, a huge demotion; he's also surprised by his reaction to it, he thought that when he would be subjected to a great trial or persecution without soma that he would handle the trial stoically and with courage: it turns out he "handles" with neither stoicism nor courage, and instead rages about how unfair it was. Lenina convinces him to take four tablets of soma and he calms down right away.
27) The helicopter pilot taking them to the Reservation tells them: "'And remember,' he added reassuringly to Lenina, 'they're perfectly tame; savages won't do you any harm. They've got enough experience of gas bombs to know they mustn't play any tricks.' Still laughing, he threw the helicopter screws into gear, accelerated, and was gone."
Chapter 7
28) Lenina doesn't like anything so far at the reservation; they see Indians in traditional attire with face and body paint, she's horrified to see an actual old man, and the reader here learns that in civilization people don't get to become old, and have "youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end." Lenina reaches for a soma but she realizes that they left them back at the rest-house. They see a rather violent and savage rain-dance ritual involving drums, snakes and the whipping of a stoic young man.
29) Bernard learns about Linda, a woman from the outside who was found by tribal hunters and brought to live in the Pueblo. This turns out to be the woman the Director was talking about in Chapter 6, and Bernard meets with Linda; she is appallingly wrinkled and old, fat, with rotting teeth, and she talks excitedly about life back in Civilization; she also complains that here there's no soma, just mescal to drink. "But it's all different here. It's like living with lunatics. Everything they do is mad."
Chapter 8
30) Bernard asks Linda's son John to tell him everything he remembers; we hear stories of the reservation men coming to sleep with Linda; how she was rejected by the women on the reservation for her "modern" sexual mores; how the womenfolk whipped her; "They say those men are their men."
31) John tells Bernard that the only time his mother was happy at the reservation was when she told him about the Other Place: it had no nasty smells, no dirt, people were never lonely, no one was ever sad or angry; about all the nice games you could play and the lovely music; all the delicious things to eat and drink. [It's almost like the human condition is to be most miserable when your "nice things" are taken away.]
32) Interesting here also how John as a young man conflates and blends the Reservation's creation stories with the stories his mother told him of Civilization; it's an interesting comment about how creation stories perhaps can be built (and later harmonized if necessary) with any given culture as that culture's religio-mythological needs change over time.
33) John becomes quite an advanced reader; his mother happens to have a textbook about embryonics, it was her employee textbook; he asks her "What are chemicals?" and it turns out she doesn't know. [This was quite a striking epistemological commentary by Huxley here: you can propagandize people with memorizable information--and they can regurgitate it flawlessly--but they still don't know any more than an illiterate "savage"! They may know "words" and they may know how to read, but they don't actually know anything. What an illusion! In modernity today, we have become well-bathed savages standing on a platform of technology, with next to no understanding of how that technology is built or functions... and yet we think we know what we're doing.]
34) One day John comes home and finds that Linda was given the complete works of William Shakespeare by one of the reservation residents, Popé. She cannot read it at all and calls it "uncivilized" and "full of nonsense."
35) Bernard starts to hatch a plan: he suggests taking John and Linda with him back to London.
36) John asks Bernard, "Do you remember what Miranda says?" "Who's Miranda?" John quotes Shakespeare [from The Tempest], "O wonder!" he was saying: and his eyes shown, his face was brightly flushed. "How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!... O brave new world." Bernard responds, "You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes." [The idea here, presumably, is that John has the same innocent enthusiasm Miranda has, but just like Miranda, he will eventually find out that this "Brave New World" is way worse than he ever could imagine.]
Chapter 9
37) Bernard gets permission from Mustapha Mond to bring Linda and John back to London. While he's gone John worries and checks in on their residence, he breaks the window and enters, he goes through all the "wonderful things" in Lenina's suitcase: perfumes, fine fabrics, talcum powder; then he sees Lenina sleeping under the influence of soma; John hears John's plane returning and runs away. [I didn't understand the narrative purpose of this scene.]
Chapter 10
38) The director plans to publicly discipline Bernard in front of the department to shame him for his various unorthodoxies. Bernard responds by bringing Linda and John out for everyone to see; Linda runs at the director and shouts "I had a baby with you!" (motherhood has become something viscerally disgusting in Brave New World after generations of artificial manufacture of babies), and then John kneels down in front of the Director and says "my father," and because the phrase a scatological subtext, it makes everyone in the department laugh out loud. The Director covers his ears and runs away.
Chapter 11
39) "All uppercaste London was wild to see this delicious creature who had fallen on his knees before the director of hatcheries and conditioning--or rather the ex-director, for the poor man had resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the Centre again..."
40) No one wanted to see Linda with her bad teeth, her obesity, her aged appearance: it made people sick as they never saw old people, as no one actually becomes old in Brave New World. And all Linda wanted to do was get some soma. John raised objections at the large doses the doctor made available to her, fearing it would likely shorten her life dramatically. The doctor explains that under the influence of soma you get a type of eternity; John responds with a Shakespearean koan from Antony and Cleopatra: "Eternity was in our lips and eyes." The doctor doesn't understand.
41) Bernard becomes more important because of John; he starts banging a lot more women, taking advantage of his new-found celebrity. It's interesting here how the system, as it rewards Bernard, begins to co-opt him: "Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory."
42) Bernard writes reports to Mustapha Mond, Mond laughs at Bernard's criticisms and unorthodox thoughts in these reports
43) John retches physically when he sees the industrialization of both people and workers in a foundry. This is his first real contact with modernity.
44) Lenina even starts to get more attention because of her experience with "the Savage"; she actually likes him; John is conflicted, he wants her but he doesn't feel like he deserves her, or that being with her is not appropriate somehow; he rejects her sexually after they have a date to go to a "feely" movie, he can't handle the modern blantant sexuality and sexual activity of this "modren" culture.
Chapter 12
45) John refuses to appear at an event that Bernard had organized to "show" him; people are increasingly talking about Bernard's "unorthodoxies"; "What should have been the crowning moment of Bernard's whole career had turned out to be the moment of his greatest humiliation." Everyone leaves the event, Bernard drops into a chair and weeps, and then takes four tablets of soma.
46) Later Bernard begins to "nourish" a grievance against John, and he also begins to be a jerk to his friend Helmholtz. "One of the principle functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."
47) Also "Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority." There were problems with certain propaganda rhymes he had written celebrating solitude and pondering how meaningless and squalid sex can be. [This is not a bad poem actually!]
48) Helmholtz also clicks right away with John, making Bernard jealous.
49) Interesting scene here where John and Helmholtz read Shakespeare together, with increasing emotional intensity; but when John reads a passage from Romeo and Juliet referring to fathers and mothers, which are long-forbidden subjects in Brave New World, Helmholtz can't handle the the contrast with his lifetime of propagandization and bursts out laughing hysterically. [Even a true poet can be blinded by his era.]
Chapter 13
50) Lenina is lovesick and makes a mistake with an embryo [and then there's a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy moment here where the author tells us that twenty-two years later someone dies of sleeping sickness because of her mistake]. She resolves to approach John directly. They have a total clash of cultures, she undresses in front of him, he can't handle it, it's too overt for his Elizabethan morality. John then receives word that his mother is ill and leaves.
Chapter 14
51) John's mother Linda is placed in a "Galloping Senility ward" in the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. The hospital introduces children to the dying process to condition them; John shows tremendous grief when his mother dies, and his grief disrupts everything with the children being conditioned.
Chapter 15
52) John is creeped out by all the twins; he interrupts a soma distribution break and tells all of the Delta worker twins there, as well as the Alpha bursar distributing the soma, that it's "Poison to soul as well as body." "Throw it all away"... Everyone is appalled and John's violation of their cultural norms, and the bursar calls a number in the telephone book.
53) Bernard can't find John; he and Helmholtz learn that John is at the Park Lane Hospital and seems to have gone mad. When they arrive they find John throwing soma out the window; the Delta worker twins began attacking him, Helmholtz instantly steps in to help fight off the Deltas; Bernard hesitates, fearful and indecisive.
54) The police arrive, begin spraying clouds of soma vapor into the air, as well as firing "water pistols" loaded with powerful aesthetic into people including Bernard. Then "Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two" begins playing on the loudspeakers. "Two minutes later the Voice and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another--half a dozen twins at a time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost crying." Bernard acts a coward here.
Chapter 16
55) The three meet with Mustapha Mond; John is delighted when he quotes Shakespeare, but in Brave New World Shakespeare, as well as many other works of literature and history, are prohibited. John and Mustapha have a discussion on why there's nothing old and beautiful, why no one today could write anything like Othello, why no one today would understand it, why the State censors works like these, etc. "You can't make flivvers without steel--and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma... Liberty!' He laughed. 'Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!'" [This speech and its implications could have come straight from the WEF: "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"]
56) "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
57) Mustapha gives a clear argument here for an elite oligarchy's various modes of control, why these controls are necessary, and why they must always be necessary. The elite running a centralized State always benefit from totalized control and stability.
58) "Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?" "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut." Mustapha goes on to explain the "Cyprus experiment" where they recolonized the island of Cyprus with twenty-two thousand Alphas: it resulted in a quick civil war. "When nineteen of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." Mustapha goes on to describe other societal control experiments, for example an attempt to use shorter working hours which resulted in unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma.
59) Bernard has a tremendous burst of emotional incontinence: he grovels in front of Mustapha, blaming the others, he is sent away and dosed with soma. Mustapha continues, explaining to Helmholz and John his own journey from scientific rebellion, to joining the Controllers Council, and then succeeding to actual Controllership and being responsible for everyone else's happiness rather than his own. Mustapha asks Helmholtz what island he'd like to be "sent" to, and Helmholtz chooses one with a horrible climate, the Falklands, making the case that it would be a better place to write. Helmholtz excuses himself to go check in on Bernard.
Chapter 17
60) Mustapha and John continue talking, he shows John various important books: the Bible, Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience; they have a discussion about God and religion; Mustapha reads an extended quote from Cardinal John Henry Newman, ("A man grows old...") [which is quite a moving quote now that I grow old]; Mustapha then gives a justification for modern civilization: people have happiness, people are never alone, and in any case man's beliefs are fully conditioned to begin with.
61) Since Mustapha is ridiculously well-read the reader gets a nice little crash course in different philosophies here [as long as you're willing to look up some of the quotes and figure out who said them and also Google the various references the characters make], it'll send you to philosophers like F.M. Bradley, Thomas a Kempis, John Henry Newman, Maine de Biran and others.
62) "There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant." [This sort of gets at it somehow; why do humans recoil from discomfort, and paradoxically why do good things ensue when we seek out discomfort? I feel like in there is a master key, a meta-solution to everything in modernity.] "You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices." [The irony here is Mustapha makes a very convincing case, and in his argument you see the urges and behaviors of most moderns]
63) "'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat semicolon the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid semicolon the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence."
Chapter 18
64) John, Helmholtz and Bernard meet up; Bernard has "a new expression of determined resignation"; John also asks the controller if he could go with them to the islands, but is refused. Also John doesn't want to go back to the Reservation either: "I'm damned if I'll go on being experimented with." [It turns out that the reservation was also a deliberate part of the system, just another "control" in The Matrix.]
65) John goes to live in a remote lighthouse area, he begins practicing various ascetic practices to purify himself; the reader learns that he intends to live by himself off the land. He becomes happy, inspired, he builds a handmade bow and arrow, people see him whipping himself, etc. A reporter comes to interview him and John kicks him in the rear. John engages in still more self tortures while a documentary researcher, hidden, records him and uses the footage to make a new "feely" movie. John then becomes a sensation and is surrounded by gawkers.
66) Lenina arrives, driving John wild with fury, he whips both her and himself. [It appears as if Huxley is parodying this ascetic behavior; it's interesting, it's as if Huxley is acting as an apologist for the system on some level here.]
67) John hangs himself, horrified by what has happened, he reader is not told exactly but it appears he was first softened up by soma and then participated in one of the standard Brave New World group orgies, and possibly had sex with Lenina (or he may have whipped her to death, it isn't clear); he wakes, remembers everything and kills himself. And that's the end of the novel!
68) [One takeaway here is that there are no half measures: you can't be in one world as well as the other at the same time, you can't be "in the world but not of the world"; you can't be in both in any way: the one way of life will necessarily destroy the other. And the author's conclusion, as nihilistic as it is, is that suicide is the resolution to this conflict of modernity.]
69) This edition ends with a short biography of Huxley, on his traditional Eton and Oxford education, his first novels, his immigration to California, his eventual fascination with spiritual and mystical life, culminating in his books The Perennial Philosophy and The Devils of Louden, as well as his experiments with mescaline and LSD, giving rise to his book The Doors of Perception, which influenced the counterculture of the 1960s.
70) There's also an essay discussing the contemporary response to Brave New World, how the reviewers and pundits of that era completely failed to understand his work, mocked it with low blows, etc. [It just goes to show that you want negative reviews, this book was far more predictive and resonant than anyone would have guessed the time. "No man is a prophet in his own land."]
71) Also note this interesting quote from Huxley himself in a forward to an edition published after World War II, where he had projected his Utopia six hundred years into the future but wrote instead, "Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century."
72) Two noteworthy quotes from a letter Huxley wrote to George Orwell:
[First responding to Orwell's "boot on the face" form of control in 1984] "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and [less] wasteful ways of governing and satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." And then: "The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."
Vocab:
Solecism: a grammatical mistake in speech or writing; a breach of good manners; a piece of incorrect behavior
Brachycephalic: having a relatively broad, short skull
Dolichocephalic: having a relatively long skull
Incarnadine: a bright crimson or pinkish-red color ("an incarnadine rose") also a verb: to color (something) a bright crimson or pinkish-red
To Read:
***John Henry Newman: Meditations and Devotions of the Late Cardinal Newman
Thomas à Kempis: The Imitation of Christ
William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
Maine de Biran: The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man
Maine de Biran: Of Immediate Apperception
F.H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality (2nd edition)
Sybille Bedford: Aldous Huxley (biography)
Aldous Huxley: Eyeless in Gaza
Aldous Huxley: Island
Aldous Huxley: The Genius and the Goddess
Aldous Huxley: The Devils of Loudon
Aldous Huxley: The Divine Within
Aldous Huxley: The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy