Warning! This article contains content which some may find mildly offensive. Read it anyway 
Our Brave New World
There are few subjects to me more fascinating than predicting the future, which is why I love Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. People complain about how they aren’t on English syllabuses, especially since the social criticism texts Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm are already heavily used in classrooms. But I’m actually quite pleased schools don’t teach them, because I think people should discover them on their own terms. They’re both enormously important books and I’m glad I didn’t sit through English lessons being spoon-fed what the establishment believes students ought to read into them. It’s one thing to know what these books are about before you read them but another to complete worksheets on what happened in the chapters - ugh.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has had a greater social impact than Brave New World: hence the terms Thought Police, Big Brother and Room 101 continue to exist in popular culture. But it’s Brave New World which ended up being more accurate than Nineteen Eighty-Four, even though I’d guess it’s much less read. No-one can say why this is for sure, but I think that in lashings of ultra irony Brave New World just hasn’t been taken seriously enough in the decades since it’s publication. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the threat of authoritarian government, which is nothing difficult to relate to for people living from the 1940s onwards.
But Brave New World’s society where foetuses are grown in test tubes, where no-one looks older than forty, where the differences between civilisations of prosperity and poverty are bigger than ever, where high-brow entertainment has been replaced by easy-to-follow trash designed especially for the masses, where promiscuity and one night stands are the norm and loving long-term relationships are extinct, where people experiment with sex before they’re even teenagers, where people are drugged up constantly with government issued pills to feel happy, where mass production and Freudianism are the tenets of society…and we think Nineteen Eighty-Four is amazing because we have CCTV cameras and more data checks now?
One night a few weeks ago I was discussing Brave New World with one of my housemates, and we both agreed that today you can read it and not be particularly shocked by the content. You oughtn’t read Brave New World today and find it absurd and/or frightening. Unless you happen to find today’s society absurd or frightening, that is. Aldous Huxley in around 1933 wrote about the 21st century with comical exaggerations. We have a bit of Nineteen Eighty-Four going on here with our governments heavily scrutinizing us and with them exploiting fears of terrorism. But Huxley is the one who really hit the nail on the head.
Sex…because everything on the Internet has to have it somewhere
I lost my virginity the other day. Really rather embarrassing at 20-years-old (but, is it really? Why do I feel like that?). I did the whole Teenage Experience, which I missed out on when I was, you know, a teenager. By Teenage Experience I mean that I went to a night club, got very drunk, got pulled by a nineteen-year-old and ended up back in my bedroom with him.
The next morning we woke up and I didn’t quite know what he wanted next or how I was supposed to act. Did he want a relationship? Did he want a friends with benefits thing? Did he even really want to see me again? And what did I want exactly? Things felt awkward and he left pretty early.
When I told my housemates about it all the next morning they were overjoyed, because I’d finally got laid. I was just worried I’d hurt this guy. I stood there in the kitchen feeling guilty and working on about two hours of sleep and what was probably my first hangover and my housemates were just really happy for me. One is attaching different labels to me, saying there are three different types based on how I acted and I’m xyz type. I have another one asking me what it’s like to have sex with a virtual stranger because she’s never done that before. I have another one hugging me and telling me I’ve become a man.
I knew they all meant well. Really, there was probably no better way they could have acted. If they had acted like it was no big deal that would have felt odd and awful in its own way. If they had judged me badly I would have felt worse.
I saw him again at a big social gathering last night and he ignored me, which honestly suited me fine. I didn’t want to pursue anything beyond that one night stand either.
The mental asylum
Until I actually had a one night stand I assumed lots of things about sex. I assumed there was something wrong with me because I hadn’t got laid yet. I assumed that sex was a normal and necessary part of an adult’s life. I assumed that sex itself was hugely important - I mean if society makes such a massive deal out of it then it has to be, right?
In Britain it’s slightly odd because we’re getting over several centuries of socio-sexual repression and now UK media, including newspapers, are filled with sex scandal as the population giggles like nine-year-olds because so-and-so has a bondage fetish. Who cares? Apparently millions do. In which case, why?
This is the greatest argument for Huxley’s vision of social insanity, and using it (being an inmate of the asylum that is my society) I had built this mythos around teenage hedonism: this coveted place in which I could rejoin the human race and become a man. It’s complete crap, of course, and I always knew that to be true on an intellectual level but on an emotional one I was wallowing in this social insanity that everyone else is.
‘It’s human nature’ - and other BS pills the nurses are feeding us
Inspired by actually losing my virginity and a little more reading and thinking about spirituality I decided to make one or two observations about what is and is not supposed to be normal.
The blanket term that’s starting to annoy me is ‘human nature’. It’s thrown around a lot and never qualified. Essentially it’s used to argue that some things are inherent and inescapable mental aspects of being a human being. And funnily enough it’s always used to justify the horrible stuff we do as a species. I think it’s important to realise that the human nature argument never seems to hold water. So here are some social insanity beliefs I’m going to take apart.
Insane belief number one - it’s human nature to buy things we like though don’t physically need:
When I did my A-level in Media Studies I remember there being several weeks of lessons just on media ownership and marketing as the financial support for journalism and actually much of the American economy. One of the things which really sticks in my mind is something my teacher said in class, paraphrased here:
‘And how do corporations justify all this marketing, making people feel bad for not owning such and such and pushing people to buy more and more of what they don’t need? By saying it’s just human nature. That they’re just meeting the needs of human nature. But is it really human nature to buy all this stuff? What about monks and nuns? People live happily without buying things they don’t need: the whole human nature argument doesn’t work.’
Edward Bernays may be most responsible for emotional spending. In ‘I Can Make You Rich’
Bernays may have regretted spreading his ideas and social conditioning techniques in books when he, a Jew himself, heard of Goebbels using his work to propogate anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. Maybe he was just ticked off that Goebbels used it for scapegoating millions of people. I don’t know - but I do know Bernays’s influence on the 20th century was powerful and in the end probably quite negative.
It’s not human nature (whatever that is) to buy luxury items, and especially not to do so for status. Societies across time and around the world have done this, yes, but societies over time also have not. The existence and conscious cultivation of civilisations that aren’t materialistic is the ultimate evidence that consumerism is not a part of human nature. We have the capacity for it but we aren’t doomed to buy things for happiness and status. To believe otherwise is to ignore history and the achievements of spiritual thought.
Insane belief number two - people need to have sex at least semi-regularly to be happy:
This maxim is such crap that no authority ever even outright says it, they just heavily imply it.
And that heavy implication is enough for me and plenty of others to have spent way, way too much time feeling bad about not having sex. I seriously used to wonder as a teen if I would be happy again if I just got laid. It’s such a daft idea, yet I bought into this notion because of the sheer weight of authority behind it.
Again, Freud is partly behind this for arguing that sex is behind, oh, just about everything human beings do. And what Freud started his nephew cultivated and nurtured in the PR industry, and since Bernays’s retirement the PR industry has kept it all going. Now that all the 20th century censorship over sex is all but gone advertisers are going to town with it. Chocolate bars, fragrances, deoderants, shampoos, TV shows, music, films, documentaries, clothing - if marketers can give it a sex angle they probably will. Sex sells. The only cost is the avalanche of reported psychological illness in recent decades - mainly in anorexia, bulima, sex addiction, porn addiction and almost every teenager stressing about not getting laid. There’s also the abundance of sexually transmitted disease.
But again, we only have to look to religion to see that this isn’t human nature championing lust. Okay, Western religion has screwed up social attitudes to sex worse than the media today does, but there are examples to show that human beings can, shock horror, lead full and happy lives without screwing people. The Dalai Lama, a sixty-something-year-old virgin and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is an excellent example. It’s not about being weird or having no libido or being immature but acknowledging that there is so much that is more important than sex. It’s a shame I actually had to have sex before I could appreciate that properly for myself.
Insane belief number three - people need to be in relationships to be happy:
I was shocked and really pleased to hear that this is one of Western society’s insane beliefs. Until I read this article I’d taken for granted that prolonged isolation equals suffering and possibly insanity.
It really surprised me and certainly challenged what I thought was true of the human condition. But in fact I was thinking that just because I’ve seen Castaway, The Great Escape, Catch Me If You Can, The Beach and other films which more or less dictate that prolonged solitude equals torture. But then you read in The Art of Happiness
the Dalai Lama saying that romantic relationships aren’t good for people ultimately. It’s a real shock to Westerners such as myself to get my head around this idea that the romantic relationship isn’t this sacred all-important beautiful thing - that it is in fact not even necessary for being a really happy human being.
But of course when you really think about it, from a spiritual and very humanistic perspective he has it right. And though the above article about voluntary isolation that lasts for years is astonishing it’s also credible once you get over Western biases about the fragility of the mind.
Brave New World Revisited
So, that’s why I believe we’re in Aldous Huxley’s bizarre vision of the future - really you just have to look around and see what we treat as important and what we know deep down to be really important. I also believe it’s inevitable that to really embrace and do well with self improvement we have to get out of all this socially absurd thinking, though many of us may have to do so in baby steps. Because, as George Orwell said in my favorite quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Sanity is not statistical.’
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