I don't want Comfort I want God I want poetry I want real danger I want freedom I want goodness I want sin we are used to thinking of pleasure as a good thing philosophies like utilitarianism even make it the ultimate human good and the so-called Pleasure Principle is often the end point of explaining why we act in the way that we do but what if pleasure could be turned around and used as an instrument of societal and philosophical torture this is the terrifying idea explored in Alis huxley's phenomenal novel Brave New World it frequently makes the top 10 list for the greatest books of the 20th century and a close reading uncovers a philosophical depth unmatched by almost any other dystopian novel because whereas other visions of fictional totalitarianism focus on the suffering caused by state repression in Brave New World almost everyone is happy they live in a hedonistic paradise and yet they are permanently cut off from any sort of emotional or Phil opical depth almost every citizen lives in Shallow contentment drugs staving off any lingering suffering and yet a few Souls choose to Rebel get ready to learn if there are things more important than happiness how gratitude can become perverse and how we too may have become a bit like huxley's tranquilized citizens as always bear in mind that this is just my interpretation of Brave New World and there is so much I will not be able to talk about here but let's begin with a synopsis of the novel and give an overview of the Society of this new world as this will be important context for the rest of the video from this point on spoilers abound so be warned but before we dive into that I'd like to give a quick thank you to our very kind sponsor short form if you like my channel then chances are you are a fan of books but there is one problem there are so many books and so little time in which to read them but this is where short form comes in handy short form contains detailed summaries and analyses of a whole host of different books from psychology to philosophy to great works of literature you can keep track of some of the key ideas and best insights from some of the coolest books in the world personally I enjoy using short form to scope out books I might want to read in the future and for refreshing my memory on books that I've already read as a personal recommendation I would advise first reading the summary of thinking fast and slow by Daniel caraman it is a fantastic way of reminding yourself of some of his key insights or learning them for the first time by joining through my link in the description short.com Joseph you'll get a free trial and a 20% discount on an annual subscription so give it a try you've got nothing to lose and knowledge to gain one a brave new overview like almost all dystopian novels the setting of Brave New World is perhaps the most important character in the story and the relationship our protagonists have with the world itself shapes them just as much as their interactions with one another if not far more so Brave New World is set in a post-war version of Earth where a global government has taken over run by 10 governors who bear the rather appropriate title controller and the policies of this world state are entirely centered around stability and pleasure this dictates almost every decision the controllers make from their legislation around birth to their extensive drug program to the culture of the planet and their work begins at conception the citizens of this new world are all artificially created by the state from eggs and sperm inside a hatchery and even at this point the fate of every single person is sealed they are immediately separated into classes ranging from alpha plus to Epsilon and which letter they bear will dictate their entire lives from the education they receive to the jobs they will have to their social position all of it is determined From This Moment the alpha pluses will be the future scientists leaders and venerated Achievers of the world while the Deltas and the epsilons will be stuck with menial tasks depending on which class an embryo belongs to it is either given an ideal environment for nourishing its future physical and psychological development or it is purposefully stunted with the application of Alcohol and Other Solutions designed to hamper their intellect and body later in life the idea here is that not only will an Epsilon not be able to do an alpha plus job but they would not even want to Once children are born they are raised by the state and the concept of mothers and fathers is totally forbidden every child is the government's child and each little one is psychologically conditioned to hold certain beliefs about culture society and the other classes Alphas are taught to look down on the Deltas and epsilons while deltas and epsilons are taught to venerate the alphas but only ever at a distance this is also where the core principles of the culture of the state are conditioned the tenants of unrestricted love making total emotional uninvestable authority of the world controllers are all hammered into these infant skulls through thousands of repetitions once they are grown happiness drugs named Soma are available on demand and anyone who feels sad or upset is encouraged to take some Soma to restore their former Peace of Mind misery is extremely frowned upon and the idea of understanding empathy is seen as outdated the only response anyone has to another sadness is take aoma the story of Brave New World follows lenina Crown Bernard Marx and Helm Holtz Watson as they deal with the arrival of John The Savage someone who was born outside of the world State the plot begins in Earnest when Bernard takes lenina on holiday to a Savage reservation these reservations are the few places in the world left unconquered by the world State and they live in small tribal communities there Bernard meets John who will later be given the unflattering name John Savage and his mother Linda who was a citizen of the world State mistakenly left behind on a previous Expedition because his mother was originally from the world States JN has always been an outcast in the reservation and Bernard agrees to take both him and his mother back to see this great civilization John had always heard about at first this works out wonderfully burn gets a lot of social status for having found this unique anomaly and John explores the world Bernard is a psychologist and he is fascinated by the way Jon's mind works so differently from having been raised outside the stat he also introduces Jon to both Helm Holtz and lenina helmoltz works in the government's propaganda Wing but he Harbors a deep and treasonous fascination with what art could be if it was allowed to be created through a free expression of human passion and Jon's chaotic experiences on the reservation as well as his knowledge of the band works of Shakespeare strike helmholtz as incredible meanwhile lenina is very attracted to John the feeling is mutual but Jon has not been raised with the principles of total free love where sex is basically the same thing as high-fiving so he understandably feels threatened by lenina's braggadocious advances and eventually chases her away Linda Jon's mother decides to spend the rest of her life in a drug-fueled semi-coma state in one of the government hospitals which everyone is broadly approving of apart from John who thinks that such art artificial happiness is abhorent however soon the drugs overtake Linda's system and her lungs begin to fail Jon rushes to her bedside weeping but his grief coupled with his repeated insistence that she is his mother and that he loves her causes a public Scandal everyone in the world's state is conditioned to think of death as a pretty unremarkable event and to think of natural birth as both morally abhorent and disgusting children are given tours around the dying in order to death condition them and when someone is no longer useful to the state they are not considered to have that much value anyway Jon's erratic behavior and natural displays of grief are considered socially disruptive and he Bernard and helmholtz are all hauled up in front of Mustafa m one of the 10 world controllers here Mustafa and Jon engage in a fascinating philosophical dialogue over the value of different aspects of human experience and trust me we are going to go into detail about this later Mustafa sends Bernard and helmholtz Away to one of the many islands the state sends people with enough orig thought to be considered dangerous while he allows Jon to go free Bernard is horrified at the thought of Exile but Mustafa almost envies him apparently these exiled islands are not too bad and are also full of the most interesting people left on the planet in fact those considered so interesting that they are a social disruption having been released back into society Jon sets up shop in a lighthouse and wishes to serve as a living Counterpoint to the hedonistic values of the new world he engages in self flagellation and becomes deliberately primitive assuring any sign of the civilization he so hates however soon people begin to show up at his retreat in order to watch this modern diogenes he is a curiosity and people will not leave him alone robbed of even the small respite of solitude Jon ends his own life this could have been a last Act of rebellion or of Despair or of Torment but either way the man from the Wilderness who was the only living person who could serve as a true counter example to the world state is dead and the Brave New World continues it is unchanged and unchallenged and may roll on indefinately propelled by the weight of its own inertia it is a fascinating story and it contains such a host of ideas questions and criticisms that we are spoiled for choice on where to start but I want to begin by examining the underlying philosophy of the controllers social cohesion Above All Else and the interesting and unintuitive philosophical consequences of this approach Ro two alone in public the German philosopher Arthur schopenhauer lived most of his life in marked Solitude women seemed to find him repulsive he had few friends and his philosophy found almost no admirers until the very end of his life and despite all of this loneliness he learns to Value Solitude incredibly highly because he thought it was the only time someone is truly free to be themselves in public there are always the constraints of others expectations threatening to crush what ever nent individuality we have but in Long stretches alone we can come to know and create who we are if we spend our entire lives with others then that is fine but we will inevitably stifle whatever could have been truly unique about us and this is a theme that Echoes through a number of 19th century existential philosophers both kard and N were also very worried about the impact of the crowd or the Herd on others no one person can stand against the immense power and momentum of an entire public public so if they do not wish to be devoured then they must find some solace in solitude nature implores people to symbolically climb the mountain alone so that they can grow their individuality and not just become another limb of the eldrich crowds that dominate the social sphere but for the government of Brave New World no philosophy could be more destructive or harmful than this one of the main lessons the citizenry are indoctrinated with is everyone belongs to everyone else enjoying Solitude is considered a St and disgusting Quirk a bit like how we might view someone who drinks their own we and the idea behind this is simple the world controllers agree with shophow and N they know that Solitude can cultivate individuality but they associate this individuality with unacceptable danger after all with difference in thought might come difference in action and with difference in action might come social conflict and upheaval how could they tolerate the possibility of a thinker like n or kard in a world where stability is prized above everything else the very notion of a revolutionary idea or a revolutionary thinker is destabilizing and why should we care about them anyway I mean if everyone is broadly happy then what's the point of the individual why should we infect a perfectly happy Society full of blissful clones with a corrupting notion of uniqueness or individuality what possible use could they have for it and I think we should take the position of the world State seriously here most of the time when we ask whether something is worthwhile or not many of us tend to judge it according to to whether it promotes human well-being so ending world hunger would be a good thing and massacring puppies would be a bad thing this is often the line of argument people use to support the notion of existential individuality as well according to them any attempt to kill the individual inside of us will leave us feeling empty and unfulfilled we may try to assimilate into a crowd or a public identity but there will always be this nowing sense that we have betrayed ourselves that we are living a half life the thing that makes Brave New World so fascin ating is that this argument arguably no longer applies we aren't presented with any evidence that the notion of individuality will make anyone in the world State happier if anything it might make them less so at the moment they feel no need to be individuals they are content in their class positions and have a life which gives them more hedonistic pleasure than any of us will ever get but all the same it strikes us that something is missing the loss of the individual seems like a great tragedy even when no one is suffering from it but can we justify this position does it make sense to Value the flourishing of individuals as individuals as good for its own sake or is this something that in theory we should sacrifice for the greater good the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that the ultimate human good was udonia or flourishing this was a pleasant and fulfilled state that someone achieved when they were truly living in accordance with both reason and virtue it is a kind of individual fullness that arises from cultivating our virtues and obeying our duties to others to our elves and to the gods this is in contrast to utilitarian philosophy which valued maximizing human happiness above all else in Brave New World we see these philosophies battle it out over the value of us as unique persons for Aristotle being happy is all well and good but it is human development human virtue that really matters and importantly this sometimes requires struggle and pain we cannot be brave if there is no such thing as danger and we cannot be magnanimous if we aren't allowed to form attachments to others without private action and individuality udonia becomes impossible even in Aristotle's extensive list of Duties that we owe to other people the thing that makes them virtuous is that they are given without compulsion in Brave New World all of this complexity in ethics and in character is flattened into maximizing pleasure but there is a real question of whether this is a sufficient justification for abolishing our idiosyncratic usess Brave New World is hardly the only dystopian novel to tackle this concept of abolishing the individual it comes up in 1984 and even the Hunger Games it is pretty commonplace for a dystopia to rob people of what makes them quintessentially them and absorb every individual person into a wider idea of the public but what makes Brave New World so brilliant is that at a glance this loss of uniqueness appears to have made everyone happier whereas you could look at 1984 and say Obviously a lack of individuality is part of the reason the citizens are suffering in huxley's novel they are not suffering and we have to ask the genuine question of whether uniqueness is worth a loss in pleasure would we rather be us or some happier person who is near identical to a billion other happy people where other dystopian fiction defends individuality on utilitarian grounds Huxley strikes at the very first premise of utilitarianism by presenting us with a situation where we have given up our individuality for extra happiness and now we must ask whether it was worth it this is just the first example of perhaps the most interesting philosophical question Huxley poses in the novel what if anything is more important to us than feeling good get used to this question as it's going to be a major theme throughout the video and while the topic of individuality poses this question in the existential sphere our next topic poses it in the political one three Plato class and gratitude in Plato's Republic the old philosopher has a very similar Quest as the world controllers do in Brave New World he wants to create a society that is stable and just and he also divides the state into different classes to achieve this for Plato there is the bronze class the silver class and the Gold Class the bronze class would be the industry of the city the silver class would form its military and the Gold Class would be his Infamous philosopher Kings who ruled from on high and Plato also wanted his lower bronze class citizens to enjoy their roles he said they would never want to be silver or gold anyway and that this was the best place for them the place where they would be happiest in huxley's world this platonic idea has been taken to the extreme as I said before there is a rigid biological class system based on the nourishment someone receives as an embryo and as soon as this is done each class is conditioned to know and love their place the Deltas and epsilons are made deliberately unintelligent by the interventions of the Hatchery and they are conditioned over their entire education to love their work at one point an alpha remarks that if they were given much more to do than simple busy work they would be miserable just like if an Al was given an Epsilon job they are essentially made grateful for their position via their conditioning and the alpha admits that if he was born an Epsilon he would be conditioned to not want to be anything else from a purely utilitarian standpoint this can seem great in a perverse way the psychologist mahai shik shent mahai once argued that us humans are at our most joyous when we are occupied by a task that we find meaningful and pushes our abilities without overwhelming them ideally the careful interventions of the Hatchery means that everyone's job does just that there is no room for social Mobility but there is no wish for it either if the epsilons are made content with their socially devalued and exploited position then who would we be to stop them are we going to inflict upon them knowledge that would only make them unhappy and that they would not know what to do with anyway in our world such arguments are quite rightly viewed as very condescending and misplaced but that is partly because in our world almost everyone can learn new things and become much more knowledgeable skillful and intelligent than they already are even the most Ardent and extreme Believers on fixed limits on intelligence do not think that people cannot learn or grow but in huxley's World there truly is no possibility of growth for the Deltas or epsilons which complicates the ethical question and this is also a much more extreme form of elitism even than Plato's at least Plato allowed for social mobility in theory whereas in Brave New World it is a biological impossibility as we move into the mid 21st century and start to explore ways to edit the genetic makeup of embryos some people have worried about this biological hierarchy becoming a reality so we are presented with a society that is at the same time extremely unequal and also perversely meritocratic everyone ends up where they can perform to the best of their abilities but at the same time this is predetermined from birth the potential of the majority of the population is deliberately stunted and they are made to enjoy this again we see the challenge to the first principles of utilitarianism this may be a happy situation but does it not seem somehow grow T is our moral intuition not screaming at us that this situation is unjust not by virtue of its consequences but by its very form is robbing someone of their potential and making them thank you for it wrong even if that is technically what will make that person happiest or is this kneecapping of someone's development not respecting their dignity as a rational agent certainly this is the kind of thing that Jeremy benam and K would have a bar fight about if we combine Huxley with some contemporary philosophy then the questions become even more interesting Peter van invagen and Robert spolski are just the latest in a long line of determinists people who think that the outcomes of our lives and even the choices that we make are predetermined and thus outside of our control topolski points out that the income levels of our parents our education and the country we are born in all have disproportionate effects on not just where we will end up later in life but also the kind of choices that we will make if we experience certain types of childhood trauma then we are more likely to make decisions based in anger and if we have a family history of addiction we are much more likely to become addicts ourselves all of these have an effect on our lives but they are also fundamentally out of our control we do not choose our genetics or our upbringing or really our education until the higher levels and there are also examples of this that are so obvious we don't even register them on a day-to-day basis if you are born attractive then you have innumerable advantages in your career relationships and more if you are born with a debilitating illness this can severely limit your options in life and none of this is even remotely up to us perhaps the scariest part of huxley's determinist class system is that it is an exaggerated and agential version of Something the universe arguably already does to us as a child we did not control how we were raised or our genetics or our social environment or even our nutrition and yet this is a huge determinant of where we will end up later in life and what we will choose to do later in life for instance if we were part of the generation whose mothers took thalidomide to help with Mourning sickness then we might have been born with it Associated syndrome and had our physical growth impaired considerably a huge sighe of our options in life cut off in an instant through no choice of our own sure we notice the extreme effects of this particular example but if the determinists are right then structurally our situation is no different we may not live in the profoundly unfree system of huxley's world but we don't often acknowledge the ways in which our own universe is doing the work of the Hatchery directors for them and you don't even need to be an outright determinist to recognize this and in some way huxley's world even has an advantage over our own at least they can recognize all of the aspects of their lives that are out of their hands they can point to the hatcheries and say look there that is why I am what I am whereas many of us live with the inherited idea that whatever happens to us is solely the result of our own merits and demerits even if you believe that someone is radically responsible for everything that happens in their lives that does not mean that they have caused it in huxley's world people know what is constraining their choice es but do we know what is constraining ours or do we instead pretend we are much Freer than we actually are just because we don't have 10 Global controllers Watching Over Us does not mean that we are the masters of our own fate to what extent can we truly claim credit for where we are in life and how much did causal factors outside of our control intercede on our behalf or seal our unhappy fate such questions lie at the intersection of the debate around Free Will ethics moral responsibil ility and much more once again the philosophical depth of huxley's novel is plain for all to see but next I want to look at how the world state has murdered a key human instinct and one that many of us hold in very high esteem four creativity and consumption in one of France kafka's letters he describes that he and his novels are one and the same if you want to know him then read his writings and if you don't then the deepest parts of him will be forever closed off to you it is a characteristically drama Proclamation for the Bohemian Legend but it also strikes at the heart of something that makes many people's lives truly fulfilling their ability to create one of the only books that was available to John while he was growing up on the reservation was the complete works of Shakespeare which no one in the world state was allowed to read and when he enters this futuristic Society one of the glaring emissions is great art he goes to one of the entertainment venues with lenina to watch a fely a kind of all immersive film but he is horrified by the shallowness of the art on display it is all just stock storylines about two-dimensional characters it does not challenge nor does it reveal anything it does not encourage reflection or even pose an interesting question it is pleasant but it is never anything more than that and this causes John immense distress this frustration about art is shared by the propagandist helmholtz helmholtz desperately wants to create art but despite being one of the deepest thinkers anyone has come across in the world State he still cannot summon up anything of depth or insight to write when he encounters The Works of Shakespeare through John he is astounded at the creativity on display this is what has been missing from his life but his programming is so entrenched that he can't even fully appreciate it he can Glimpse its beauty admire its creativity but its tragedies fall flat and some of its Great Moments are rendered unintentionally ridiculous and crude this saddens John because he realizes that not only has helmholtz been made unable to create things that are expressive but the very ability to see and recognize depths of emotion or passion has been totally stolen from him most of the spectrum of emotional experience is unexplored territory and while he is in a sense happy this has come at the cost of hobbling his psyche and this is meant to be one of the most gifted Alpha pluses in Europe someone everyone recognizes as a genius a towering intellect but try as he might he is impotent to create this dialogue about art and creativity comes to a head in the conversation between John and muster M at the end of the novel John is bemoaning the state of Art in the new world and Mustafar surprisingly agrees he says there is nothing that they make or even could make that would compare to Shakespeare according to him you cannot have art except by suffering and strife for Mustafar extreme creativity can only exist as long as there is war famine disease pain loss and grief but he and the other world controllers have worked very hard hard to eliminate these sure the quality of art has decreased but if the whole purpose of Art in the first place was to help us cope with an imperfect world is that so bad now such a world is a thing of the past there is no need for art it has outgrown its usefulness and for Mustafar this is not a cause for despair but for Bittersweet celebration just as the small poox vaccine has been rendered pretty much obsolete because the horrific disease has been totally eliminated the controllers have destroyed the suffering that we needed art to treat no one would say we should bring back small pox because without it we don't get the small poox vaccine for Mustafa the death of creativity is a small price to pay for a world without pain and this hits at the core of an age-old philosophical debate about the purpose of creating art is it the job of Arts to produce pleasure in its audience or does it strike at something that is more important than pleasure for instance Plato thought that beauty was good for its own sake he would quite often talk about the beautiful and the good as if they inevitably went together and one of the jobs that art does even in his censorious Republic is reflect the form of the beautiful other thinkers would argue that the world controllers have not eliminated the need for creation for instance the psychoanalyst Eric from posits that the act of creating something is partly aimed at dealing with a feeling of separateness in a moment of creativity we become unified with our craft we become one with it while maintaining our individuality for others like Kafka art is partly an expression of something within a way of communing with the world and with other people those aspects of ourselves that we cannot put into straightforward words and this is only scratching the surface of the various different views of Art and creation that abound among philosophers something we see an awful lot in the Diaries and private letters of great creatives is that their works sometimes seem like they are bursting forth from within causing extreme discomfort if they are not released the Russian writer and philosopher Theodor dovi said that one of the unbearable things about life in his prison camp was his inability to put pen to paper he was constantly bursting with ideas and they were screaming at him to be expressed but his will was frustrated and many people feel this to some extent many of us have a desire to create and to leave a mark on the World by our creation nature would have called this a manifestation of the will to power Ernest Becker would have called it death denial and schopenhauer might refer to it as an externalized will to life so a huge philosophical question dangles in the air how important do we think this desire to create is and are we willing to sacrifice it if it's going to bring us more hedonistic pleasure are the citizens in Brave New World happy in the greatest sense or are they cut off from some of the deeper joys of life because of their inability to exert these inner creative drives characteristically of this work there are endless questions and very few answers and the issues certainly do not stop there because now we will move on to something very close to our hearts the way this utopian dystopia treats love five love love and free love some of the greatest stories in history have centered around love and its Earth while companion loss we hear Love's frustrations in the declamations of Tristan and doal while Romeo's profession that he n saw true beauty till this night speaks to the way love can well and truly knock us over turning our lives completely upside down love caused the Trojan War brings joy to billions of people and edles thought it was one of the fundamental forces of the universe suffice to say it's a big deal and a huge theme in a lot of philosophy and literature about love is the idea that we want to merge with another person in some way in the Bible this is put as becoming one flesh in Plato's Symposium lovers are imagined as two halves of the Same Soul cut in Twain by the Gods in the 20th century the French psychoanalyst jacqu Lan spoke of the tension in Romance between togetherness and distance there are the twin wishes to remain independent from our lover and to meld with them we want to be reassured by the continued presence of another person yet also to remain independent and these desires understandably come into conflict this tension can be seen almost everywhere from the advice to treat them mean to keep them Keen to the third Act of almost every single romantic comedy so it is notable that in Brave New World the controllers have tried to take this desire from us to condition us out of it instead of this wish to merge with another there is the maxim that everyone belongs to everyone else and there is a love that is totally toally free and here free simply means without restriction making love is essentially on par with making a cake lenina is looked upon as strange for having vaguely monogamous and committal drives first she takes up with a man named Henry and stops seeing other people and then later she forms a unique Fascination for John her friends look upon this as totally bizarre as do the rest of the citizens for them love and love making is not something you do with someone you care about instead it is all simple Recreation and nothing more indeed the very notion of an emotional passionate connection either with a single person or with multiple people is condemned in the strongest terms even the word mother is considered vulgar because of the special connection it implies someone has with their child I find this very interesting because the view of love the world State ends up taking is at once deeply individualist and also very collectivist on the one hand no one can really open themselves up to another person in any meaningful fashion because that would require the dreaded emotional connection but on the other hand everyone is free to be CED by anyone else at any time there is the illusion of freedom but every choice amounts to the same thing a shallow connection with someone you are using as a self-pleasure Aid everyone belongs to everyone else but everyone is also a consumable object to everyone else and in a flurry of Freedom the citizens of the new world find they have no choices because in what sense is a choice meaningful if its effects are the same as every other one we could have made with only superficial differences dancing along the surface connection has been totally replaced by consumption the fundamental option that is barred from the new world is that of commitment no one has the ability to commit to another person in fact it will make you a social Pariah and possibly get you exiled but it is only through types of commitments that we get to experience the deeper layers of Love companionship and more don't be foed into thinking this point is more profound than it is it is just that if we're going to forge a connection with others then we need to give that person our time attention and affection in a way that is non-transactional and does not treat them as an object for our own pleasure it is love freely given and freely received but not free in the sense of Brave New World there every romantic interaction is reduced down to pleasure traded for pleasure there is nothing inherently wrong with this being one dimension of love but if it is the only Dimension then so much is missed out the reassurance that someone knows you at a fundamental level with all of your little insanities and flaws and loves you nonetheless the ability to express your vulnerable affection for someone else safe in the knowledge that it will be well received According to Aristotle virtuous friendship and love was the deepest and most fulfilling connection we could Forge with any other person and yet in Brave New World people are permanently cut off from this and this deprivation is made all the more Insidious because they are not forced to abandon love at the point of a gun but instead they are taught that it is something of little importance and that taking it seriously is a mark of undesirable eccentricity I cannot help but think of how some of my close friends describe their experiences on dating apps and see some rather unsettling parallels this notion of there being so many people out there someone could be with yet a fundamental inability to commit to anyone in particular reminds me of something that kard talked about in His Brilliant book The Sickness unto death a type of Despair brought on by an excess of possibility and one example of this is when we are paralyzed by options so that each individual choice to not commit to a single line of action strikes us as totally consequential but then eventually our postponement of investment comes back to bite us and we never engage in the sort of unconditional commitment that might fulfill us for kard commitment is a leap of faith that we must take to elevate Our Lives yet it is always terrifying and to a certain extent irrational but sometimes just committing to something is better than to nothing at all the citizens of Brave New World are arguably Meed in this despair of possibility and their only Mercy is that they don't know what they're missing however we have now talked an awful lot about the carefully crafted culture of the world state it is now time to turn to their enforcement mechanism and it is a power we are all sadly familiar with six isolation and shame if you've been a teenager at some point then you almost certainly know shame that creeping feeling that whatever you are doing is either wrong or being constantly judged by your peers it makes you feel like you are insufficient or defective in some way after a while the voice of outer condemnation and and the voice of inner shame begin to sing from the same hym sheet and you can end up truly believing that you are all of those horrible things that people are saying or insinuating about you while in many ways the new world functions as a hedonistic Paradise shame is the engine of punishment that keeps everyone in line This is clearest in the case of Bernard Marx he is an alpha plus the highest ranking cast in the world State he's an accomplished psychologist and by all accounts should be having a great time but he is constantly being shamed both by other people and by himself the first source of this is quite literally his stature Bernard is a few inches shorter than the other Alpha pluses and in a world where physical size is praised as a virtue and when the alpha pluses are purposefully made to Tower above the lower ranking classes this is a source of great insecurity for Bernard and it is something he cannot change in the slightest he is not content with being a short King as some people say I don't know if that term is still relevant my sister told me about it the other day but I tend to learn slang terms about 6 months after everyone else stops using them so let me know if short King is relevant here or if I just seem like an old man this little touch of alienation is also what leads to his separation from wider Society it is what causes him to stop taking s and to purposefully feel sorrow as a little Act of rebellion against the community that has rejected him outwardly he wants nothing to do with this Society but inwardly he yearns for its approval he is like the child desperately trying to get his parents attention after being ignored for so long and this inner conflict in Bernard is displayed all throughout the novel most notably when he brings Jon back to the world's State and is effectively his custodian he becomes a bit like a celebrity he invites only the highest ranking people to his parties everyone wants to see Jon and by extension everyone wants to see him he has the attention of attractive women something he could previously only dream of and he has the social standing of someone far above even his position and he loves this his opinion of the state changes on a whim and all of a sudden he appreciates what he previously hated of course as soon as his Newfound Fame evaporates when Jon refuses to make an appearance at one of his parties he goes right back to despising this horrible new world but despite its amusing undertones I actually think Bernard's experience of Shame is very insightful and it's one of the most underrated aspects of huxley's novel in a recent paper James Lang argued that shame stems from a thwarted desire to connect with other people in a socially acceptable or proper way so when we are shamed and when we experience shame we are reing two distinct messages the first is that despite our wish to connect we are not connecting and secondly that this is because of some value failing on our part in other words we are not just being rejected but we are being rejected specifically because we are deficient in some way there are clear cases where we might actually want to communicate this message we might want to let a mass murderer know that their social rejection is as a direct result of their failure to live up to the moral standards of the community but if we take Lang's analysis seriously then we we immediately notice two further things one shaming only works if someone actually desires to connect with us and two shame can bleed into someone's self-conception because we're telling them that they are not only denied connection but denied it because of something wrong about them specifically and this is where the unsettling way the controllers use shame in Brave New World comes into Focus there is only one world State and one world culture moreover every child is conditioned from birth to desire socialization and companionship and to find Solitude and quiet reflection incredibly uncomfortable in other words the setup is perfect to make shame as painful as possible everyone is taught to desire social acceptance and these shallow Connections in the extreme but at the same time there is only one way to achieve this desire and if you don't get it that way then you are permanently isolated and alone and since these citizens are taught to associate being alone with being deficient and the only weird people want to spend time with themselves they conclude that if they are not constantly in the company of others there must be something deeply wrong with them and underneath all of his spite Bernard thinks this too of course this also means that if the controllers ever wanted to bring someone back from the brink of rebellion then they could snap their fingers and summon up some social acceptance for them and they would react exactly how burnard did his programming still has a total hold on him and as soon as the opportunity arises he leaps back into the arms of the institutions he so hated this is the existentially terrifying nature of shame it Stokes our desire for acceptance at the very same time it denies it to us Brave New World communicates just how powerful a form of social control shame can be and Huxley uses it to great effect in the unsettling dynamics of burnard's relationships it also reminds us of the long-lasting effects of rejection Bernard has faced rejection his entire life and as a result he becomes immensely vulnerable to betraying his principles at the first sign of acceptance by contrast Helm H halt has always been considered an exceptional and brilliant man and has only had encouragement wherever he went so by the events of the novel he does not require social acceptance and this allows him to bear his Exile with dignity while Bernard flies into a frenzy at the thought of losing what little social position he had but next we shall move on to huxley's analysis of a deep and controversial human need one that we see come up in philosophy quite a lot but that often goes unacknowledged seven the necessity of sacrifice all through the New Testament of the Bible we see themes of sacrifice the most VI example of this is Christ dying on the cross and so redeeming all of mankind but we also see the apostles give up their possessions and their former lives to follow Jesus St Paul sacrific his livelihood to spread the word of God and the Virgin Mary give up her beloved Son for the good of the world and this is not just a theme in Christian scripture it appears in Buddhist texts where monastics are instructed to live in service to others and in the vadas where rituals of sacrifice are outlined and this widespread usage of sacrifice as a motif is kind of remarkable able given how potentially unpleasant sacrifice can be by definition a sacrifice is the giving up of something good in service to something greater and that's sort of a tough pill to swallow but what is perhaps even worse than sacrifice is having nothing we would want to sacrifice for the philosopher Bernard Williams talks of categorical desires these are things that we would desire to happen even if we were not around to see them for instance I might wish that my siblings achieve success in whatever they do even if I do not live to see it happen that would be a categorical desire but I'm not going to wish that my bacon sandwich tomorrow would still be here even if I die in the night thus that is not a categorical desire intuitively categorical desires transcend our thoughts about ourselves and our own pleasure and reach out into the world to imbue an aspect of it with value it is striving for something greater than ourselves and according to Williams categorical desires are a huge part of what makes our lives meaningful they are what stop our existence from becoming a solipsistic circle jerk and allows us to Value things for their own sake rather than merely what they can do for us and the value of this idea seems intimately connected with sacrifice having a categorical desire is in effect having something outside yourself that you value just as much or more than your own pleasure it is thus very close to having something worth sacrificing for and it's a good thing too without these categorical desires we would have no reason to care about anything whose timeline stretches beyond our own depth of course Williams is not the only person who's working is relevant here if we examine Nature's working definition of meaning we see it as something like a thing you are willing to act in service to or to stick more closely to his terminology a higher purpose you are able to sublimate your will to for him it is what allows us to transcend short-term Hedonism and make our lives not just pleasant but fulfilling and organized to bring this idea down to earth think of the parents you know and how they say they would not just sacrifice for their child but do so happily without a shred of doubt or resentment in their heart and that they find this fact both comforting and fulfilling if nature is to be believed this is the kind of meaning a sacrificial attitude can imbue us with and we can see people's willingness and even eagerness to sacrifice quite a lot in everyday life from the friends giving up a jolly evening to confront a recently bereaved companion to the child in the playground sharing their favorite toy with their little sister this sort of sacrificial generosity can make not just the receiver happy but the giver as well and this is one of those rare things that Jesus the Buddha dovi and Aristotle would all agree on so it's at the very least worth considering and part of the reason Brave New World strikes JN as a dystopia is because the people there are deprived of having something they can sacrifice for behind the vague platitudes about everyone living for everyone else there are very few examples of genuine sacrifice in the world state in practice people simply pursue pleasure and avoid discomfort if they are sad they take a sua and if they feel desire they just go out and achieve it without a second thought about anything else there are certainly strengths in this approach it's better than a kick in the teeth but it also seems that we have lost something in the process one of the clearest examples of this comes in the relationship between Jon and lenina Jon is clearly attracted to lenina as she is to him but he does not want to consumate this until they are in a committed bond this makes very little sense to Lina but to John the self-denial is the point he is sacrificing his own short-term pleasure to show his seriousness about making lenina his wife lenina may not understand but to John this is a crucial part of love he is demonstrating his willingness for self-sacrifice and this same urge to sacrifice is embodied in Helm H halts when he begins to act out against the world State inserting his own poetry into his lectures on propaganda despite it being forbidden nobody forced him to do this he wants to sacrifice for his own principles otherwise how does he know he even has them it is all well and good us saying we would suffer for something but until we truly do our modest martyrdom is Holy untested Helm Holtz and JN both hold their categorical desires incredibly close to their heart additionally some philosophers like schopenhauer have argued that our willingness to sacrifice on behalf of others is the very thing that marks us out as ethical people the willingness to give up some of our pleasure or to feel pain out of compassion for another person is for him emblematic of everything a good person should strive to be but in their wisdom the controllers have effectively removed sacrifice if anyone is unhappy then they just put them in a drug fueled mental holiday and the Very Act of being invested enough in another person or an idea to sacrifice on their behalf is seen as socially destructive after all it is everyone belongs to everyone else and any deeper level of compassion than the vague Goodwill we feel towards our fellow humans runs counter to the maintenance of predictable social order if someone values something enough to sacrifice for it then they might even value it more than the orders that come from on high but if we take philosophers like Bernard Williams and along with some Modern psychologists like Emily impet seriously then we are forced to admit that in eliminating sacrifice the controllers have also killed off a potentially very fulfilling aspect of people's lives deeper meaning has been sacrificed at the altar of shallower pleasure we never find out how many in Brave New World feel the same sort of emptiness as helmholtz or burnard but I cannot help but think that they must be more common than the likes of Mustafa would want to admit there may be such a thing as empty pleasure and now I want to tackle this point about pleasure headon as it truly is the golden thread that runs through the novel's philosophy and it touches upon a few of the most interesting questions in history eight the right to be unhappy towards the end of the novel we witness an extended dialogue between JN and muster Mond on the nature and value of pleasure we've been referencing this through the whole video but now let's dive a little deeper in order to interrogate the very foundations of the controller's views on good governance and what it means to be a person as I said before the thing that sets the governments of Brave New World apart from a lot of other dystopias is that they're actually quite good natured they profess that they only want what is best for the citizens of the world State and we have no particular reason to disbelieve them furthermore they work on largely appealing utilitarian premises they want to maximize happiness and minimize pain and this seems perfectly Noble but the controllers also make a number of philosophical assumptions that are quite questionable and we and John can tar get each one of them the first is that all pleasures are created equal implicit in Musta Mon's worldview is that happiness is linear and based on quantity so no distinction is made between different types of pleasure the difference between ecstasy joy happiness titillation Som fueled Mania and fulfillment is essentially glossed over in favor of a lower resolution worldview where all of these things are exactly the same and can be summed together in a honic calculus and funnily enough this was also a criticism that early utilitarianism encountered in its initial format it only talked about pleasure and nothing else and was accused of being far too simplistic so John Stuart Mill eventually drew a distinction between the lower Pleasures like eating drinking and the physical part of having sex and the higher Pleasures like companionship love and Aristotelian style contemplation this is partly the thrust of John's criticisms regarding art in prioritizing the short-term Hedonism of their citizens the controllers have robbed them of lots of other kinds of positive feing like cathis or Compassion or deep-seated affection but John's critique ultimately stretches much deeper than this because what he wants as Mustafa puts it is the right to be unhappy that is he wants to feel the full breadth of human experience and places some value on this in itself rather than simply Desiring positive feelings all the time this reminds me of a paper by Robert Ney who argues that grief is partly about establishing the identity of the deceased after their death in this case someone might paradoxically feel glad to be grieving as in doing so they are honoring their beloved dead Shakespeare once described the sweet sorrow of parting from your lover knowing that you will see them again and full of present sadness and premeditated Joy the human mind is not as simple as adding up our pleasures and subtracting our pains according to John there is value in the push and pull of the pleasant and unpleasant sides of human experience and if we cut off negativity entirely then we will be depriving ourselves of the strange satis action of having lived a life that was full there are parallels here with something n said about how someone can either be open to the highs and lows of life or neither but you cannot have one without the other that is if you are going to fully engage with the willful and passionate aspects of your life then sometimes this will take you to a temporary energetic Ecstasy but sometimes it will also plunge you into Misery we can choose to dull both edges of this passion if we like but for nature if we are open to one then the other will surely occur at at some point ultimately this is an empirical claim and I will leave it up to you to decide how well evidenced it is from your own experiences John also despises the concept of Soma this drug that can induce happiness in even the most melancholic of patients it is unlike many modern anti-depressant in that it does not have immediate side effects only shortening the patient lifespan slightly in the long term but JN still sees its happiness as false in some way in my video on 1984 I mentioned Robert nok's fantastic thought experiment The Experience machine this was an imagined scenario where he would offer to plug us into a machine that would simulate total Bliss for our entire lives he will even sweeten the deal by wiping our memory so we won't even know it's a simulation his contention is that most people will refuse this offer we would rather experience a true and real mixed bag than a false and simulated Paradise this has been used as evidence that there are some things we humans tend to Value more than happiness truth being one example of this but there is another question raised by this experiment what does it mean for someone's happiness to be false a s trip strikes a lot of people as false happiness because it induces a dreamlike state where someone's fantasies play out in front of them but does that devalue the feeling itself in some way JN and Bernard contend that it does but it is an open question take Linda for instance Jon's traumatized mother who spends her final days high on S she was truly miserable and there seemed to be no way to relieve this misery should we really expect her to remain in this world that has done her so much harm rather than Escape into a comforting illusion and then there are other thinkers who talk about our deep-seated self-destructive drives dovi thought that if we perceived ourselves as unfree then it would not matter how much pleasure we ought to be feeling we would eventually Rebel wanting to reclaim a sense of our human dignity this thought was picked up by later psychotherapists and given the startling name death drive a concept which remains controversial to this day but whether it is true in general for Jon such a drive very much exists he would rather be a suffering Rebel than a happy conformist and his impulse to self-destruct is finally fulfilled when he ends his own life in his isolated Lighthouse the scars from his self flagellation still gleaming on his back ultimately Brave New World challenges a deep-seated assumption that many of us have that pleasure is always good and that more pleasure is always better this may be true or it may be false and it partly hinges on where exactly we set the boundaries of the term pleasure for Huxley the controllers have made the concept far too narrow and traded in our Humanity for a cheap thrill but finally what is the point of reading a dystopian fiction book from the 1930s in the 21st century well I'm glad you asked nine the warnings of Brave New World As I said at the beginning of this video Brave New World is pretty unusual in the genre of dystopian fiction rather than depicting outright oppression it instead portrays a populace too unreflective and filled with short-term Hedonism that they cannot see what is potentially wrong with their society rather than the brutality of the Pax Romana it is the gentle distraction of the PanAm ET kirkenes instead of Maintenance through military might it is the manufactured happy consent of the citizenry that keeps the global government afloat it is not that they have thought about it and decided that this is what they want it is that it has not even occurred to them to question their situation and this means Huxley can provide his own unique brand of warning first at the personal level it encourages us to put conscious thought into what matters to us the citizens of the new world are deliberately conditioned not to Value anything more than consumption and pleasure but we don't have to we can freely reflect on what fulfillment means to us and to what extent short-term pleasure has a role in it beyond that we can question what Hedonism even means for our lives do we favor the highs and lows of a more extreme lifestyle or the epicurian Delights of a conversation with friends over some bread and a glass of wine we will have inherited a societal idea of what is pleasurable and Huxley encourages us to interrogate this viciously secondly at the social level it is worth reflecting on when pleasure becomes a tool that is used to distract us from an issue or question that might be really important to us thinkers from the Rowan poet juvenile to macki AI have warned us that when push comes to shove rulers may turn to distraction techniques to sneak through some unpopular decision or to cover something up Huxley reminds us that just because we are having a good time now does not mean that all is well and that distraction is no less diverting because it is Pleasant thirdly at the philosophical level we can begin to ask what things are more valuable than pleasure and how they might factor into both our ethical system and our existential philosophy even if you're a DieHard utilitarian the question of what exactly pleasure amounts to and its relationship to pain disappointment excitement anxiety fear Elation anticipation and more are very much relevant Beyond this asking whether Pleasures can be empty or whether some Pleasures are more morally important than others or whether there are some things like Freedom or expression or individuality that are far more important than pleasure can all get our philosophical juices flowing again these are all open questions but they are profoundly interesting ones and they can help us gain a more precise understanding into what is perhaps the most important philosophical question of all how to live a good life your answer to these inquiries will help you decide whether Brave New World is a flawed Utopia or an outright Abomination trampling over everything that is human in the name of a false mistress because ultimately what separates Brave New World from its contemporaries like 1984 is the nagging question pervading the whole book what if the controllers were right what if pleasure is all there is and what if the sacrifice of art Freedom individuality change love class Mobility solitude and more are all worth it provided we can get our daily hit of happiness and dream some easy dreams must Fon stands in front of us a modern mephistophiles with his hand outstretched but is his bargain worth it thank you for watching and I hope you have a wonderful day and if you want to see a completely different dystopia then check out this video where I look at all Wells nightmare 1984 and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life life