Happiness Is Quickly Becoming The Only Acceptable Feeling
Aldous Huxley predicted it all.
I’ve never read a book before that made me instantly double-check the often ignored first few pages with all the publication and copyright information. As soon as I finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I had to flip to the front of the book.
1932, this book was published in Nineteen Thirty-Two. That can’t be right, I thought to myself. Books that are nearly 100 years old are about whales or parries or the French Revolution. Was Huxley a prophet among mortals?
Brave New World is a work of speculative fiction about a future World State whose main purpose is to keep everyone happy. The society has everything: a wonder drugs called soma (all the highs, none of the hangovers), personal helicopters, genetically engineered beautiful humans, and orgies, lots of orgies.
Everyone is happy all the time. No one is allowed to feel otherwise.
As you can imagine, the novel describes a dystopia rather than a utopia. Having only one acceptable state of being — happy — comes at a cost, namely, no more free will, only endless distractions from reality.
As I read this book — again, from 1932! — I couldn’t help but draw inferences to society today. When we lose someone close…
