Aldous Huxley

Along with George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', one other notable piece of literature is regarded as a dystopian prophesy, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. That is, regarded as such by everybody apart from Alex Jones who, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, suggests that the author was somehow responsible for consciously forwarding a totalitarian agenda.

As with Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is difficult to draw this conclusion without metaphorically entering the mind of Alex Jones who spins information like magnets on a fridge door to make words create the sense he wants them to.

There is an historical literary rivalry between the 1931 novel Brave New World by Huxley (pub 1932) and the 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell (pub 1949). But it is clear as the year 1984 vanishes from our rear view mirror, that the real near future is an horrific fusion of both nightmare visions. Huxley wrote to Orwell of his novel:

'Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.'

Does comparing the tools of obedience, clubs and prisons, to passive servility suggest that Huxley was in favour of totalitarian power? Or is he agreeing with Orwell about the inevitable outcome - and that technology and science will be the tools of totalitarian control?

Like Orwell, he presents the reader with something of a choice - or perhaps dilemma. Which side of the security fence would one want to be born? His parable is as much an investigation into the concept of the noble savage as it is the pseudo-utopian pain-free world of in vitro reproduction and preconditioning. I have not discussed Brave New World with anybody who has expressed a desire to find themselves in the antiseptic world of hatcheries and conditioning centres. And if any doubt persists, the final words of the novel out to make it clear that the central character, John, finding himself in this brave new world, chooses death.

Just as Bill Hicks said of the Judas Priest trial where two fans had committed suicide, what band wants their fans dead? What proponent of a brave new world would have the central character commit suicide in the last sentence rather than live in the nightmare world.

For many years I have recommended that people read one of Huxley's lesser known works, from decades later. Almost without exception, whenever I mention it, people interrupt before I have reached the end of the title. And I am certain that even if Alex Jones has heard of it, he has not read it.

In 1959, Huxley wrote a reflective series of essays on Brave New World called 'Brave New World Revisited' in which he stated that Brave New World was a 'reasonable guess' at how the world may proceed and that it had done so much faster than he thought. The last chapter of the book proposes actions which could be taken to prevent the totalitarianism which was portrayed in the novel.

Huxley's last novel, Island, was presented as an antidote to the dystopia of Brave New World. Of it Huxley wrote the following:

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"


Of course, this will not be good enough for Alex Jones. He will cite that Huxley's brother, Julian, was a eugenicist and a proponent of Charles Darwin. Though one ought not be hanged for the crimes of one's brother, perhaps here lies a clue to Jones' antagonism. Evolution and its contradiction to Old Testament dogma.