I loved it sounds almost perfect! Ironic that its grouped with “dystopian futures” but that was news to me.

[1]: http://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-v...

1984

Fahrenheit 451

Brave New World

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Neuromancer

Opened my mind and put into writing some of the things I'd been contemplating.

  * no exit - jean-paul sartre
  * brave new world - adolous huxley
  * 1984 - george orwell
  * foucault's pendolum - umberto eco
  * l'etranger - albert camus
  * 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - jules vernes

Suggested reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

This isn't the theme of "Brave New World" that I picked up on, and I don't think the book featured a world with profit-seeking corporations.

Seems to me like "consuming because we want to" is the better choice of the two, no?

Not that I disagree with the gist of your point.

I read those when I was 12... then everything I could find by Lem and Huxley too.

So we named it after the guy who coined the term "agnostic", Thomas Henry Huxley.

I stand with Nir (and Huxley). These technologies are powerful, but that doesn't make them evil. They can be used for good.

just in time to get a kick out of the "brave new obamian world" video

This, 100%. Turns out turning fiction to reality is a profitable endeavor.

Then I read Brave new world. Happiness taken to extremes.

Now I'm not so sure.

And I wonder also, if it'd be deemed undesirable to be able to pick and choose traits and prototypes..

All in all, fun conversation, and makes me want to read Brave New World again.

Interesting parallels between this article and the world Huxley predicted nearly 100 years ago.

The only Utopia I expect is the one of my religion. I don't expect to create one.

I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.

Or maybe they've just read and understood Brave New World all too well.

I read this book in the eighth grade. I was fascinated by the classes the society was divided into. In the book you were born into a certain class, and I saw many similarities to today's world. It was not the most inspiring, but definitely it was the most interesting.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement

The Song and the Pendant by Magnus Von Black

Fahrenheit 451 is also a solid read.

This is by far the WORST one line summary I've ever seen about that novel.

poly + molly + endless disposable entertainment ... it's hard to come to grips with, and incredibly scary.

I had few discussions of it and I still to this day, can't decide. It is definitely must read book, and its a good read too. Not a borish slog that puts you to sleep.

This book is a wonderful book that anticipates the present future.

Not all of this book foretells, but I am reading it because I want to be able to have such foresight.

Being emotional was a trait considered as crazy.

I think the present for some people is already a synthesis of all three and if we're not careful it will be for everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_State_in_Brave_New_World...

- Night

- Hitchhiker's Guide series

- Dark Tower series (Mostly just the first 4, though)

- Eats, Shoots & Leaves

- Just about any George Carlin or Patrick F. McManus books

- Wheel of Time Series

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

- The Shock Doctrine by N. Klein

- The Anarchist Banker by F. Pessoa

- Collapse by J. Diamond

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by D. Kahneman

- a few books by Noam Chomsky

EDIT: nearly forgot:

- Brave New World by A. Huxley

Huxley was Brave New World, Orwell was 1984.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932

"Bokanovsky's Process"... x-ray, and alcohol to clones of the "worker class" to make them slow and stupid to do your bidding.

https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html

Somehow, this line reminded me of Huxley's "Brave New World".

Nothing new actually. The whole concept is pretty old.

Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".

Read "Brave New World" and see if any of the things depicted there ring a bell.

I like "Brave New World" as well. It is interesting to see how our present is a mix of both Huxley's and Orwell's worlds. http://postimg.org/image/ue0pdq56r/

Candide by Voltaire is a classic satirical novel that still works fairly well imo, though it can be a bit un-subtle by the standards of modern literary satire.

At this point, they may now have become so obvious that they’re cliché.

That got personal, I like selling adult books like Don Quijote, Brave New World and 1984... but keep getting banned on other platform.

- Orwell's 1984

- Aldus Huxley's Brave New World

- Philip K. Dick's Minority Report

- Andrew Niccol's Gattica

* The miracle of mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh

* Letters from a stoic - Seneca

* Amusing ourselves to death (Neil Postman) (combined with 1984 by Orwell and Brave New World by Huxley)

* Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki

* Walden - Henry David Thoreau

That said, whether it's one company or a few that are well-aligned doesn't really matter for the purposes of that book.

RIP Aldous Huxley and thanks for having written Brave New World. It changed my life.

written by the same author as 'Brave New World', Aldous Huxley, the book details more of a Carrot approach to big brother.

- Brave New World: Aldous Huxley is a genius and a wordsmith

- Dune: a sci-fi masterpiece, highly recommended to anyone into sci-fi

- Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: not purely fiction but an amazing book I will surely re-read during my lifetime

"Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

I've read the Lord of the Rings 3 - 4 times, which I feel is a lot for a pretty thick series.

Lord of the Flies: 3 - 4 reads

1984: 3 - 4 reads

A Clockwork Orange: 3 reads

Brave New World: 4 reads

I really like dystopian fiction I guess.

An institution only needs a handful of actual leaders. But it needs thousands of middle managers. This program undermines that goal, so they shut it down.

/me gets depressed and goes off to read Brave New World again.

We won't give up our liberties if they are taken by force, but rather give them up out of apathy. Apathy as a result of the cessation of our easy desires.

There are many parallels between trends we all see coming in the 20s and themes of Huxley's '32 work.

A country that achieves what is described in the book will almost certainly fail to compete with countries that reward creative endeavours and free thought.

https://pulsemedia.org/2009/02/02/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate...

edit:

>Perhaps next time they should consider assassination

Perhaps you should consider the possibility that this coup was staged by Erdogan himself in order to purge all critically thinking people in prominent positions.

The Fountainhead,

Stranger in a Strange Land,

The Rules of Life,

Catch-22,

1984,

Brave New World, and

An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning (by Peter Eccles)

I'm guessing (from a quick trip to Wikipedia) OP means this:

Soma, featured in Aldous Huxley's novels Brave New World and Island, a fictional hallucinogenic drug to keep society peaceful and happy.

It's been a LONG time since I last read BNW, time to put it back on the reading list!

The interesting bit is that if you're part of Brave New World's society, it's not a bad place... it's just stuck in time. There's an original series Star Trek episode where they ask the question: can they disturb a society which hasn't progressed for centuries; their answer was yes. I have mixed feelings about that, but I certainly wouldn't like to see humanity to stop evolving, dreaming, building, and if we keep this up, we might just will.

"Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" - Lewis Carroll

"Dracula" - Bram Stoker

"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelly

"On Education" - Bertrand Russell

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" - Douglas Adams

"Animal Farm" - George Orwell

"1984" - George Orwell

"Lord of The Flies" - William Golding

"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley

"Gulliver's Travels" - Jonathan Swift

"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins

Really expanding on this stuff takes a lot of writing, I'm not quite up for it yet (but I'm working on it).

1. More people have read 1984 than have read Brave New World.

2. Brave New World is so ridiculously accurate that most people are too afraid to think about what this means.

We fear 1984 while living (for the most part, the only real difference is that we don't have, or need, a direct controlling force) Brave New World.

The point is to increase your children's (that is, everyone's) reliance on the government, of course. The ideal for statists would be to remove parents from the equation completely. You've read Brave New World, right?

It was a sobering exercise realizing that there's a fair amount of Orwellian and Huxleyan prophecies in our modern world, but we tend to focus more on the 'scarier' Orwellian ideas.

Nobody has an interesting courtship story. It's just a boring "Oh i thought she was hot and I messaged her" kind of thing. I only know 1 couple in their late 20s/early 30s where both partners are truly happy. Everybody else is just stuck in a perpetual mindfuck or is cheating their way to happiness.

I you haven't read "Brave New World" I would highly recommend this book because it shows the society we're becoming.

  * 7 languages in 7 weeks, Bruce A. Tate
  * Coders at Work, Peter Seibel
  * Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  * Neuromancer, William Gigson

  * The Island of Doctor Moreau, H G Wells
  * Brave new world, Aldous Huxley

  * The Martian: A Novel, Andy Weir
  * Dune, Frank Herbert
  * 2001: A space odyssey, Arthur C Clarke

Ironically, Orwell wrote before WWII that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) was heavily inspired by We (1921). Then he wrote 1984 (1949) which borrows even more: it's the same story, with more romance and a more mainstream narrating style.

All of the Big Brother, Ministries of Whatever, censorship, and surveillance stuff was just window dressing for the love message.

Even Brave New World, to me, is about love. The society spurns familial love (like between John and his mother) and committed relationships (like between everyone and everyone) and pain or discomfort is a prerequisite for love and the pursuit of happiness has all but eliminated true love from the world. John kills himself because he hurt the woman he loved, he is humiliated for loving his mother, and is frustrated by the fact that the woman he loves can't love him because she is too busy pursuing simple, immediate, pleasures.

At least, that's my recollection of the two books.

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

Really though we don't need to go to fiction to see what is happening in society. We just need to go to Ancient Rome. "Bread and circuses" was a tactic used by the patricians (elites) to keep the plebeians (masses) appeased. Give people a minimum standard of living so they can continue to live, and distract them from injustices and corruption through entertainment.

Take Huxley's "soma" for instance. An astounding portion of our population go through life medicated: Prozak/etc, pain killers, marijuana.

Not that I blame them. Totalitarianism is a bitter pill. Better have something to take the edge off.

If the comment had gone on to say something deeper or more specific about Brave New World in this context, that would obviously have been fine.

"Armada" was a nice simple story very much along the lines of "Ready Player One." "Daemon" was surprising -- an interesting 'what if' regarding the evolution of AI.

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html

It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror.

(Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)

The answer i think is already being played out around us and involves Nihilism, Hedonism and Fanaticism. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World also hints about it. On the individual level we all need means to access "varying altered levels of consciousness" and on the societal level we need to be made more interdependent as a collective. The former is an experience to justify our individual existence while the latter keeps us bound to "society".

Brave New World changed my entire outlook on consumerism and mass media. I recommend it to everyone!

He basically presents Huxley's world exactly. His real contribution seems to be the analysis at the end. Specifically, the notion that individuality must be retained, as it is an "asset of society."

My simplified summary though, is this: Brave New World for the masses, and 1984 for anyone who wakes up and tries to change it.

Also, that people talk about both authors works but neglect to discuss their British secret and not-so-secret society connections seems to create a sort of superficial aura of debate around the two. Frankly, the books only scratch the surface, but TPTB have done an excellent job at making any even potential association with the title "conspiracy theorist" a thing to be feared. (and plenty of the theorists themselves have helped in that cause)

There's nothing wrong with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. You're probably right that it receives outsized attention because of the movie, but it's a fine book in its own right. It's probably one of the easier PKD books to get into if you're not used to him in particular or sci-fi in general, which is reason enough to recommend it to someone.

Brave New World is a good book to understand why this is a bad idea. It seems that Orwell and Huxley books are being used as manuals instead of the cautionary tale that they are.

1984 by George Orwell. I am told that we're increasingly moving towards a mix of 1984 and Brave New World (I haven't read the latter).

I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas.

For non-fiction, the books 'Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Taleb were eye-openers for me. Also, I found an interesting synergy between Nassim's books and the book 'Thinking fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman (which is a book about human psychology).
Also, I enjoyed reading 'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'.

I don't read much fiction but it can be interesting sometimes. I read 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley many years ago and it's a book that appears to be becoming more relevant with time. I find that watching foreign films can also help to diversify my thinking.

If anything, Minority Report is what we should send. The entire purpose of this program is to find terrorists before they commit their crimes. The surveillance is widespread (as it is in Minority Report). People live comfortable lives until they become targets, and becoming a target occurs without warning and can happen to anyone.

I also judge it harshly for the way the author wrote the only female character as an obvious object of wish-fulfillment rather than a coherent individual with reasonable motivations.

I do indeed give it credit for being an early scifi dystopia, but every other dystopia I've read was far better, and I can't help but feel that "Brave New World" surpassed "We" in every possible way. Still not recommending this book to anyone who doesn't just want to learn about dystopic novels.

In it, the government uses entertainment and technology to keep people within their assigned classes as opposed to military force and surveillance.

I'm sure there are some professional MMORPG players out there fuming right now, thinking, "I made XXX dollars selling equipment on ebay." or "I made XXX dollars winning such and such tournament." Porn stars also make a lot of money.

If I had to make a wild guess as to why people stay on the smack into adulthood, it would be escapism. When life paints you into a corner, it is very easy to retreat into the virtual world with netflix and xbox. Urban Japan is hard mode, so probably a much higher percentage of people being painted into corners. Still probably better than netflix though. At least it's an active pursuit rather than a passive one.

For example, books were banned in "Brave New World" -remember all that Shakespeare drama? Huxley was saying people are going to be controlled by the government because in the Brave New World, the government breeds humans for different purposes, and all those humans know are pleasures which are completely dependent on the government, like daily rations of soma, a drug which prevents aging and sadness.

Some of my favorites and their lessons:

Enders game -> Understanding an "enemy" makes you see their beauty, makes you not want to be enemies (dehumanizing the enemy is extremely important in warfare and in propaganda; we boycot evil Putin, we don't think of honest Russian people who "love their children too", trying to make the best out of life.).

Atlas Shrugged -> The importance of not ignoring your own wishes in a group context, the morality of rational self-interest.

Brave New World -> You can either spend time creating or you can spend it consuming.

1984 -> All the metaphors it provides just makes any discussion regarding government over-reach so much more efficient.

Little Brother -> Why privacy is more important than security: Your rulers can be wrong with catastrophic consequences.

At the time I kind of thought: "liberals are more like BNW with drugs and 'karma' and such, and conservatives are more like 1984 with endless wars and refusing to acknowledge things."

At some point in my life, it feels this has flipped.

I now see conservatives as consuming soma (tv) to lull them into a false and simple world, and liberals as enforcing wrong-think.

Obviously, life is much more complex than two books, and similarities can be drawn in any direction. But I still find it interesting having watched my perceptions flip.

On the other hand, checkout http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub. That subreddit flags many of the deepest, most insightful comments on reddit and is a fascinating trove of information about all sorts of interesting subjects.

For example, here's a brilliant comment that compares and contracts Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George Orwell's "1984" (both excellent books, I might add): http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1hhrpk/huxley_vs_orwe...

In a sense, Reddit can tend towards a Brave New World style of information by drowning us in so much information, much of which is false or inane, that we can lose sight of what's important, but as a source of entertainment, it's often terrific.

You were more on target when you praised the efficacy of FB's advertising products, bleepblorp. Unfortunately, FB doesn't offer any way to control the course of society except to hasten its decline by overwhelming users with crap.

Neil Postman anticipated this in 1985, when he explained that America had not succumbed to Orwell's dystopian 1984 vision, but rather, had become something more akin to Huxley's Brave New World:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with indulgences, trifles, and vanities."

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Classics definitely aren't picked because millions of people over dozens of generations have enjoyed them more than other books. If that were the case, high school students would spend a year just reading Agatha Christie.

And I can count on one hand the number of science fiction and fantasy books we read in high school and college literature classes (1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451).

Basically, what kind of person has such a petty, nasty view of the human species that he honestly believes, if left to our own devices, we'll turn into that?

When you read Brave New World in high school it's a little difficult to recognize there's multiple layers of satire there.

It helps if you have the technical skills to go with it but to be honest, having those skills should be a matter of training, not expecting people to be learning on their own time.

This should be fixed on the company level - every employee should receive regular training, not be expected to magically keep up their workload and learn new technologies in their spare time.

Another issue that makes projects go side-ways is people relying on a paycheque for their livelihood. If you want people with integrity to practice it in the workplace, don't place them in impossible situations where they have to choose between their integrity and their family's financial well being.

This should be fixed on the government level.

This is all to say that this endless stream of blog posts about what an already over-worked, under-paid worker ought to improve upon, are not helpful - highly educated people used to be Aristocrats who fine dined and wrote poetry. Today we are expecting people to pay for their own training, spend the best years of their lives studying to pass tests, be hazed trying to get a job, for the privilege of getting worked to the bone for the benefit of a corporate entity. I thought only dystopian novels could think of a system so counter-productive and insane, until I read Brave New World and thought hm, this might be an upgrade over the life I'm currently living.

Anyhow :)

Also interesting is Brave New World Revisited, a book written 30 years after he's other book where he compares it with 1984 by Orwell. He also makes some guesses about the future[1].

I love dystopias and Brave New World is the best.

spoiler

[1] The most important one being about soma and how it's so similar to lsd.

well nobody should get the damn thing, it sounds like they're trying to turn people into smiling customer service zombies, did the people at Amazon read Brave New World and thought Soma was something they should actually build?

"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects"

I was raised in a super religious house; for whatever reason, that one or two books started my down a path of materialism/skepticism and away from religiosity/dualism/spiritualism. It was just the start, mind you. I was probably already primed and heading that way anyway, and that just happened to be the spark. I don't mean that there were any huge insights or great revelations for me there.

Island is pro-drug (magic mushrooms), pro-sex, pro-enjoying life, sensible use of sperm banks, sensible non-coercive education, playful response to religion.

Sado-masochism is presented as child abuse or a kinky adult game, not as in BNW as a nobel response to an immoral world (BNW ends with the savage whipping himself, getting into an orgy with curious onlookers, and then hanging himself in disgust).

"Science et Méthode" (Henri Poincaré, 1908)

"The Conquest of Happiness" (Bertrand Russell, 1930)

"The Revolt of the Masses" (José Ortega y Gasset, 1930)

"Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley, 1932)

"Reason" (Isaac Asimov, 1941, short story)

"Animal Farm" (George Orwell, 1945)

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" (George Orwell, 1949)

"Starship Troopers" (Robert A. Heinlein, 1959)

"The Gods Themselves" (Isaac Asimov, 1972)

"Time Enough for Love" (Robert A. Heinlein, 1973)

It’s such a good series and probably paints a better understanding of what a fallen world means and what a proper relationship with God is like, yet using sci-fi literalism instead of religious dogma.

But you mention enjoying words. Now that I think of it, I don't typically enjoy words. I enjoy the ideas that words convey, so I happily read a ton of books, but when the writing is not straightforward I quickly lose interest.

And I do theoretical math and try to persuade calculus students that it's a fantastic subject, so I certainly can't accuse anyone of being pretentious when they enjoy something I don't!

Shakespeare had Ovid and Homer and the Bible to pull his references and allusions from, but our shared canon is considerably poorer.

I like to listen to audiobooks (when commuting), and BNW's audiobook (produced by BBC) was also great: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012QED5Y

Shakespeare, and other great works of classic literature... are now classified as "malware"...

Essays (like those of Emerson, Voltaire or Thoreau) are now classified as "malicious essays"...

And, much like a box of Cracker Jack, or bottle of Tequila, you get a free "surprise" with each one... you get a free worm... (well, it's a computer worm... but same difference...)

Well two things are for sure in this "Brave New World" (a book which is also banned by the way!)...

1) Computer virus protection companies will never go bankrupt, and

2) Perhaps old-fashioned, printed on physical paper, virus-free (well, computer-virus free, not necessarily "mind-virus" free!) books (in addition to actual education) will make a comeback!

I am not holding my breath for this, however...

(Disclaimer: I am kidding about most of the things I said above...)

Getting past the first chapter of Pandoras Star is well worth it - Morninglightmountain is one of the most original, minblowingly awesome all time alien baddies, and the trepidation and sense of impending doom in that book and its's sequel Judas Unchained are superb. Would also recommend the Void Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton too - strong mix of scifi and an alternate fantasy world.

Missing in my view would be:
Greg Bear - Eon (as people have mentioned, but also:
M John Harrison - Light
James Blish - Cities in Flight
Battlefield Earth (awesome book, hopeless film)
Brave New World for my ultimate "classic"

Brave New World was published in 1932 after all. "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wi...

"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

relevant: "The pace of modern life" https://xkcd.com/1227/

The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it.

We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.

Of course, people of sufficiently low mental capability don't occur naturally at a high enough rate. So they have to help things along by disrupting fetal development for some people. That part seems morally questionable.

Great novel though, highly recommended.

1. 1984 by George Orwell: totalitarianism, telescreens, thought police, doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother and the cult of personality

2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Using medication to stay happy, psychological manipulation and conditioning, class hierarchy based on intelligence (or perceived ability).

3. The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth. Huge international corporations de facto run the world. States are their front. Advertising is the best paid profession (FB, Google). Ads and products are very addictive and aggressive. Advertising agencies select the new president. People are fooled to believe that quality of the products is constantly improving their life while basic things needed for life are becoming more expensive and out of reach for normal people.

One wonders who he is to convince them that they may end their suffering.

I think that there's something very cold about a society which says, 'on net, the world is better without you in it' not to someone who is a murderer, rapist or traitor but to someone who is depressed or afflicted with cancer.

> Last year, De Standaard, a prominent Flemish newspaper, published a long tribute to a depressed mother who was euthanized after being abandoned by her boyfriend and becoming disillusioned by her psychiatric care. “I am forever grateful to her that she handled this so well,” her twenty-four-year-old son told the paper. “I am so glad we were able to say goodbye in a beautiful way.”

One wonders if the son attempted to support his mother in life, rather than tell her goodbye.

> On the morning on which the euthanasia was scheduled, Boeykens’s daughter, Kerstin, said that she called De Deyn, crying, and begged him to move her mother’s 9 A.M. appointment a few hours later, so that she would have time to drop her children off at school and then drive to the clinic. But De Deyn said that he was booked for the rest of the day. (De Deyn denies that this happened.) Records show that Boeykens died at 9:20 A.M., at which point De Deyn removed her brain and performed an autopsy.

I don't really know if there's anything more to add to this vignette. It's like something out of Brave New World (a book which, incidentally, I've always found far more prophetic than 1984).

A short story about the consequences of normalized post-birth genetic alteration:
http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/thelittlegods.ht...

A short description of the pre-birth and post-birth conditioning present in Aldous Huxley's famous Brave New World:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_so...

The Last Book In The Universe takes a different approach to the issue. A cataclysmic event called The Big Shake destroys society, and only a small group of surviving scientists hidden underground were able to genetically modify their offspring to be superior to the rest of the world. This creates an immensely divisive class system, and the genetically altered humans live and govern separately from the rest of the planet.

This will not be an easy problem to solve, and there is no telling what the future effects will be. But it seems precise genetic alteration is the inevitable holy grail, doesn't it?

I wasn't sure if the "you" here is "you, the person who posted the link," (singular, referring to me) or "you, the readers of this comment of mine" (plural, referring to anyone who reads your helpful comment). I agree that Brave New World, which I read in childhood and reread in childhood and in adulthood, is a very thought-provoking novel.

On my part, I posted the link under the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" clause of the HN guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

after it came up in a Google News alert that I've had set for months (which only rarely yields blog entries worth reading). I endorse this submitted blog entry as worth reading for better-than-average research and for important subject matter, without claiming I agree with all of the author's conclusions. Maybe I'll agree with more or fewer of the author's conclusions after I read the discussion here. I'm willing to be convinced by evidence. I see an interesting discussion is developing through your comment and others. Thanks.

"This is some rare TV footage of LSD research conducted in Los Angeles in 1956 by Dr. Sidney Cohen, which included an interview with Gerald Heard, an Anglo-Irish philospher who turned on a number of influential Americans in the 1950s. Among them was AA co-founder Bill Wilson, who thought LSD could help some drunks have a spiritual awakening. Wilson's first trip was in this very room in summer of 1956 and was supervised by Dr. Cohen and guided by Mr. Heard. The whole story, and much more, is told in "Distilled Spirits -- Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk" by Don Lattin, the author of the bestselling "The Harvard Psychedelic Club." The "Famous Writer" in this blend of memoir and group biography is Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World" and "The Doors of Perception."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeO2BOdmkEg

and

https://aabeyondbelief.org/2015/10/21/the-lsd-experiments/

Huxley's editor said it'd never sell, so he added the plotline from the perspective of one man who wanted to break free and made the entire thing dystopic.

I believe the signs are all there that many of the real Team Elite really do want Brave New World-esque domination, with a tiny group of truly free elite managing the masses as though they were cattle.

EDIT:
In the book Huxley imagines a new society. One of the hallmarks of the society is there is no pain or suffering. This is accomplished in part by Soma, a fictional drug perhaps best described as a no negative side effect tranquilizer or opiate.

EDIT EDIT:
The society also removes almost all major sources of pain. A person is chemically engineered (was written before the discovery of DNA) to be happy with their job and position in life since conception. There are no parents. There is sex but no romantic love. In avoiding pain almost all the happiness in the society is superficial, coming from sex, drugs and movies. They might be happy, in the most shallow meaning of the word, but there is clearly no joy.

"Minority Report" was also a pretty forgettable short story, and this time the movie made of it was mediocre.

"A Scanner Darkly" was yet another minor PKD work that was made in to yet another movie. It seems this list of scifi books if partial towards books made in to movies. But just because they've been made in to movies doesn't make the original book good, much less great.

As far as PKD books go (which is quite far, as he is one of my favorite authors), I would recommend "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and "Martian Time Slip".

And of his short stories, I'd recommend "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Woof".

Gibson's "Neuromancer" is alright, but "Count Zero" is better. Avoid the rest of his work.

"Brave New World" is an incredibly overrated, heavy-handed propaganda novel, written without a shred of talent. Avoid.

"Dune" is great, though I prefer the last few books of the original (Frank Herbert) series: "God Emperor", "Heretics", and "Chapterhouse". Definitely skip "Children" and "Messiah".

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is utterly brilliant, and is deserving of a place on a top-10 scifi novels list.

I enjoyed "Foundation" and "I Robot" as a kid. Not sure if I'd still like them now, decades later. Likewise for "Farenheit 451" and "Ender's Game".

I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged", but I did read "The Fountainhead", which amounted to a very long-winded statement of Ayn Rand's philosophy with two-dimentional characters serving as mouthpieces for it. It could have easily been stated in 30 pages, but instead was stretched out over 600.

This kind of reminds me how I felt when I was reading both those books. I had already seen all the memes about 1984 not being an instruction manual, and it left me kind of confused, because the direction the west is moving towards doesn't really resemble what was described in the book (at least, not yet). Then I read Brave New World and it certainly read like something more relevant to our current situation. Both are horrifying stories though, and it pains me that US, a nation that once prided itself for being 'free' has 2 conflicting mainstream ideologies, both of which call for a bigger government in an attempt to oppress the other side.

I'd also recommend that you read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for a counterpoint. The sad part is that the way the world is going appears to be a mix of the worst elements of the two.

Of course, the perpetual war in 1984 was a big part of the story, but because we only ever see the world from characters living in Airstrip One, for all we know the war could've been over years ago.

My most troubling experience regarding Brave New World concerns a short community review of Brave New World on GoodReads I read not long time ago. (The only review in Finnish.) It consistently kept calling it "utopia" and discussed only things like how the savages lived in terrible conditions and the characters and "Shakespeare quotes" were "annoying". Not a word about how book is meant to be a dystopia, or if skipping the fancy words, about a society that is a pretty bad place to live. And I was left wondering if the writer of that review just did not know about the word "dystopia", or simply could not spot anything troubling with the picture Huxley painted.

"Will Farnaby is a cynical journalist shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, a Buddhist paradise where modern science and technology is embraced only insofar as it can improve medicine and nutrition, not for industrialization; drugs are used for enlightenment, not for pacification; and the evils of corporatism are unknown."

"The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world."

https://www.amazon.com/Island-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061561797

If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start to disappear. All you have to do is look to N. Korean, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela right now, this day to see how disastrous it is. You may call me hyperbolic but this is exactly how it starts. If we have to lose some elderly people to a virus (with an IFR of .1%, median age of death of 84 and 92% with comorbidity), i'm sorry to say that we have to lose them. The alternative is authoritative oppression, starvation and misery for hundreds of millions of others. Make no mistake, this is exactly what is at risk when you talk about removing personal freedoms.

Now, things are different. Facebook is building the set for a real life Truman show [1], Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns..) has found stiff competition in the rise of censorship on the 'net, 1984 is treated as a user manual by those who prefer to see the world in terms of 'good' and 'bad', Brave New World is just another story - nothing to see there, move along. Where institutions like the EU are trying to dissolve national borders and national identities without offering a believable identity in return, leaving the population grasping for a handhold and ready for recruitment by any strong identity group which catches their favour.

There is supposed to be a Chinese proverb saying 'may you live in interesting times' , to be directed at those one considers to be their opponents. While the proverb seems to be made up, times are interesting in many ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show

* 'Paris in the Twentieth Century' by Jules Verne

* 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley

* '1984' by George Orwell

* 'The Space Merchants' by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (1952)

Verne predicts correctly many technologies and changes they cause in the society. Probably the
most accurate future projection overall.

The three other books: The Brave New World, 1984 and The Space Merchants neatly complement each other. Our reality is a mix of the three themes represented in these books.

Some people think that 'Stand on Zanzibar' should be mentioned.

Of course, reality is also better than that. Many of the people that would ostensibly be equivalent to the party members in 1984 are the ones that are making noise about the dangers of what the government is doing. And the fascist hell hole aspects of Brave New World are certainly not our everyday (society more or less treats excessive use of things like alcohol and marijuana as serious problems. More so for individuals with higher levels of civic engagement...).

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Foundation Trilogy -Isaac Asimov

The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss

The Law - Frédéric Bastiat

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff

It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book - Paul Arden

Are ones that stand out. I'm sure a lot of other books helped shape my worldview though, especially ones I read as a kid. The "Tom Swift Jr." adventures, the "Three Investigators" stories, the "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys" ones, and those "Encyclopedia Brown" books all stand out in my memory as probably being influential. And later in life, I'd say Dean Koontz' work has had something of an impact.

What if taking certain drugs actually liberated rather than enslaved you?

Psychedelics, constructively used, might actually help people see through the power structures used to control them in ordinary life, and could be a strong catalyst for positive social change.

Take a look at the ideals that psychedelic use encouraged in the 60's and 70's counterculture. These people were not after being lulled further in to sleep by "narco-hypnosis", as Huxley terms it. They were after dropping out of the dominant society, about building their own alternative societies, about being peaceful and loving towards each other, about resisting the powers who told them to give their lives to chasing profit, or climbing the corporate ladder, or killing people in wars, or hating other people.

Of course, they did not all realize their ideals in the long run (though some did... the environmental movement, which has been incredibly successful, had its roots in that time), but it wasn't like these people were an army of brainwashed zombies programmed to obey. If anything, they questioned and disobeyed too much for mainstream society to tolerate, and there was a huge reactionary backlash against them -- they who had been greatly influenced by psychedelic drugs.

I suggest you take a look beyond Huxley's "Brave New World" (which he wrote in 1932) to his later book "Island" (which he wrote in 1962), in which he himself describes a utopia based around the use of a psychedelic sacrament. His thinking on drugs had clearly evolved in the 30 years since he wrote the former novel.

Also, Huxley is famous for having asked for and received LSD on his deathbed. There is a touching account of this event written by his wife here:

https://erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxley_la...

Also, not trying to be on a high horse here (hey, I'm posting this on HN...) you might find that the people are merely offered the drugs and brain-computer devices and they make their own decisions about the two.

There's a fantastic comic (no link, sorry) comparing Orwell's future to Huxley's future that's remarkably relevant.

EDIT: link - https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/huxley-orwel...

I forgot, but it gets even better when, at the bottom, you notice the book is also from an even more prescient book, Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. I believe it came out around the "golden era" of TV, but again I don't think all that much has changed. We're still the same humans with the same flaws. I should stop there; I'll start giving out spoilers. Read the books. :)

This guy gets it. I absolutely agree that China needs the searing scrutiny of the world for the sake of its people and the world but China is also still in absolute infantile stages of propaganda sophistication. Straight up censorships and news suppressions are things the West did in WWI. Astroturfing is a step up but operating under the premise of a palatable freedom of information and political choice while being inundated with what to think without ever receiving 'literal fake news' is light-years ahead of China.

And as to how you're defining and establishing clichés in a novel technical process, I do not know, since the nature of novelty means there is no meaningfully recurrent pattern. And I must say I don't appreciate you wantonly imperiling the accessibility of my comment. Also I suggest you read the book, it's very good. The Island is also quite good, if you're interested. I can't speak to the rest of Huxley's work.

If these were digitised they'd most likely be stored on the same device as their personal and private matters, and one does not out of good manners, automatically fire up their PC's or tablets to go and have a rummage around.

I have hundreds of books and I'd find it hard to decide which ones should hit the recycler. To this day yet even my scrappy 1970's paperback copies of stuff like 1984, Brave New World or The Ginger Man still elicit long conversations because visiting friends can freely browse your shelves.

I think a better form of government results from trying to achieve a balance between capitalism and socialism (Possibly other things too, I'm not a political science major). I'm not sure how far it should lean one way or the other, I just know that both ideologies lead to plenty of human suffering when allowed to completely dominate.

1984 is one of my all-time favorites. I love dystopian fiction. Have you also read Brave New World?

Probably the only correctly-placed book in the fiction list was Ulysses. Several mindblowing pieces were completely ignored for the sake of name recognition, both in the original and the Radcliffe list.

I'd gotten into this with David Brin a few years back on G+ when he was grousing that modern sci-fi is pessimistic in was the classics never were. He is wrong. Though happy stories do tend to sell better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature

In the real world everyone rates themselves in comparison to other people too, but most of the time the process is not very open. In the workplace people are prevented from saying what they think about other people by office politics, employment law, and HR policies against this and that. Probably the only place it is really transparent is in school (If memory servers correct there is a PG essay about this).

Stranger in a strange land is definitely a great book and Heinlein has to be one of the greats of SF writing. Read 'the moon is a harsh mistress' too if you get the chance.

The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aphorisms and short stories are much better than his novels.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

> The villagers hold the officials and the castle in high regard, even though they do not appear to know what the officials do. The actions of the officials are never explained. The villagers provide assumptions and justification for the officials' actions through lengthy monologues. Everyone appears to have an explanation for the officials' actions, but they often contradict themselves and there is no attempt to hide the ambiguity. Instead, villagers praise it as another action or feature of an official.

Replace officials and castle with AI and it is almost the exact same scenario.

1. This is already happening: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)

  First they came for the swears . . .

Next is content not in alignment with the schools ideologies or politics, for what is essential to a work?

These aren't abstract tin-foil hat concerns either: In 1982 Texas banned a geography textbook for mentioning evolution [1]. Publishers are financially incentivized to publish. These mechanisms enable those in power to control the information presented to children and students to suit their agendas (even while their own children attend private schools not subject to their decisions).

>According to Time magazine, the list of the most banned books of all time include . . . “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley; “1984,” by George Orwell

We should be pretty uptight about censorship.

https://ncse.com/cej/3/4/censorship-evolution-texas

https://www.webjunction.org/documents/webjunction/Censorship...

https://www.lehigh.edu/~infirst/bookcensorship.html

I can relate a lot to this. I'd say my formative reads were:

- 1984 and Brave New World. The former should be mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.

- The Bible. Going from "I was raised Christian" to "I'm gonna read this and ask myself if I really believe this stuff" (I do, but in general I deviate massively from mainstream evangelical Christianity).

- Dune. Yep, profoundly transformative. I'm bummed that some people I've recommend it to don't seem to have had the same experience as I had reading it.

You will have to discover your own solution, but for what it's worth, here are three things that actually fixed MY depression:

1. Exercise. Not only will this improve your health--it will change the way people treat you. If you have any kind of physique at all in most places -- instant respect.

2. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." I think someone said that anger comes from results not meeting expectations. This book brought a lot of things into focus for me and made my expectations more harmonious with reality.

3. Pushing myself to do uncomfortable things for growth. I studied computer engineering because everyone said I was smart, and I liked computers. I had zero people skills. As self-therapy, I went into real estate. I figured sales would be a trial-by-fire for dealing with people. One of the better decisions I've made in my life! Getting a break from semi-autistic engineering types vastly improved my social skills, and having to deal with the general public further refined my expectations of reality.

Hope this helps!

Smart people aren't having so many kids now because they don't have to. If they don't have a religion telling them they need to, and they have a good career and a very comfortable lifestyle that affords, why would they want to go to all the trouble that raising a lot of kids requires?

In addition to that, kids are very costly in today's society, and with adults not living near their families so much, you don't get any help with your kids when you need it, so that makes it even more unattractive.

Having a lot of kids made sense back in the days when you needed the help on your farm, and your whole extended family (or village) lived together and could collectively share the burdens of child-rearing. Now, it just doesn't.

The answer to me is simple: we need to outsource child-rearing to the State, as shown in the novel "Brave New World" where children were made in factories and then raised by trained professionals.

Considering the level of alignment in general trends to the thematic aspects of the book, and considering the possible applications of this technology and its further development; even if it is mothballed for experimentation in human subjects now, still presents the hypothetical and moral hazards that Huxley proposed. These are all certainly points for discussion, and I'm sure others could corroborate even more interesting interpretations of possible and probable outcomes both positive and negative from "Brave New World" alongside other novels, literature of a more scientific nature, as well as philosophy. But since you assert it's "unsubstantive", I yield to your discretion.

"""

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another — slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

"""

How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler

Gilgamesh

Beowulf

Snowcrash

High Output Management, Andy Grove

Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson

Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley

Walden, Thoreau

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

Letters from a Stoic, Seneca

Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein

Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase

Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

Disrupted, Dan Lyons

Big Data, Nathan Marz

Practical OO Design in Ruby, Sandi Metz

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainier Maria Rilke

Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher

Language and Thought by Chomsky

Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

Language and Responsibility by Chomsky

Magic, Science, Religion by Malinowski

Meditiations by Marcus Aurelius

Oranges by John McPhee

The Dream of the Enlightement, Anthony Gottlieb

Nonexistant Knight/Cloven Viscount, two novellas by Calvino Italo

Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee

Infrastructure by Brian Haynes

I'd recommend almost all of them, but especially the first two, and Autobiography of Red(poetry).

The best book I was assigned to read in high school was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I later read most of Potok's other books on my own. A few years ago I reread The Chosen--that is a very fine book for a reader of any age.

A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.

I admit I don't like all of his books, maybe translations are to blame in some cases, in others I dislike the story, like The Investigation. But there are a lot of them with imaginative situations and ideas. Swarn-likes aliens, planet-sized ones like in Solaris and all kind of weird civilizations, very obviously caricaturizing politics.

The book that I recommend as most anticipatory is Return from the Stars. Robotic cars that prevent collisions, the Internet as we know it, with centralized directories, help pages, video calls incorporated, payments, etc.

The astronauts return to a much, at least apparently, softer society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars

Also worth mentioning that it's from 1961.

If we're talking about dystopia in general, that's quite old. In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, it's the part set in hell that's been most memorable. The appeal of zombie fiction in the U.S. is a result of deindustrialization, which began in the 1980s. So, I don't think that, on the grand scale, this is something brand new. For as long as people have been able to think of the future, there've been some willing to entertain the idea that everything might go to hell.

It we're talking about technological dystopia (e.g. Black Mirror) then that's because there's a strong (and correct) sense that while technology is an inexorable force, the current leadership (i.e. Silicon Valley) can't be trusted. Is that troubling? Yes. Should we take it as a warning regarding our socio-technological climate? Yes. Does it foretell catastrophe? I don't think so.

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

Anti (preposition): opposed to, or against.

Science (noun): the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Literature (noun): books and writings published on a particular subject.

>As we steamroll at full speed into the Brave New World, does any book, piece of art, or piece of literature that goes against current popular thought become "anti-science literature" and thus promoted for removal.

No. It is not true that any book, piece of art or literature can or will be deemed "anti-science literature". It is also not true that Amazon's ability to curate its own platform - an ability it has always had, and has always shared with every private enterprise, and has, with all other platforms, exercised before, represents a dangerous precedent towards the wholesale societal censorship of everything that "goes against current thought." Further, it is not the case that the books in question merely represent "wrongthink," making their removal an example of such. And also, we are not steamrolling into the Brave New World.

Bringing up Brave New World, 1984 or Martin Niemoller's poem in on the internet should be considered signs of pseudointellectual poserdom.

>Plenty of people could make an argument that implementing communism is just good rational (...)

no.

We live in a society. Society is run by human beings capable of perceiving nuance and applying rationality and discretion to their decisions. The fact that an equivalence can be made, does not mean that all equivalences must be made. Amazon choosing to remove these books from their platform does not lead to the slippery slope of removing all literature related to human freedom, free markets and the constitution.

>How about books on biology that clearly make a distinction between male and female genders. (...)

Again: no.

> of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be
perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or
four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they
wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half
ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was
the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma;
that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far
from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take
a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for
labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a
lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the
sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex-
cessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize
every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep
a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it
takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides,
we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every
change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so
chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is
potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a
possible enemy. Yes, even science."

- I read Brave New World (Huxley) when I was young, and it didn't have such a strong impression on me at the time, but it has strongly influenced some of my political takes over my whole life.

- The four steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) showed me that there can be method to the apparent madness that is entrepreneurship.

Reading Brave New World in an updated edition, the preface was about the nuclear arms race and how Huxley wished he had focused more on that as threat. Since I was reading that in 2002 or so it seemed that elements of the book itself were more relevant.

To solve this we would have to figure out which technologies have a future trajectory, try to ascertain what that is, and also predict unexpected events that would change those trajectories.

Let's say that we think electric/autonomous cars will become a majority. We first have to figure out the factors that will drive that, whether it is ecological consciousness, the price of fuel, simple competition between established car markers confronting upstarts, safety concerns, etc.

We also have to consider the darker sides of human nature, and the intervening events that may shape the years between now and then.

This isn't a hypothesis I've come across before. On reflection I firmly disagree with it, but it's an interesting claim and worth discussing.

The main problem I have is that there is a much simpler explanation for why schools choose the bleak dystopian novels: simply because all the most established, popular, and excellent dystopian novels are the bleak ones. 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale etc... . The reason these books are taught in school is actually that bleak novels capture the human condition more successfully, and thus stand the test of time and become classics. The only dystopian novels I can think of with a successful protagonist, which are cuturally established and excellent at a literary level, are Philip K Dick's books; there are many other reasons schools would not choose to offer these, not least the prevalent casual attitudes towards drugs.

The other issue I have is that the commonly accepted moral thrust of the above listed books is not that one should simply play by the rules and keep one's head down. It is instead that we should be collectively aware of the threat of society going in that direction, and take steps to prevent it before it gets as bad as that. Whilst all those novels are bleak depictions, they contain a message of hope: that we still have time to stop this from happening. If you look at the life of George Orwell and the views he expressed publicly, it's clear that he would not advocate keeping your head down and working hard to get more "rations" than your neighbour. He fought in Spain with the anarchists against the fascists, and spent a lot of his life going hungry rather than give up his vocation of being an authentic writer.

Lastly, is there any evidence/data to suggest that books like 1984 are more common in more authoritarian schools? I would actually expect the opposite, that schools with a more liberal leaning are more likely to teach it for the reasons I state in the paragraph above.

> "But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

> "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley re marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusi...

Indeed this "war on drugs" will probably remain until there is a generational shift in power or if some pharmaceutical company saves the world by developing soma.

For those who don't know what soma is, it's a fictional non-addictive recreational drug without negative side effects first described by Aldous Huxley in his novel "Brave New World".

I've heard people say, as you do, that "the masses" will never do such and such, and I agree. But in the past, I haven't really been willing to separate "the masses" into their own group. Instead, I've considered myself, and you, and others on HN, as part of "the masses".

Anyway, I wonder now if I'm wrong. Maybe we should think of the masses as if they are proles (85% of the population in 1984)? Are "the masses" actually just a large group of people who are—literally—no help whatsoever is securing and protecting a just and free society for themselves and others? And worse, completely unaware that they are no help?

Perhaps the masses should be ignored, since their opinions—when they have any—are politically powerless.

I’ve often thought of the counterculture to online space as those who are breaking free of centralization and the digital “monopolies.” They’re the people who are homesteading on tildes, Mastodon, or their own self-hosted instance, for example. In cyberspace, FAANG are the new industrialists (the new informationalists?), so to me it makes sense that a portion of online society wants to separate or rebel from this establishment which controls a good portion of this cyberspace.

As IoT becomes more prevalent, I can see those who seek a break from connectivity in general as countercultural, too. Some of the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or Ted Kaczynski’s* “Industrial Society and Its Future” reflect this.

* I do not condone Kaczynski’s actions. I’m merely stating the concern about technology’s negative impact on society has long been thought about. It makes sense that there would be those who seek to shun it entirely.

You say that and yet so many of its critics at the time did not get it. It is among the most blatant of all satires (right up there with Idiocracy) ever made, yet it still flew over the heads of critics like Roger Ebert [1].

Ebert claimed to have memorized the novel as a child. Right out of the gate, he calls it "true to its source." No, it's completely antithetical to its source! Verhoeven hated the source novel so much he turned his adaptation into a farce intended to depict how banal and juvenile he thought Heinlein's idea of a militaristic society was. Now, plenty of people disagree with Verhoeven and love the novel, but it's completely incorrect to call the movie a faithful adaptation.

The film was simply operating on a level that people were not prepared for at the time. Today, it's a different story. Of course, it borrows heavily from Huxley's Brave New World which itself is terrifyingly prescient (and also faced criticism at the time). Some stories might just be ahead of their time. Over-the-top satires of contemporary society seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon.

[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/starship-troopers-1997

It means corporations have more in common with authoritarian regimes than is obvious. They are systematically cold and all-powerful, and merely acting out the typical series of behaviors that cold and powerful organizations act out. By definition, corporations have no social commitment to the society within which they operate and this seems to be at the heart of the issue.

Be careful to note the difference between authoritarianism and socialism. They do not favor one another. In fact, they are mostly in opposition if anything. Socialism concerns social and economic structures and authoritarianism concerns governmental structures.

You might like a book called Brave New World by Audus Huxley. It’s a science-fictional narrative that explores the potential of human society to succumb to these cruel structures.

- Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Plenty of gotchas with real world examples from academia. Well written and easy to read.

- The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary. About imaginary corporation (a blend of Facebook and Google and Amazon) and probably not too distant future. If you liked Black Mirrors, you will love this.

- Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous. Classic novel with interesting thoughts about engineered society, where every human is assigned class, purpose in the society and feature at birth.

- Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Bilton, Nick. Read this book in a weekend, really well written and well researched about the inception of Twitter.

- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock, Philip E. A study on people with above average ability to forecast feature events (mostly geo-political). Talks about measuring predictions and improving them.

- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Brilliant book about overlooking rare events which have dramatic consequences because 'it's unlikely to happen'.

- Pandora's Star (futuristic (2380), humans are immortal through rejuvenation and are colonizing new worlds using worm hole tech(I think they have 50 or so worlds), long read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)

- Ender's game (futuristic, the movie cuts off 1/2 the book that revolves around Ender's 2 siblings, both also are geniuses, short read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)

> As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom.

I'm not aware of what historical (as of 1946, when it was written) examples this was premised on, and I've never seen it expanded on anywhere else (though I have looked).

I'm curious if anyone who cares to defend Huxley's dystopia has any actual rational basis for this claim, since it forms a core component of the world he builds.

More generally, I am not terribly sympathetic to the overall world built in Brave New World as a possible future. It definitely seems to me as if the 1984 predictions are much closer to reality than BNW's.

We live in a constant state of readiness for wars that have unclear purposes and the governments we have seem much more interested in tearing down ideas like full employment or sexual or narcotic freedoms. So it's surprising to see people think that Huxley got it right and Orwell didn't.

It has often been commented that out of the two futuristic scenarios, Huxley's is much closer to the reality we are experiencing now.

I’ll say it. Jordan Peterson has been a positive influence in my life. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of his lectures on YouTube. I started a book club to read his recommended books such as Gulag Archipelago, Brave New World, 1984, and The Rape of Nanking. It has been a difficult and important experience for me.

Reading Dostoyevsky was eye opening, if just for the fact that as much as people change, we stay the same, and the Communists were using some of the same idealistic arguments for changing the world in 1860s Russia that they are now. The idea that we are simply products of social conditioning, the tabula rasa and nothing more, the victims of our upbringing, were all central tenants in the severity of punishments for people being sent to Gulag in the Soviet Union. Prostitution was 3 years and being a nun was 10 Years. It technically wasn’t illegal to be a Christian, but teaching your children Christian values was! Families were purposely torn apart.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that learning more history, and just how badly things can go wrong, is very important and anyone who encourages people to seek out that history on their own is good in my book.

Orwell himself made the claim that Huxley must've known of We, so yes, Orwell certainly knew the work. From TFA:

Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it.[28] Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel".

That's not the point. People already DID get killed, and ARE getting killed. Millions and millions of them. Totalitarianism is the fact on the table. That's not just "another market", and the benefit to China gained by Western complicity in it, is nothing compared to the damage we are doing to ourselves.

I doubt you understand how important this is and how deep it runs. We're not going to throw millenia of evolution of thought, and ultimately thought and human agency itself away, just to make not resisting more comfortable for "the large chunk of non-dissidents" or Silicon Valley or whoever may come.

> The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough cir­cuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past, free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox educa­tion. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

> Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, with­out freedom, human beings cannot become fully hu­man and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.

-- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited" (1958)

> But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

> What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

> This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Given the modern drive for micro-optimizing every bit of one's life (looking at you, /4 Hour.*/) there is a much better dystopic story out there by Harlan Ellison:

http://compositionawebb.pbworks.com/f/%5C%27Repent,+Harlequi...

And perhaps even more appropriately, given the themes of impersonally evil bureaucracy and supposed terrorism, the movie Brazil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29

One of the minor themes is the relationship between morality and society. I read it as a teenager, and it made me think about the issue in a way I'd never done before.

* Adolous Huxley: Brave New World.

Similar reason as for the Triffids. If this is a dystopia then what, exactly, is wrong with it? To answer that you need to first define what society is for, and to do that you need to confront deep questions about what humanity is for.

* Desmond Morris: The Naked Ape

* Robert Axelrod: The Evolution of Co-operation

* Matt Ridley: Nature Via Nurture

These three changed the way I think about human nature.

* Douglas Adams: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

There were all these ideas in my head that I didn't have words for, and suddenly here was someone making jokes about them.

* James Burke: Connections

A book as well as a TV series. History suddenly became interesting, as well as making a lot more sense.

>Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing.

If that's how you read/watch science fiction, you're wasting your time. Gattaca and Brave New World are dystopian stories. Dystopias are not meant to precisely predict the future. They are mean to show how the future will look like if certain conditions are met. The overall reasoning matters far more than specifics.

The overall reasoning in Gattaca looks solid. And we're nowhere near the level of genetic testing/engineering technology shown in the movie. But we're getting there.

>Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.

Where was this government involvement described?

http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html

I don't recall the book explicitly speaking about government involvement with Soma at all, aside from the implication that government approved of it. FDA approves all the anti-depressants and painkillers as well. So?

Huxley is definitely on my top ten list of favourite authors.

I might agree with you though, on "take away." I find it annoying but it is less rude than the more straightforward, "What is your point?"

I really do hope this election increases citizen participation in the public sphere.

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman seems appropriate here.

> Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.

Yeah, the architecture definitely isn't. It just looks nice. But that wasn't the thing I meant in my comment. I meant the underlying theme. Better future through competence, dreams and - yes - technology. And (spoilers) how all was almost lost when they unleashed the positive feedback loop of expecting dystopia and giving up. I like that movie because it's the first thing in a long time that rekindles this, perhaps childlike, positive thinking, that we can make things better.

"- Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", Orwell's "1984": once considered fiction, these futuristic novels are actually happening right now and they seem to be getting worse. Yes, Miss Newton?

- Can we fix it?

- Sorry?

- I get things are bad, but what are we doing to fix it?"

--

Thanks for the thoughts on urban design in other sci-fi movies. I admit I never thought much about it when I watched them; I'll likely pay more attention from now on. Also anything in Second Life you recommend checking out?

--

EDIT: Also for "commercial", it was great. I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw rockets landing old sci-fi/SpaceX style, and a launch loop just casually shooting a rocket the next moment. Sci-fi porn that scene was for sure.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."

— Neil Postman (Author of Amusing Ourselves to Death)

I have always felt guilty deep inside when watching something and not learning anything from it, I try to find that one thing, that small part of philosophy in a television series and use it as a motivation to watch (like the line: "We are the universe trying to figure itself out" and the stuff about humanity growing up in Babylon 5). But the feeling of uselessness kept creeping up.

Recently I have just told myself flat out: Just make something, I felt increasingly restless while watching TV. And it feels good, I make lego contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my RPi(s). It feels good. I don't know why but ever since I was I kid I have felt this, very deeply and only in the last year have I actually expressed it in words.

I have read 1984 and Brave new world in the last 3 years and they hit some sensitive spots for, must reads if you ask me.

Didn't you ever read Brave New World? You don't publicly kill the Truth-knowing bloggers. You drown them out with by a million distractions. See also: Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign.

I'm not going to argue every stupid conspiracy theory that anyone can name...but I don't need to. There are plenty of actual conspiracy facts that should be sufficient to convince anybody that this kind of shit actually happens. COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird and MK Ultra to name a few.

The modern "skeptic" gets it all wrong - they don't question anything and come to conclusions way too quickly. That's because they're not actually skeptics, they're just afraid of getting out of their mental comfort zone.

What we're not taught are the methodical psychological operations implemented over decades on at least 2 or 3 generations that lead up to a situation where an entire country could be fooled or intimidated into allowing such horrors to occur.

If we were taught the causes and not the symptoms then I dare say history would be harder to repeat. Go read Mein Kampf, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, it's all there. The methods are extremely simple, it's just the level of psychopathy in our ruling class that is hard for people to accept.

Doesn't this sentence that you wrote ring any alarm bells for you? "Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally."

[1] Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

* 3%, the tv show

* Brave New World (Huxley's book)

* Player Piano (Vonnegut's book)

Yes, BNW is a better dystopia to live in than 1984. But... it's still a dystopia. Free thinkers are socially ostracized, personal preferences (outside a certain set) are ignored, personal destiny is decided at conception (one case where the world of 1984 is preferable). It's a shocking world, and one that I wouldn't want to live in.

And inevitably, the discussion revolves around the fact that it's not as bad as 1984. As if "actually only the second-worst dystopia in classic fiction" is anything but damning.

Having a dystopia-off distracts from a significant part of the value that these works have to us as members of a society: There is more than one road to hell (and more than one hell to reach). 1984 shows an example of a possible future, why it is bad, and how it got that way. BNW shows an example of a very different future, why it is bad, and (less clearly) how it got that way. They give useful common ideas for possible outcomes of current actions. While BNW is preferable to 1984, it still shows that avoiding a 1984 outcome as hard as you can is not enough because there are other ways that freedom can be destroyed. To simply say "I would prefer my freedom be destroyed in one of these two ways" is not the most useful thing one can take away from reading these two books.

The problem is that it is easier to jump to a conclusion than it is to stop and think.

But that's not what your article was about! You weren't pushing a rough awareness of opportunity cost, you were saying that it's a "fallacy" because in most cases you can't calculate it down to the penny. See my other comments.

I for example see no learning/entrainment value out of cleaning my apartment

What about the value of a less stratified society? Ever see Metropolis or read Brave New World? Ever live in a country like Brazil or India where the moneyed have servants to do everything from cooking, driving (few in India drive their own car!), and even raising their children? Yes, I want those people to have jobs, but no, I don't want to live in a world like that, or anything like Metropolis. And I don't want to be so elite and spoiled that cleaning my fucking toilet is beneath me.

I make well into 6 figures, though I just quit that job and will likely make much much less to contribute something better to this world than I have been, something better than what pure and cold capitalism has been telling me is valuable.

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Most people don't perceive these changes to affect them/their daily lives, so they are not concerned with it. They don't care.

[0]: http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

George Orwell averred that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We.

Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."

As we move further into the 21st century and the world government's seek to expand their power, this strategy is seeing even greater success. This complements Orwell's 1984 very well, specifically because it matches Alduous Huxley's 'Brave New World' quite well.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Circuses

A defacto ban is "We're removing it from our reading list, removing it from our library... but we not discouraging our students from reading the book". Removing it from a reading list isn't a defacto ban, it's modernization. If the kids at a specific school don't seem to respond well to a text, PULL IT. I don't care what text, even if it's one of my own beloveds just PULL IT and put in something the children will read and will learn from.

Brave New World is a classic, beyond perhaps, but if kids today aren't learning from it then so long. For every new book that goes on the list, an old one is going to come off of it. I'd much rather see kids get something like Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett that they'll respond to. Fuck, give them Harry Potter or a goddamn Halo novel if the kids will actually read it.

Going back in time to around 12-16, I'd send one of:

* Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

* 1984 - George Orwell

* To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

* Catch 22 - Joe Heller

* Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

* Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck

* Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

* The Call of Ctulhu - H.P. Lovecraft

* Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Some of those I actually read in school and loved (but wish I read earlier), others I didn't. I think any of those books would've interested me at the time. There's plenty of time for Rich Dad, Poor Dad, SPIN Selling and all the business books later in life.

the author is pointing towards a decadent and impotent cultural milieu -- "Nietzsche warned that the society of the last man could be too barren and decadent to support the growth of healthy human life or great individuals."

Search for the text "blink" on this page https://praxeology.net/zara.htm for a fuller picture. "We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

We have now, certainly, and now is amazing. But we have the past, too; at least for a while (dementia and all sorts of other things can rob us of the past). We have the future, too (though we can be robbed of that).

I live for all three. The past is where I draw from to inform my present actions; the present is where I enjoy myself and prepare for the future; the future is where we're all heading.

If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss.

The argument that you should live for now because you could be dead at any second is obscene, to me: it's more likely that you live than you die, and you're likely to be consistently happier now and in the future if you act like you'll be alive in the future. Evidence: planning for retirement. Seriously.

So live for yourself, sure, but live for all of yourself. Think of yourself as a smudge on a timeline: not in one place, not just in the past, not just in the future. Optimize the smudge.

There's a strange belief that reading certain books will make your mind better. (For ''better', read 'more middle class' - at least, that's how it works in the UK.)

It may even be true:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/07/reading...

There's an entire series of books by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu where he pulls apart culture as a symbol of status and social distinction. He's well worth reading on the topic. (But being middle class, I would say that...)

A lot of people miss the fact that literature is about teaching moral lessons. If you read books about novel writing, you'll see that some recommend that you start with a premise - which is a moral point you want to make.

You can then use the writing to dramatise the premise. This is more persuasive than stating it outright as an opinion, and also gives the book a focus it wouldn't otherwise have.

This is a slightly old-fashioned view now, but I think it applies to many old-fashioned classics - maybe not so much to modern fiction, a lot of which is either escapist or nihilistic or horrific for the sake of it.

1984, Brave New World, and F451 all have a strong premise, IMO.

Now maybe if one takes the position that hardship and grief are somehow morally virtuous (a position that is surprisingly common and that I as, I think, a rational person have a very hard time understanding, especially since the reasons for it are very seldom given in coherent theories) there is merit to this argument. But even then I still fail to see why the 'savages' in the book, or the protagonist, are somehow morally better than the other people.

So if anyone has read the book and wants to explain why they feel the world described in there is bad, I'd be very interested to hear why they think so.

(I'm leaving aside some what I think are minor issues, like the apparent destructive qualities of soma addictions - that was one of those other points I felt Huxley just put in there to get his point across, the technical deficiencies of the drug are irrelevant to the moral position he's (presumably) arguing).

There are two viewpoints on how totalitarian regimes will wield power in the 21st century. The first being the George Orwell 1984 camp, where Big Brother (the government) watches your every move, censors and blocks information – what many regimes in the Middle East are trying to do.

The second camp is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World scenario where governments team with corporations to offer a litany of distractions and entertainment. Governments will not have to track us because we’ll voluntarily allow our entertainment outlets to do that for us. We’ll be offered all the entertainment and information we could ever want on cable and the Internet, as long as it is not too critical of the “establishment.”

The second dystopia seems to be where most regimes are heading, and with the massive consolidation of Internet Service Providers throughout the world, coupled with their merging with the largest entertainment providers in the world, the Internet as we know it will most likely look like Huxley’s model rather than Orwell’s.

Check out this trailer on kickstarter.com for more info on this topic:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-docum...

Brave New World is probably actually the more relevant book to today's hedonistic, rampantly consumerist world. Even if the slightly tongue-in-cheek references to 'his Fordship' seem a little quaint we certainly haven't lost our tendency to worship distantly superrich media personalities. Then again, we're probably too busy checking our Facebook feeds to go back and read it

Of course in this world it's much easier to be offended than to tolerate. #legalism and #liability is the death of us.

Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for.

Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position.

* It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.

I'll quote a passage from the Wikipedia article on it that expresses just one frightening aspect of the society described in the book.

Natural reproduction has been done away with and children are created, 'decanted' and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, where they are divided into five castes (which are further split into 'Plus' and 'Minus' members) and designed to fulfill predetermined positions within the social and economic strata of the World State. Fetuses chosen to become members of the highest caste, 'Alpha', are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in "decanting bottles", while fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes ('Beta', 'Gamma', 'Delta', 'Epsilon') are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Nathan Hale administrators dropped the book as a regular part of its sophomore Language Arts curriculum after Sense-Wilson’s initial complaint, however students can still read it as part of class “literature circles” in which students reading the same book discuss it in a small group.

Reading the above it appears that the book hasn't been returned to the high school's curriculum. The school board merely said it could be. Judging from the school administration's initial actions I would say return to the core curriculim is still in question.