People are happy they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. You can’t make flivvers without steel and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. “Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. Green with anxiety and apprehension, only Bernard remembered them the others ignored him.“Why not?” He too was forgetting the unpleasant realities of the situation. And if were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello.” “Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. “And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “That’s what we’ve all been wanting to write,” said Helmholtz, breaking a long silence. “Well then,” he said, after a pause, “something new that’s like Othello, and that they could understand.” He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet. “Why don’t you let them see Othello instead?” “Nice tame animals, anyhow,” the Controller murmured parenthetically. “Goats and monkeys!” Only in Othello’s word could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred. Those plays, where there’s nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing.” He made a grimace. “But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. “Because it’s old that’s the chief reason. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else. “But why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage. Marx,” he added, turning to Bernard.“Which I’m afraid you can’t do.”īernard sank into a yet more hopeless misery. But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. “I thought nobody knew about that book here, in England.” The Savage’s face lit up with a sudden pleasure. So Ladies and gentlemen, without further or do I present to you this illuminating snippet from Brave New World: Mond responds with a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices.” John is pleasantly surprised to find that Mond has read Shakespeare’s Othello. Savage.” John concedes, but admits that he does like some things, such as the constant sound of music. So Mond arrives at his office and says to John, “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. His entire world-view is based on his knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, which he can quote with great facility. The consummate outsider, he has spent his life alienated from his village on the New Mexico Savage Reservation, and he finds himself similarly unable to fit in to World State society. John (The Savage) is the only major character to have grown up outside of the World State. To set up today’s book excerpt from Chapter 16, I will give you a brief character description and some background so you can follow along: The following extract from Brave New World I found congruous to what kind of worldview the new ethics movement has in store for us if not enough people have the ‘will’ to speak up for those aspects of freedom which intellectuals have outlined in my previous posts.Īt a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, the author of Brave New World Aldous Huxley said: “ There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.”Ĭould Huxley’s forewarning be analogous to the affects social media platforms, big tech and AI (including those wretched algorithms), The Great Reset initiative by The World Economic Forum and Eugenics development have had on shaping our society’s destiny? I have just revisited it again, but this time in Spanish (see image inset). We were assigned to read Brave New World in High School and I’m willing to admit there was a lot I couldn’t grasp back then. This week in Wednesday’s literature piece we are taking a peak at one of the all-time great novels about the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress.
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