Dystopia and Shakespeare

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

When I picked up Brave New World from the library, I was driven by a recommendation from Kenneth. My expectations were fair to middling—usually, I don’t go for dystopian-society books. Farenheit 451, Anthem, and 1984—while palatable—don’t quite tickle my fancy. The only thing I knew about the book at the time was that it was a futuristic story, and one of the characters had some sort of tie to Shakespeare.

Well, let me just sing the praises of Brave New World right away: it was awe-inspiring, thought-provoking, unadulterated amazing in book form. It is one of the few books that I plan on buying for myself, to secure a copy that I can read and mark up with my own personal notes; a rarity, considering how short on funds I am. I personally doubt that I will be able to give Brave New World the stirring recommendation it deserves, but I will try my best.

A brief synopsis of the story: in the distant future, much of society is operating under one World State. Natural breeding has been done away with. Lower caste children are conditioned to despise reading and nature and their growth is stunted, while higher caste children are allowed to grow and develop naturally; everyone is encouraged to consume (through hypnopedia). Promiscuity is the social norm; family units have been done away with altogether. An outsider called John the Savage, who was raised on a “Savage Reservation” in New Mexico, is introduced to this society—John is the son of a woman who mistakenly ended up spending her life on the savage reservation and only knows of this world what she has told him. Most of his learning has come from reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and it is through this unique perspective that he sees this purposeless, empty society.

The most profound point that I felt arose from Brave New World was that of the purpose of man. In the society, there is only a sham of a religion (which rituals begin with heavy doses of soma, an ecstasy-inducing opiate, and end in orgies), and “happiness” is at everyone’s fingertips. Because “everyone belongs to everyone else,” no one ever loves someone they can’t have or feels the loss of a person they were attached too—it is freakish and anti-social to ever develop such a connection with other people. So, what is the purpose of man in this society? Answer: there is none. The pursuit of happiness is a joke, because they already have all the happiness they need—they are bred to be happy, bred to be content with their lives. They are never trying to improve themselves, because they believe that they are perfect as is—why fix something that isn’t broken? No one is striving to discover anything, there are no moral codes to live up to—their sole existence is made up of consuming, living in luxury, and then contributed phosphorus to the environment when they die. And when people lose their individual purposes, society ceases to produce truth and beauty. The conditions of the morality of the people are summed up perfectly by Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, as he is arguing with John the Savage:

“Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand…Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”

I have much, much more I can and want to say on this book, but this post is getting lengthy as is. So, I am sending out an open invitation for everyone to call me and chit-chat about Brave New World (Luke, I’m looking at you). We will philosophize and conjecture and spend our time developing our intellect.

In the meantime, let me just leave you with my favorite quote:

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments we should like, but unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

I don’t know why, but for some reason this quote just jumped right out to me. It made me laugh, but I also think that it’s true, on a subconscious level. What does this say about me, I wonder?