Pretends to be Dumb - The musings and writings of:
Brian "Ayavaron" Jeffrey Ross II

ONe thing that always manages to capture my imaginatino is future society. There are usually two takes on the future. It will either be utopian or dystopian.

The utopia is less written about because its assumed to be more boring than dystopian settings. A utopia has everyone happy and placated constantly and that will probably bore most people. However, what I like in a utopia is the concepts.

How are the people all managed? How can they be happy always? And usually there is some kind of catch which turns the utopia into a dystopia in the eyes of some.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was like this. It had a wonderful world where everyone had enough to go around, strong emotions were discouraged and everyone was doped or engaged in an “orgy-porgy” when when not working and/or contributing to society. Now, some of you may thing that sounds horrible, but there is beauty here. Almost all conflict comes from emotion and conflict just in turn causes different emotions which are also usually negative. Without conflict then unhappiness is largely elliminated in favor of boredom. To alleviate this, sex and drugs are added so that everyone is entertained. People are even bred and conditioned to be happy with these things since their mere fetuses in test tubes.

Sure, there is no freedom in this world, but is that a problem? If everyone is kept totally happy then why do you need freedom or culture? What’s the point? I’ll admit that life would be absurdist or nihilist in such a state but it would also be hedonistic and what does it matter I think?

I’m not certain what I’m getting at, but I do definitely think Huxley was a pompous ass to portray Brave New World’s society as he did, condemning it as an immoral, pointless and cruel existence.

I’m reminded of a Modest Mouse lyric,

“If life’s not beautiful without the pain,
Well I’d rather never ever see beauty again.”It would seem that Huxley would disagree and say that we need our suffering, our wars, our depression, and our religions in order to exist. I hope that most people have a little bit more sense than that. I respect Huxley for having written something so intellectually entertaining but not for his opinions.

Huxley’s ‘topia even had peaceful way of dealing with malcontents. Those who decided they needed something fuller in life could have it if they were removed from mainstream society to live with other malcontents. And should they not want to do that, they have the option of becoming controllers of society which all leads to society’s betterment as a whole.

Anyone who fails to see beauty in such an idealistically beautiful system is too cynical to think about ‘topias.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 12:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized, General, Books, Concepts and Science, Art by Ayavaron. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.