Monday, January 14, 2008

[books] A Brave New World

My "classical" education is definitely lacking. Aldous Huxley is required reading for most high school or early college students these days. Well, not mine.
For those that haven't read it, its a vision of the future that, depending on your perspective, describes either utopia or distopia.
Unlike 1984, the people living in Huxley's world aren't miserable - far from it. Free love, perpetual employment at 30-some hour weeks and all the drugs that you want make it a great place to live. What is even more striking is the caste system, unlike any other caste system, is stable. Stable because people within a given caste are made, physically and psychically, to server their purpose. An Epsilon is happy to be an epsilon because he doesn't know any better - he doesn't know what it would be like to be an Alpha and is conditioned to not care. Very, very powerful concepts for societal control.
All in all, a definite Good Read.

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