Amusing Ourselves to Servitude: Huxley's "Brave New World"

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the other great dystopia of the twentieth century, and it is fascinating to read alongside Orwell’s 1984, because the two warn of opposite dangers. Orwell feared a world controlled by pain, surveillance, and fear. Huxley, writing earlier in 1932, feared a world controlled by pleasure, comfort, and distraction. His World State keeps its citizens docile not by torturing them but by giving them everything they want: endless entertainment, casual sex, and a happiness drug called soma. People are not oppressed; they are pacified. And that, Huxley suggests, may be the more insidious tyranny, because no one even wants to rebel against a chains made of pleasure.

Here is what Brave New World taught me about control through pleasure, about the cost of frictionless happiness, and about why we might come to love our own servitude.

Key takeaways

• Control through pleasure, not pain, keeps the population docile.
• Stability is bought at the price of freedom, truth, art, and depth.
• “Soma” is the drug that erases all discomfort and dissent.
• People are engineered and conditioned to love their assigned places.
• A painless, frictionless life may cost us our very humanity.

The dictatorship of pleasure

The brilliance of Huxley’s nightmare is that it looks, at first, like paradise. The citizens of the World State are healthy, comfortable, perpetually entertained, and, by their own report, happy. There is no poverty, no war, no loneliness, no pain. The state maintains control not through jackboots and torture but through pleasure and conditioning, giving people so much easy gratification that they have neither the desire nor the capacity to question anything. When discomfort does arise, there is always soma, the perfect drug that dissolves anxiety and dissent in a warm haze of contentment, with no hangover. This is a profoundly modern fear. Huxley saw that a population could be enslaved far more effectively by indulgence than by repression, that the most reliable way to make people stop resisting is to make them comfortable and distracted enough that they never want to.

The price of stability

But this frictionless happiness comes at an enormous, hidden cost, and the novel slowly reveals it. To maintain perfect stability, the World State has had to abolish nearly everything that gives human life depth and meaning: family, lasting love, religion, real art, science pursued for truth, suffering, struggle, and genuine freedom. Shakespeare is banned, not because it is dangerous propaganda but because it is too disturbing, too full of passion and pain the citizens are no longer equipped to handle. The “happiness” of the brave new world is shallow because it has been purchased by eliminating the difficulties out of which depth, art, love, and meaning grow. Huxley’s question is pointed: would we accept a perfectly comfortable, perfectly stable existence if the price were everything that makes us fully human? And, more uncomfortably, are we already accepting it, a little at a time?

Loving our servitude

The deepest and most disturbing insight of Brave New World is that its citizens are not unhappy slaves longing to be free. They have been conditioned, from before birth, to love their servitude, to want exactly the lives they have been assigned, to find the very idea of freedom, solitude, or difficulty distasteful. There is no Winston Smith here secretly yearning for truth; almost everyone is content. Huxley’s warning is therefore subtler and, in some ways, scarier than Orwell’s. A tyranny of fear creates rebels; a tyranny of pleasure creates willing subjects who would not dream of rebelling, because they have been made to desire their own chains. The hardest oppression to resist is the one we do not even recognise as oppression, because it gives us what we have been trained to want.

What I’m taking with me

Brave New World feels, if anything, more prophetic than 1984 for our own time of endless entertainment, instant gratification, and pharmaceutical comfort. What I am taking from Huxley is his warning that control can come through pleasure as easily as through pain; his insistence that a life without difficulty, struggle, and even suffering would also be a life without depth, art, love, and meaning; and his most unsettling lesson, that we might be conditioned to love our own servitude, distracted and comfortable into giving up our freedom without a fight. The question he leaves me with is uncomfortable and urgent: am I amusing myself into a contentment that costs me my humanity?

Frequently asked questions

What is Brave New World about?

It is Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel about a future World State that controls its citizens not through fear but through pleasure, comfort, conditioning, and the drug soma, sacrificing freedom, truth, and depth for stability and happiness.

How is Brave New World different from 1984?

Orwell feared control through pain, surveillance, and fear; Huxley feared control through pleasure, comfort, and distraction. In Huxley’s world, people are pacified by indulgence rather than oppressed by force.

What is “soma” in Brave New World?

A pleasure drug provided by the state that erases anxiety, discomfort, and dissent, keeping the population docile and content without any unpleasant side effects.

References & further reading

1. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Chatto & Windus, 1932.
2. Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Chatto & Windus, 1973.
3. Watt, Donald (ed.). Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1975.