Hello and welcome to classical stuff. You should know I am here with two of my compatriots Graham Donaldson. Hi. Hi, sorry I'm here.
Yes. Yeah, I'm hope he's here and Thomas Maggie. Oh, hey. Oh, hey, sorry guys And our podcast is all about bringing the the classical world to you our listener in a way that is digestible and not too For and not too heady not too academic E which is a word I just made up and also it's summer right Wow, wow, I was gonna be apparently a rockest I don't know It's always a very exciting time.
It's also a bummer because there are no students at school. Yeah, no things get very quiet So we also live on the surface of the Sun during the summer. Yes It's pretty warm down here. I for one love summer.
Yeah, you know I do I do I do too love summer So today friends we are gonna be studying and talking about a book by Aldis Huxley called book surprise surprise It's called brave new world and brave new world is yes, it is written in the 30s so that so those of you who are Have questions as to whether or not is considered a classic you can send your angry emails to Thomas Maggie No, no, no, it is written in the in the 30s But we do study it in 10th grade and I teach it even though it is a more modern book But we're gonna be talking about it because it is it's good. It's a good one But fellas I just gotta say like it's summer. I had my coffee. I have a beautiful cup of coffee in front of me I just ate some granola the weather's nice.
I feel like all of my needs are met. Okay, what more could I want? You're doing your own intro for your episode You're finding your own pun to make on all this great No, cuz that that mean the book the one of the thieves in brave new world is isn't society and culture and civilization for meeting all of our needs and if all of our needs are met are we not then going to be happy and And you know just live in a state of perpetual ecstasy So let's talk a little bit about all the sex now frankly, I don't know too much about the man all I know is that born into the British or aristocracy relatively relatively famous family I believe his grandfather was one of the scientists on board The Darwin Darwin's yeah on board the voyage with Darwin. So he came from a pretty prestigious and scientifically focused family I believe his father was involved at you know some of the highest levels of the scientific community and for all the Sucksley he was very much sort of by birth was seen to be you know this a future member of parliament You know like this sort of this aristocratic British bloodlines Went to the best schools, but himself was quite sickly as a child and spent a good portion of his young life in bed and in convalescence and away from other children reading a lot and uncovering a pretty deep and expansive love of botany and plants and medicine and when one studies botany one quickly studies genetics and early rudimentary genetics and the breeding of plants and the cross breeding and getting different characteristics and whatnot and so he grew up in this kind of privileged aristocratic life, but one that was also had hardships he was removed from friends and Often sort of saw himself as this outsider because of his illness and that comes up a lot at least in Britain brave new world It comes up in these characters who seemingly have everything that they want but have this little nine sense that they're missing something anyway There's a one thing we're not gonna talk about this podcast is sort of Huxley's own view on this world that he creates in this book mainly because I always whenever I look into it I always get conflicting reports the book itself presents this view of future human life that is so absolutely miserable that Everybody who reads it is like oh my goodness This is terrible But Huxley himself always sort of gave mixed kind of back and forth so for how he thought about it if he thought it was kind of like an inevitable Anyway, we're just not gonna talk about it frankly No too much about it right something after brave new world is like this is brave new world revisited Yeah, but he has how's it still a new world would that be like a brave world that we have seen for brave half-charted world?
Yeah, anyway, so the book is essentially a takes this question of We have the scientific method and remember after maybe some defines in terms today We have science and we have technology so we'll start there. Well, what's a good like working definition of science classically understood? What science maybe What is science? The ability so we I'm gonna mix it with empiricism So you might not appreciate that but empiricism is what you can see So you can study the world around you to learn things about it good and by the time we get I mean the scientific method is the idea that there can be certain inputs that lead to certain outputs and we can test those We can test those inputs to determine the effects of them exactly Science that is most basic element is a methodology a methodology of being able to say something about something being able to And so yeah, you do it by experiment.
So you have a hypothesis I remember the whole scientific method our 10th graders always do whenever I ask them and so because they know what I've never Ever teaching this step one is grant writing. Yes. Exactly. Yes.
You grant establish research space research your new research Don't repeat any else's step three or grants snarky Twitter feed Yeah, I'm gonna feed follow NASA step four published paper step five gained over I'd these steps six question marks to step seven profit Step six get debunked step seven Associate professor perfect But the method is is a hypothesis a method an experiment and then actually performing the experiment and then coming to a conclusion about something Yeah And if you apply this methodology to the world and to all these different fields of things that can be studied We can slowly build up a database of saying what is About the world so you know what what is about physics? What what is about about color? I mean you can say that science is the systematic seeking of the mind of God, right? I mean, I don't think many scientists now I mean You'll sense yes, or that's what Aquinas would say that like knowledge is conforming your mind with reality Yeah, he would take it that the other way.
Yeah, it's true. So we have science We have this methodology of saying what is about the world and then we also have her hand-made technology and technology the good definition of technology is an artifact created by a human by a human what I mean by artifact is it's something that is maybe tool is also a word But technology is a thing that is being created by a human being for a function So like a rock on the ground is not an artifact just rock so you take that rock and start using it for things hammering nails into boards You've turned that rock into an artifact. What you've a sweet tech Yeah, you've applied to it. You got you exactly is you've applied an idea and then you've applied You know an understanding about the world that that you know the sharp piece of metal driven into what is going to stay there And so you've now have this this technology however rudimentary so Huxley has this idea and he says we have science and we have technology and In the 19th century was the heyday of like this idea of scientific progress that like mankind is progressing towards some kind of ideal and before in the podcast, I know we've talked about I've read from the quote from the world fair from the quote from the world fair by Prince Albert married Queen Victoria about you know this world fair at Crystal Palace about sort of the the destiny of mankind that through science and technology and innovation We are going to bring mankind back to the Garden of Eden back to some sort of place of of sort of perfection and Huxley has this idea and he begins to look at kind of the zeitgeist around him in the early 20th century So so you know generation after Prince Albert and he's sort of looking at the zeitgeist around him of what he sees the sort of fashions of humanity moving towards and sort of the spear of the age and he says if we allow science and technology to sort of progress what kind of civilization civilization could we envisage in?
2000 years in some sort of silly timeline and in the future what kind of humanity could we envision and then this book brave new world It's his attempt to give a an account for if mankind allows his desires coupled with technology and the increase of his powers to mold a Civilization that caters to everything that we think we want what kind of civilization we have and so he so this book is his Sort of thought experiment in doing that so some of the zeitgeisty things that he's looking at and some of the things that you know that he's looking at is the advent of eugenics and the advent of genetic manipulation so eugenics the idea that if you breed you can breed in or breed out of human beings certain characteristics based on you know your understanding of genetics and and The big the other thing that that sort of takes a lot of prevalence in this book is prophylactics is contraception Every time I read this book and I think about it. I don't even think we realize how different a world we live in post Pill or like you know post easy birth control It is absolute moral paradigm shift that has happened kind of maybe 20 years before we were born We're sort of 80s 80s kids right born the 80s. Yes, Tonya We're on the 90s right now. I'm very nice.
He's Louise Jimin Christmas. I'm old. All right But anyway, so like just This was not This was only beginning to be understood in Huxley's time So this is he's writing in the 30s But the idea and the knowledge that science and technology would have the ability to divorce Sex from children sex from procreation was is kind of was an under an unknown thing It was just not a matter of if but when and so that kind of moral Adam bomb has gone off and Huxley's kind of thinking about what kind of future we have what kind of civilization we have anyway Maybe this is a good point to tell listeners that in discussing brave new world We're gonna be discussing a lot of like pretty serious and some dark and some pretty heady things So maybe this is a podcast for the younglings to skip maybe we can maybe need to wait a week and go on for Hanenburg's podcast on I don't know what you're doing next week Jason and the Argonauts Jason and the Argonauts a family story There's definitely no mass murder No, okay, no relations outside of wedlock. Yeah, all of those things exist in this ancient Greek epic excellent neither do weird sword birds I'm so excited.
Let's go get ready boys. Anyway, so let's talk a little bit about this world When I teach the book there's the world building and then there's the story and in many ways the story is secondary to the world Right of the book this past year in English class We were kind of running up against time because we spent a little longer on some books And so we just talked about the world building we didn't even get to the story the story really is kind of a secondary thing in in the book So the world so this is a world set many thousand years into the future and fellas. It's perfect world Okay, everything has been organized and the motto is shoot. I can't remember the motto is like community identity stability It's not great.
It's not well working towards no. No, it's not human beings. The family has been abolished. We don't need families anymore Families just bring high passions and love that's displaced in equitably amongst society so human beings are now born in factories and test tubes in bottles and And And everyone has an inescapable social destiny, so maybe do you like your job?
Yes? Do you feel do you have those moments at some point where you're just sitting at your desk and you're like man? I'm never so where we're going with this. I was made from this job Yeah, but if you're gonna reveal to me that like Veritas like as I was in the womb They know applied was it don't they get like alcohol to the kids when they're making?
Oh, you're not in the world. You are an old fashioned normie. Bro, you're an alpha Yes, so yes, let's define Plus is the number there's alpha double pluses. Yeah, good.
Yeah, so the world is based on a caste system So there's alpha beta gamma delta epsilons and everybody is created and everybody has what is referred to as their inescapable social destiny You have a place in this world you have a future you have a purpose and that purpose is that you are going to be Essentially conditioned to love the thing you're going to have to do. Yeah, so everybody's made in test tubes and sort of Is the slang term is bottled everybody is bottled and is raised to work in a specific job? So let's say if you were gonna work in the salt mines When you are either a fetus and then as you are a little baby You are subjected to heat and every time you're subjected to heat some there some sort of pleasurable stimuli is given to you in the form of Soma which we'll talk about in a second and every time you'll be subjected to cold and every time you're subjected to cold some sort of Unfavorable stimuli will be put upon you like radiation or some sort of ways that make you feel nauseous so that you always associate cold bad Hot good because you're inescapable social destiny is you're gonna work in the hot salt mines So there's gonna be some point when you're in those hot salt mines like man I love the heat and I pity those fools who have to work in the cold. That's right.
I feel like I was made for this job Or if you're gonna be working fixing airplane engines and hanging upside down all day Well when you're a little baby or a little fetus same kind of thing They'll hang upside down and shoot you full of some kind of like dopamine rush that you associate upside down with awesome And then when you're right side up or when you're doing something different You're gonna be hit with some kind of radiation or some sort of thing that associates right side up with it's not quite right Like one of the modern wives of what they just make you watch reruns of some horrible Bravo television marathon. Oh anyway Because everybody has a job and a role that they need to fill so you have a place that you're going to fill and you're actually Bread and conditioned to love it now in this brave new world There are people that have to do pretty rudimentary and boring jobs And they don't need to have the same kind of cognitive functions or the level of human complexity as everybody else in fact It would kind of get in the way If you were a fully functioning adult and all you're doing all day is working in the salt mines or pushing a button That may be boring for your high-powered mind So what in this brave new world they have developed is over a period of time they've developed a caste system So there's alphas betas gamas deltas and epsilons alphas are like you and I okay Congratulations fellas. Okay. We are alphas.
We have nothing wrong with us. Okay. We have our full cognitive abilities We are tall. We are broad-shouldered.
We are handsome. We are alphas. So you should think listener Yes, just me up casting your mind's eye that picture then there are betas betas still have all of their cognitive functions But they have some kind of deformity that holds them back. They're a little bit shorter.
Maybe they have some They have some sort of maybe they have some sort of of Immunodeficiency one of the main characters her name is Lina named after Lenin and she has lupus Given to her at birth genetically So you have these betas and the betas they are these sort of second in the caste system and they are not quite as perfect as the office Gamma Delta epsilon you work your way down and when you get to epsilon you have essentially and the book makes no bones about it They have essentially bred a whole cast of of you know Adderworphism and Down syndrome and some severe mental and cognitive Disabilities because they are only going to be bred to do some certain small function and they don't need They don't need the full sort of gambit of human experience. How do they sort of mess with your mental ability? Is it by watching multiple episodes? Is it the more episodes you watch of modern house?
No, so part of it comes with a something that is called the book I don't know if this is a real thing or if this is something that talks to me up But it's called the bakanovsky process and what it essentially is is that the embryo once fertilized Is put under a severe amount of stress and when that embryos put among a severe amount of stress It splits into two and then you put those embryos among stress and then they're split into four and in the in this this world They sort of discovered that they can not indefinitely but They can split embryos up to something like 70 times or something And just make you feel better that is a fictional process is a fictional process So this idea that you split this embryo and that you have you know 10,000 identical twins of the epsilons just from what you're not wasting wasting you're not wasting one embryo on someone who's going to be an Epsilon semi moron as they're called you're just using you're reusing a Sanbury on your kind of like rinsing and repeating it and that gives it that That degrades its its function over time in this world but doesn't matter because you don't need full functionality because his inescapable social destiny is gonna be something utilitarian and And but he is going to be conditioned and bred to absolutely love that destiny of his so far Yeah, why would I want to think hard when I can sit here in the salivator push button So they long think about whatever I like those guys that got to work in the salt mines and they got to think about all this stuff I don't gotta think I just put a button exactly so there's one character I mean I character there's one scene in the book where the two main alphas are going up to the roof and the person who's running the elevator is an And you can tell by the way that he only knows one word and that word is roof And he can take commands of which button to push but his greatest joy every day Is when he gets to the roof and those doors open and the beautiful sunlight washes in his elevator And he goes oh roof roof and you can just you just know that at some point during his during his conditioning in the hatch in the department of Hatcheries, that's where they're from that's where that everyone's hatched that during his conditioning in the department of hatcheries that he was conditioned to love pushing that button and going to the roof he was made for that job Identity stability community So yes conditioning is a big part of this people are conditioned to hate for example going out into nature or and they're also conditioned to hate reading books because as one of the characters tells us while giving a school group a tour of the Department of Hatcheries is that back in the day We used to let we used to condition people to love to going out into nature But it turns out that everybody just wanted to go into the and go camping on the weekends and trouble with going camping You don't buy pretty much stuff, okay And so we just realized that people when they went out to the woods It was kind of these two wasted days of them not purchasing anything and of them just sort of enjoying the outdoors So they're now conditioned to be suspect to be suspicious of nature and to love organized sports where you have to buy lots of equipment And then the organized sports isn't just like basketball with a ball and hoop It's their extra paddles and you have to have sets of paddles and water boards and upper boards and like certain helmets and dress and lights It's all very complicated and expensive. It's like worse than hockey. Yeah worse than hockey That's a sport that's a lot of cool. It's true and it's worse than hockey.
So people are then conditioned to love expensive Sporting sports because you got a buy all the equipment and that keeps the economy going Is it just me or does that kind of sound awesome like sports with lots of gear? I'm kind of a gear nut and I kind of sounds great. Centrifical Bumble Puppy is the name of one of the sports Oh, I would play that I don't know what that is seriously. That sounds fun.
They're puppies involved. Yeah, it's bumble puppy Like you know it's just falling over it's big fat paws. Also cute. Yeah, I'm not quite sure if puppies are involved Does it make that makes everything else worth it just to play bumble puppy For me You are also taught and conditioned to love your place in the world So alphas and through a process called hypnopedia hypnopedia is basically when you're going to sleep at night phrases are repeated over and over in your little speaker pillows and that you have these sort of phrases embedded inside you much like a Liturgy this was a lot of Like a conditioning when it was just coming out right psychological conditioning was a brand new thing You know Pavlov's talking all that and they were like hey, we can make people do what we want We can make people do what we want now turns out that in this hypnopedia You can't get people to memorize facts, but you can get people to memorize sort of sentiments or moral feelings So they learn all these little phrases and they're bouncing around their heads and hearts for their whole life things like like a tree in a B Is not for me.
Yes. Yeah, I mean that one up. That's very good. That's very good in the in the the Department of propaganda But things like ending is better than mending it's better to throw out your shorts when they get a tear and go buy a new pair Short-sen it is to repair your shorts because you mend your shorts.
You're not buying new shorts guys Old gross mended shorts, right? Everybody belongs to everybody which is another thing we'll talk about in a second And then all the different casts are taught that their place is best so the betas are taught like I'm so glad I'm a beta Those nasty gammas have to wear such an ugly color in their dumb those alphas they have to work so frightfully hard I'm so glad that I'm a beta and all the betas have this as they're sleeping in their barracks because remember they don't have families They all live in a big room as they're growing up and they just and so they all have this belief that where they are and who they are and what they do Is the best possible situation that they could be in and everybody in the world? Has this place it has an identity and has a a place to fit into this machine and to be useful? Is a very powerful powerful needs that are being met Whenever there's problems they do have something called soma and so much probably one of the most famous things to come out of this book Because it is such an interesting it's just sort of a kind of a powerful metaphor But what soma is it is the perfect drug a little bit of soma just takes a little bit of that anxiety or a little bit of that edge off A lot of soma and you go into basically basically a blissful holiday Huxley although I don't mention this to the students but Huxley kind of In other writings and in this book basically talks about when you take too much soma It's essentially like the height of of like sexual climax extended in chemical form So this is what kind of this what soma is doing into the mind So you have a small bit of it, but if you take a lot of it you're sort of at this this this euphoric You know brain absolutely washed and dopamine and any sort of stimulant and soma is used as It is it is put in everything.
It's in your food It is something that is just people socially take when there's various characters and stories and whatever they have a problem wherever They're like oh man Someone so doesn't like me the friends like you just a little bit soma go home watch the Netflix you'll be fine and So soma is yes, it's this um, it's used whenever so the conditioning doesn't work or if everybody has a bad day Oh, you know, and this isn't a perfect world accident still happen You still you know people still die there are still things that may be considered, you know, not so psychologically comforting Well, you just take soma has no negative side effects. It has no hangover If it's addictive, I mean everybody's addicted to it So if everybody's addicted to it and it has a negative side effects is it actually even like a social problem? It's not going away. It's the caffeine.
It's what to say says Donson as he drinks coffee He's literally drinking coffee right now. Okay. Um, so anyway, so you have soma and soma is this this the thing that is the great smoother the great equalizer In this world Everybody so there's no more families in fact the family is seen as kind of like this dirty Gross term that if you call somebody a father you're essentially calling somebody It's like the equivalent of saying something is a poop if you call somebody a mother in the world that it has a much sort of grosser Scatological interpretation along with it. They are concerned childbearing is really not a It's not a good looking process.
Yeah, it's not tidy and and test tubes are yes exactly and they're controlled and everything can be Yes can be planned and organized So the vast majority of people women in the brave new world are sterilized. They don't need to they don't want to be them bearing children They don't want them bearing children, but a very select few are not and their eggs are harvested and then are used in the in the hatchery process The sexual ethics of the brave new world is that everybody belongs to everybody there is no marriage any kind of relationship that lasts for a long period of time is looked on with suspicion because problems arise when feelings are are isolated in are localized so if somebody loves somebody too strongly Well, they are going to make decisions in their life that are a unpredictable and be maybe not necessarily beneficial for the whole First I love my wife. I will make decisions that if push came to shove I would probably make decisions that would take me out of Community with you with you fine gentlemen like if if if a man had to live in Sweden or something I don't know this is a bad stupid example but you know what I mean so like if if So strong passions and feelings are looked at suspiciously eliminating families or the slow elimination of families I want to remind a listener that this is a process that has happened over many thousands or many hundreds of years Whenever I teach this book students always sort of think that some big bad has kind of instituted this this world and is pulling the strings in the Background, but that's the 1984 book Not brave new world. Maybe we'll talk about how those the legacy of those two books towards the end of the podcast But there's there's no big bad.
This is a society that has kind of we've kind of Amble sort of you know found our way to it wasn't this great plan. It was essentially what do human beings want? Well, what are human what are problems that human beings have? Hey our job.
Hey our job. Don't have enough sports equipment Yeah, you don't have enough entertainment. We had our job. What if we made everybody love their job?
What else do human beings want? We want we want to have sex with everybody. Okay, fine What if we just create a world where everybody has sex with everybody? No problem.
Oh, okay. No, you know, well, it's not a nature. Yes Well, we got wars and stuff. Oh, well, why would people have wars?
Well, if you boil it down someone's passions for something are stronger than other people's And their needs are met and or there's feuds because of love or whatever Well, if we can smooth all of that out from birth from the beginning then we can avoid all of these problems You know, so this is a this is what the world has kind of slowly lurched itself into as opposed to some sort of giant revolution has happened the slow March and the advent of technology so Anyway, so yeah, the sexual ethics everybody belongs to everybody everyone is is is expected to have sort of meaningless and Permissive and pervasive sexual relationships with everybody and if you're not it's not okay And if you're not, it's not okay, it's weird because it also means that somebody else isn't getting fulfilled and you're not doing your part And that's right. That's right. And yes, so there's one character and she kind of So this is the world of the book the the story of the book Which I think we're gonna spend that much time talking about today The story of the book is that there are a number of characters that kind of feel like Everything doesn't really fit for them and there's one character in her name is La Nina and she is quite beautiful and she's a beta but she's one of these betas that has That it hasn't been sterilized so that she even sort of is more sexually appealing to everybody And she is a highly sought-after partner and she's just kind of at some point feeling like It's just something's missing and she ends up dating somebody for a month and her friend tells her that that's unnatural And she's sort of looking for some passions right cuz passions and she's sort of looking for something more so all these characters are kind of Their humanity begins to sort of bubble to the surface. There's one character who feels like he hates Soma There's one character who is an alpha plus who has the best job all the women love him He's handsome and he isn't basically he's an advertising executive to put a sort of long stuff So what he does he actually writes those lyrics those little phrases He wants to be a poet he wants to say something meaningful And so he's kind of has his feeling like everything's not right and then La Nina She kind of wants some sort of real relationship and she has this feeling like everything is not right So the story is is that human nature still bubbles to the surface and this world can't completely give everything that everybody wants But the tragedy of the book is that the conditioning is so pervasive that what we recognize as normal human nature eventually is seen as Kind of a bug in the program and the conditioning and Soma eventually can sort of eradicate that those desires and bring everybody back to a sort of a baseline existence of pleasure and of Every every need being met Our students very easily see the seeds of If this if this book is the full flowering they easily see the seeds of it in their lives and in the light in the world around them Loosing sexual norms huckups tinder tinder I mean it takes four or five questions in a class to actually remind the student that oh, yeah sex is about Babies right because they have been so decoupled in sort of our modern understanding our modern culture that sex and child rearing are almost seen as Completely different categories altogether and have no crossover in terms of just average conversation this would not be so a hundred years ago even before so before you know Technology has made it where we can decouple the act of sex from from the moral responsibility of family Anyway, so much also something that students very easily gravitate towards As I've been teaching this book for the past seven years more and more It used to be kids are talking about drugs, but now kids talk about cell phones kids talk about technology and it's a me Our students not just our students but students and this generation Know so much about dopamine just the concept of dopamine and tech unsciency technology We didn't know we knew this stuff and we were kids, but they just know the idea of like the science of addiction with screens and and Chemicals just it's I guess it's just sort of more talked about in them anyway So they they are quick to to draw those connections to that and see the sort of seeds of this So this is this is essentially the world trying to think of missing any other big pieces of it.
No I mean, unless what about the people who kick out at the society? Well, yeah, this story goes on there people that just don't fit in and they eventually get kicked out to the sort of like island of Misfits, but one other thing is is that this world is You have to sort of read between you have to be pay a lot of attention But you realize that the upper upper casts are white Europeans and the lower casts are Asian and black and there's definitely sort of a racism element to this story going on The idea being that one group of people arrived at the technology first and then was able to Use that technology to enrich themselves and and screw over the other And then that that that die was cast and the society has sort of moved along that trajectory So you have this a huge racial divide where the lower casts are are are other races and then the upper classes upper casts are European white European so there's that element and And then there's also the sort of the objectification of women women in the book are talked about as essentially Actually a lot of the slang terms to talk about how attractive a woman is are other terms about like a machine Like look how pneumatic she is that's sort of one term or some sort of apparatus that the female form and the female person is purely an object of sexual desire Period and that the commingling of sexuality and motherhood and family is that is no longer a that is though There's been a sharp divide between those two things in the brave new world You don't age everybody sort of hits the perfect like 27 to 32 and then stays there until their bodies fall apart and they die So from when you say to the you know when you sort of look at you say listen Here's the world where a lot of your what are students have anxieties about am I gonna Am I gonna be able to like find a place in this world? Am I gonna have a job? Am I gonna?
Am I gonna have some sort of meaningful existence? Well, yes, you will in fact from birth you will be conditioned to in the world of brave new world. Yes Everything has been taken care of you take care of you and in fact you are gonna be completely formed to love the thing that you can't escape You will be able to It's like the any sort of pop song right like you see the thing you want the thing you get the thing That will be a reality for everybody and if You will there will be no rejection You will everyone belongs to everybody And then if ever there is a bad day while there's there is a a chemical backup for you in Soma And so then this is the world and so I always ask my students So then what is traded or the other question is why I'm usually reacting like oh, I don't like this This doesn't sound good and my question is okay. Why what's wrong with this?
And how is this how is this book anything other than the conclusion than the logical conclusion of what a lot of our Sort of cultural zeitgeist is telling us that we want Students often mean so we have good conversations with that The difficulty that people would be happier. Yes, this society that is the difficulty Yeah, like it's hard to Yeah, you're saying like in the language of I don't know I don't like using the word culture I don't know it's hard to like criticize what's wrong with it. It's my thought number one But the thought number two is like nothing will keep us from going in this direction Yes, like there's no one who's standing up and being like we should have less pleasure or you know I mean and the worst part is that the people who like you know the main character leaves and goes to this island of Misfits thing it's gonna be some sort of paradise of true humanity and it's not scrappy It's not like they don't have very many resources and families are broken and like bad women get left and the food is bad There's a lot of superstition and it's hot and there's no air conditioning and it's it's it's not a great world He doesn't want to stay there either and so I'll just actually doesn't just present the one side like this is where we're going We should definitely stop he says well. Here's the alternative and it isn't that great.
Yeah, yes, it's definitely pessimistic book I think for the student why I think it's important to teach it is that it does confront them with The seeds of ambition in the seeds of culture or the seeds of sort of this progress towards what and really the The only way out of it is to say that there is something about being a human being that is beyond What this book offers so this book offers those three things identity community stability There's something more that the human person wants than just those three needs met. I think about this whenever So what's that like it's been bouncing around in a lot of like the TED talks, you know the the things that human beings need to be happy Oh, I'm like friendship and meaningful work and it's a sort of hierarchy of needs right yeah Yeah Ben sass did a talk at Senator he's a senator from Nebraska He did a talk at the gospel coalition and he was talking about you know I think the psychological research says that human beings generally need friendship people who who are sad when you're sad and happy when you're Happy sort of its basic form some sort of meaningful work and the last one is important last one doesn't exist in the brave new world some kind of Answer to what happens after death some kind of answer to It's not just like how do you make sense of suffering, but it's more how do you make sense of mortality? So that's one thing that they don't have in the brave new world in fact They shy themselves away from death they isolate death and they condition you to actually Not think about it and to so for example when there's a tour group of little kids at a hospital and someone dies and the kids see it And so they're immediately given so much chocolate ice cream so that they sort of associate This sort of somewhat traumatic experience with ice cream and someone you know sort of pleasure and all that kind of stuff so What I try to use what we try to talk about with the book is that This is a natural vision of human humanity that the students have a repulsion to it But they can't easily say why they don't want the fruit of what this world is giving them Because they do want the fruit of it, but but there's something that There's lack of freedom or there there's something that doesn't deal with maybe some some sort of spiritual sense or some sort of transcendence of the human person that needs But there's really a lack of freedom if you want to go to the exactly I know I know I know the reservation you can if you want to take a holiday And be on drugs you can you want to go to the forest? Absolutely as an alpha right now, but the bait isn't game I mean the gammistell is absolutely have they only have the the tools to be able to think beyond their conditioning They are essentially sub human they don't have they are in the realm of instinctual animal They don't have their same rational faculties at least this Huxley presents them.
Yeah, they don't but you are you are pretty free in a lot of ways It's true what you want to do so what's missing? That's the big question for the question is is what is missing and why is this? Why does everybody get a little like Humanity yeah, but what is it so there's a scene? I think for the end where a bunch of eplons are about to get their soma and I forget which character is like it's John It's John throws it out to start revolution wants to free them He wants them to like rise up and yeah exactly over for the system and they don't want to do it Like they are pleased with their station in life They don't they're not allowed to consider it being different like they're being they're not being treated as humans They're not being treated as people yeah, this book often gets talked about in the same sentence as 1984 But I feel like bravely world in 1984 are they are radically different Visions of collectivist future.
I think they're polar opposites on the same track Yes, so they're both and when I say collect they're both collectivist in its vision of a future humanity So what I mean by collectivist is a centralized controlled human existence so with this one it is a a control it's basically a honey trap right is what it is so it is a an existence where all of your physical needs are met and The trade-off is your I mean I guess sort of your existential freedom I don't even know what to say how to say it there there is a trade-off However, you want to put your finger on it 1984 is just a boot on a neck It's like 1984 is if you want something other than this authoritarian government and they can't get out of it They can't get out of it and even their minds are beginning to be changed through you know Was it double-speaking and all that kind of stuff? And I always chuckle whenever I read some sort of think-piece or a lot of people say oh we're living in a 1984 world I don't see it. I don't see it. I don't see it.
We'd learn not a brave new world world I see way more seeds of that. Well, I think I think both are manifest I just don't think current United States is manifest in 1984. I think there are other countries around the world that are experiencing far more 1984 or they are really are yeah, there are there are definitely strong-armed Fascist regimes that have the boot on the neck of freedom in the world definitely But with the with Huxley's brave new world this seems to be the kind of of world that would be stumbled into by mistake as opposed to Intentionally played by some sort of strong arm. Yeah.
Yeah, and that's kind of the scariest of the of the book is that is that Every kind of terrible conclusion soma Seems to have its genesis in a problem that we have today So so in the United States drug addiction is now I think it's a beat-out heart disease or at least it's getting there I don't know the thing that went around headlines is that the life expectancy in the US drop because of opioid Yes, so there's here's two so then you are somebody who cares about this problem And there are two ways that you can try to solve this problem We can try to get people off opioids Oh my goodness people are taking these opioids and they're dying or you can engineer safer opioid right like and so here is The world has said that's too hard to get people off drugs if we can engineer safer drugs You can get people off a bear one or you can just be okay with marijuana Yes, and and then if we can and if we can sort of sign to pour our scientific resources and understanding what makes up these Materials then we can engineer them in ways that are safer and I mean then all of a sudden you get you get all sorts of dystopian uses of words safer and healthier for the community, right like that's garbage, but But you get these sort of new zeitgeisty phrases about like using science for a better world and engineering better opiates The startup bro pitch in Silicon Valley. Well, we used to have opium and now we have Adderall, right? Yeah, I mean when you have what do they call methinot methamphetamines and benzodiazepines rather called Anyway, so right every every terrible solution every terrible terminus in this book you can see the seeds of it today Oh, I guess I'm broken families All these things New medication medication has a use also like it's not this kind of summer is for the escape It's not for I don't think it maybe dummy actually when John's mom is in the hospital Is there so much rip for pain or is it it's for pain and also because she just doesn't want to The she's grown ugly and she's in a world of people. Yeah, the point I was gonna make is that maybe the drugs You're talking about have actual purposes.
I don't have an actual purpose So much does not really have a purpose like it doesn't have a medical purpose rather Opiates have medical purpose or you invent you invent the the the you pathologize human experience in order to that Because you already have this solution for it. Yeah, I mean the only point I'm giving is that so like we need painkillers And so a non-edictive pain killer would be like awesome. Yes, that is a thing that should be developed so that like surgery I'm wrong. Well, you know, I mean I'm just saying an idea to paint killer is is kind of like a misnomer right like isn't every not You're gonna be addicted to pain.
That's what I'm supposed to be. That's how they were marketed in the 90s And that's why I'm proven right. Yes. That's why that's not really addictive.
So far as I know I know but it is a pain killer. I'm sure you know, not like to paint those but they're like for like high High-end plan is like for a back surgery like you're I'm not helping you with that ether will go on sure But I think you can die from ether I guess Yeah, so I think has the same problems of addiction, but I'm not sure but if we don't we need to keep sort of a nuanced If we if I guess my point is if we lose an idea of what if we lose an idea of health that does If we start messing with the baseline idea of what is a happy person and we say there can't be happy people unless they have some kind of chemical But that's this is additives if you so if you can boil down and say happy brain looks like this and you can regulate hormones to make it look Like that. Yes, why wouldn't you do that? Exactly.
That's the point. I mean, this is the world that has done that Why we so there are really hard ways to make people happy and like live good lives and like the been sass thing you're talking about Like yes, you can get those three things. It's really hard to get those three things friendship and and a great job or not a just great job a purposeful job and then a sense of of Peace about death. Yeah, so what's way easier than that is is getting high with ways here that is video games What's way easier than that is like they're all these easier and have to get to those things And so we should lift up those hard things and say they're worth going after but we you almost have to lift them up because no one naturally Is gonna say I want to do hard things to get good results.
Yes Like it hurts, but if we can continue to perfect the easy path, then It's the easy path to and maybe this brings us back to Abolition of man. It's an easy path to something that is no longer human as we know it human as we recognize it And there are probably people who would make that trade. I think there are lots of people who make that trade. Yeah, yeah Why wouldn't we make that trade because we would know as classical people human as Christian man?
Why wouldn't we make that trade? Yeah When you say there's so many parts of the trade that I'm having trouble sure different than them like again the one part of why Would you not genetically modify people to like be nicer in the future is that's the disrespecting their humanity? It's fundamentally changing what it is to be human Why don't we bliss out and escape from the world is because we're supposed to like make this world better? Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah It also makes you think that we've probably like the outcomes that we think we want in a real world or not things that we actually want Yes, and that's what characters kind of bump up excuse me bump up against is oh man There's we got it I just it feels like I just don't have what I want. I still feel like there is like I still haven't found I'm looking for a Kind of thing I was like I'll just take you so much we find um, but there's still that sense of of That you're not living the way that you ought so The book confronts the student with the immensity of that of that question because the conclusions of the book are so much What the world tells them they want and says they're that they ought to be working towards and then when they sort of see it in the naked Light of data, they're like I don't like that. Yeah and I think there are a lot of things that are missing. I mean there's the You you touched on freedom and said that we do like and I said they kind of do have freedom They don't have freedom in the way that humans generally want we want freedom to Determine our own purpose right and that is specifically taken away from them.
They cannot determine their own purpose It's the same reason my my leadership kids rail against Predestination because it feels as though it is taking away their ability to Pedestin their own some shoes I choose for themselves Maybe what you do is you fool them into thinking that they've made a choice about their job So you like condition them like if they're gonna be a salt mine person You condition them to enjoy all the things of salt mining, but you don't tell them They're gonna be a salt miner and then when they're 17 in high school you're like, you know what this pamphlet came across my desk It's a salt mine internship. I think you should check it out and they go and realize oh my goodness. I've flipped in love salt mining I've just covered myself. That's the other piece is that it reduces the end purpose of man So it reduces the freedom of man to choose and I also think it reduces the end purpose of if someone's end-purpose truly is salt mining Mm-hmm.
Well, isn't that a shame? It's their social purpose right their social purpose But it is made their ultimate purpose because the rest of their entire life is formed around this one job that they're supposed to do in reality Very rarely does someone find that much fulfillment in a salt mining job They're their actual purpose is found somewhere else in something they enjoy say model trains or family or something something else that is A purpose they have chosen for themselves the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever Yes, but for some people they think that she fenned his model trains So I'm not saying that is their chief end But I'm saying at least they have chosen it They've chosen some purpose that they want to pursue rather than being slotted into a purpose a model trains will eventually be Desatisfying I'm not arguing with that what I'm saying is that person chose model trains Right they weren't ferried into model trains. I'm hoping that you're like actually really in the model trains I think they are just as boring as a headline I'm not I just that trains never really my thing I'm saying language of choice is really hard in the context of this book because you would generally say like the epsilon's are choosing The salt mines are choosing. Yeah, they want so much about everything else But it's also it's almost unfair because brave new world changes all of our categories like any other context We could talk about yeah, if I met a kid and like he loves the heat and he loves all mining then like more power to him Go do it but in the context of this book that's wrong because they're being forced into it They've been manipulated right and so it's still finding out that you have been manipulated by your parents your entire life And of course you'll rail against that's not true freedom And so you're missing those those pieces certainly and of course the questions of higher purpose of life and religion which are completely absent as far as I know But then the sort of the the good heuristic that this book can do is then can give the student the ability to say wait a minute I just like the idea of being manipulated in that brave new world in what ways am I being manipulated by what I think is normal now?
Like I live in you know They live in this culture or they live in this world that has that is where they're being taught and they have these phrases and every ending Is there the mending everybody belongs to everybody and I is this sort of outside or look at that and I say oh terrible But then to have the ability to say wait a minute I need to look at the culture that I live in as an outsider and begin to look at the messages and begin to look at the things That I am presented and when students begin to do that It is a scale of fall from their eyes kind of experience and all of a sudden In city they begin to see the insidious things of the world that they've never seen before like I don't know the the algorithms that tell them what Netflix shows to watch or or you know the predictive The predictive Google searches or any of these sorts of things I begin to say well my experiences and my What I should be wanting is being catered to and is being manipulated by something that is not and this is another whole episode It's not this like you know It's not this big bad sitting in a tower saying you know Bwaha I can control the masses it's not like Zuckerberg's pulling all our strings or whatever we kind of stumbled into into a System that is doing this kind of thing it says all people want give people what they want people want our You know Perfering their political views because all our information because we gave it is But now it's then you sort of there's this tipping point where it's a sort of feedback loop And so and so when students begin to look at it in that way that they get that same kind of sense of uneasiness So that same sort of sense of manipulation that I think that they see when they when they look at this book and it can It's a sort of disorienting and Kind of destabilizing experience, and I think it's good thing When we were kids, I don't know if maybe you guys didn't have this experiment we were kids we I remember My folks when we watched television and ads would be on this is in the 80s and 90s was the heyday of like oh What is advertising doing to our children when we would watch ads my parents would we play a game called spot the lie when we would watch advertising So where's the lie in the set I'd be like oh if I had that beer the pretty girl would talk to me It's like good. That's the lie right But then you turn off the TV and you're not and then you don't have ads around you anymore that doesn't exist anymore anyway, it's just There's a lot of parallels of the modern world and seeds planted now that have left untouched will grow into something That I think ultimately we don't want to be a part of Anyway, that's why that's that's brave the world at least that's the world even talk about the story But that's that's all this is book if you it is a summertime if you are a listener It's a pretty quick read yeah I'm looking season and fun fact is that I'll just Huxley in his later life almost Subscribed to the society that he put in this deeply dystopian book. Yeah, he died. I think on drugs I think that was all just so yes for is that he would be a listy that he would yeah be given that as he died so he could die Hi, yeah, yeah, and that's why I'm a little fuzzy on his sort of he doesn't repudiate the world and he's kind of It's for it sort of all over.
Yeah. Anyway, but that's brave new world. Well, thanks for listening everybody This has been classical stuff. You should know you can catch us on the web at classical stuff.net.
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