Brave New World

I think something about my dissertation research days caused a shift in me because since then I found myself getting more intrigued by philosophical material and studies on the human behaviour and human conditions. 

This book was recommended to me by my good old college friend, PC, when we were talking about all things random, just before dozing off. It's quite strange and disturbing, that my colleagues at work sometimes laugh at my facial expressions when I'm reading this book on my break. It's written in 1931, but what's even stranger is the fact that most of Huxley's predictions are actually happening now in 2012. 

It revolves around Huxley's ideology of a 'perfect world' after Fordism (or after the time of mass production), where babies are farmed from test tubes and created from chemicals to make them perfect and void of illness and recessive genes. There are no mothers, no fathers, no births, no families. These babies are conditioned through sleep teaching, where they are brainwashed by voices from a controller from a very young age. "Everyone belongs to everyone", hence recreational sex is accepted from young, because it is believed that when you get attached to one person for too long it entails suffering, heartbreaks and unhappiness from all the expectations. They live in a controlled world where the Controller censors everything that might disturb this utopia: literary books and new studies of science are banned to prevent them from provoking the thoughts of the people which in turn might upturn the stability in society. As a result, people are obliviously content and happy, never finding the need to challenge or think against the norm.  It's all a bit crazy and sci-fi, but in between the lines, Huxley cleverly reveals the ideas of how the world these days is controlled by the media and politics, how we are all slowly being brainwashed by our politicians and their propagandas, and how we can ever find the right stability for a 'perfect world'. 

Initially I thought Huxley had one too many acid trips to have thought of all this craziness,
but now I would love to explore his radical ideas in his other works about 'utopia.'