Aldous Huxley and the Age of Engineered Pleasure

from They Tried to Warn Us · host Ray Welling

When we think of dystopia, we often imagine Orwell’s jackboot: surveillance, censorship, control through terror. But Aldous Huxley offered a different nightmare – one where oppression wears a grin. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley imagined a world pacified not by fear but by pleasure. A world where citizens are kept docile through engineered happiness,endless distractions, and a little pill called soma. His warning wasn’t about totalitarianism. It was about triviality. A society so inundated with comfort, entertainment, and consumerism that it forgets what it means to be human. Fast-forward to 2025. We live in the dopamine economy. Algorithms serve what we crave. Discomfort is avoided, curated, anesthetized. Huxley saw it coming – and we brought him forward to see what we’ve done with his prophecy.More information:They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.

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This episode was published on August 26, 2025.

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