Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Dystopia Unbound
by Pedro Blas González (November 2024)
If persecution, liquidation and the other systems of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call “the problem of happiness” —in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
There was a time, up through the mid-1980s, when high schools and colleges still taught classics of literature, philosophy, and other morally and culturally significant works. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is one of these works. Then the rot set in.
The Mind-Virus of Marxist Deconstructionism
By the late 1980s cultural Marxism began to zoom its resentment of Western civilization into Western philosophy and literature. The cultural war that was begun by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s, (see my essay “Cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School”), saw new impetus in the ‘60s with Marxist ‘theorists’ like Adorno, Horkheimer, Goldmann, Althusser, Habermas, and Marcuse.
Why the Marxist anti-Western civilization fervor in the 1960s?
It is an undeniable historical fact that Marxism is messianism of the here-and-now. Marx emphasized that the role of philosophy should not be to understand the world, but to ‘change it.” This disqualifies Marxism as philosophy given that philosophers are moved by awe and wonder that aims to understand and appropriate the riddles of human life and reality. Instead, Marxism advocates for totalitarian control over human beings. As such, Marxism is an anti-philosophy.
Marx’s messianism is the natural go-to response of a form of human pathology that negates and does battle with life and human reality. Marxism is the rationalization and normalization of personal inadequacies and perversion of human reality. This makes Marxism a sadistic form of misanthropism. This form of sadism promotes social/political theory, while castrating the inherent worth of individual, differentiated persons. The end game of Marxism is absolute power, not the betterment of human beings. Granted, misanthropes come in forms other than Marxism.
Marxists are repulsed by the structure of human reality and free will. Growing up with a false and deluded sense of what drives the contingencies of everyday life, young people brought up on Marxism and its many attendant values must eventually find a worldly outlet to unleash their tortured psychical and emotional dysfunction. This attracts disgruntled misanthropes given that Marxism’s claim to change the world has an empowering appeal. The world, then, becomes their oyster.
The German philosopher Max Scheler refers to this self-loathing that is not content to seethe within itself as ressentiment. José Ortega y Gasset recognizes ressentiment as the pathology of mass man. Marxism is the anti-philosophy of mass man, and thus the training ground for the promulgation of personal dysfunction disguised as social/political policy. This is why Karl Marx is the patron saint of demonic, however intellectualized hatred.
Disclaimer: Marxism is NOT merely an economic, social/political theory. This is the smokescreen and cover that Marxists use to not call attention to their personal shortcomings, which they are not content to keep discreetly to themselves. Marxism breeds arrogance, selfishness, and most importantly, narcissism. Marxism is the pathology of an unbound settling of accounts with life and human reality.
These are some reasons why Marxists cannot let life be.
After at least 150 years of Marxism, the rabbit can no longer be contained in the hat. Marxism is a failed theory that has brought about unprecedented vitriol to human relations, rationalized murder, and stylized violence to the world. This has been achieved with the self-righteous flair of intellectual calisthenics. This helps explain the pathology of Marxists.
French deconstructionist theorists Derrida, Foucault, et. al., taking their cue from Gramsci’s Marxist cultural war, aim to expand Marxism beyond its classical model of economic and social/political aberrance.
While Marxism is a failed and discredited totalitarian ideology, it has infected and corrupted all aspects of human life in postmodernity. Repeating lies and contradictions over and over again has a hypnotizing effect on the unsuspecting. This is one reason that Marxism is so effective in attaining power through its web of deceit, propaganda, disinformation, psychological suggestion projection, and character assassination.
The adherents of Marxism embrace it on theoretical terms, while practicing devious intellectual dishonesty. From the handsomely compensated French deconstructionists to Pablo Picasso to university professors to the chic Marxist that make up the 1%, Marxism is a chameleon that must change its strategy and goals to survive. The next generation of Marxists, Marxism proclaims, will be the best installment yet.
The expansion of Marxism into philosophy and literature aims to, in keeping with Marx’s plan to change the world, destroy the capacity of reason and language to appropriate the nature of human reality. The appropriation of human reality, especially at a young age, enables people to become well-grounded in their expectations of appearance and reality, what is possible, and limitations that must be respected.
The destruction of language, the aptly described deconstruction of reason, thought, literature, and philosophy of deconstructionism, guarantees that an ‘apple is no longer an apple,’ a ‘pipe is not a pipe,’ and a ‘rose by any other name’ is no longer a rose. In other words, the eyes and ears play no role in man’s discernment of human reality, human relations, and the daily world that we must contend with.
Through deconstructing human life and reality systems of power that employ disinformation and propaganda, as Marxism by its very definition admits it must do (the end justify the means), reason, common sense, and good will are destroyed. Ultimately, this virulent quest for deconstruction, today we have ample, undeniable evidence to realize, makes people mentally ill.
Brave New World: Dystopia Unbound
Elsewhere I have written that liberalism breeds degeneracy. If this is correct, postmodernity is the peak of progressivism, the religion that Marxists turn to in order to empower malcontents.
Has postmodernity reached its peak of dysfunction? It is hard to tell. We can’t be certain given that we need to distance ourselves from our own time to verify if what comes after is any better. In other words, can our moral/spiritual, rational, and cultural rot progress even further?
Regrettably, the twentieth century demonstrated that progressivism is greedy and self-serving, like a black hole, walloping up all the traditional, orthodox, and objective values that it can corrupt. This is the legacy of liberalism.
Scientific Moral Corruption
Huxley’s Brave New World highlights moral corruption that, as well indoctrinated Marxists posit, is most effective when it is scientific, socially engineered corruption. Scientific moral corruption is what the degenerates of the new Marxist world order are banking on in Brave New World and in our own totalitarian postmodern predicament.
Scientific social-engineered depravity takes advantage of people’s need to occasionally take a ‘holiday’ from human reality, through the exercise of the imagination, literature, or other activities. Marxism’s scientific moral corruption conditions people to turn their holiday into a permanent fixture of human life. This necessitates the castration of free will and the expansion of the breeding grounds of corruption that enable the creation of more malcontents. The most effective way to turn man against free will is to make free will a burden.
Making free will a burden, one would think, would turn people into hapless, quasi-catatonics. Yet, this is not the case. Turning people against free will in postmodernity, we witness en masse today, makes for unprecedented vitriol-induced, self-righteous, self-serving, and despotic ideologues. These are the mass man characteristics that Ortega y Gasset warns us about in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), one of the many Ortega y Gasset books I explore in my book Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy of Subjectivity.
. These people are the war dogs of Marxism, foot soldiers who are conditioned to believe anything and nothing at all. These people demand that others unburden themselves from free will as well.
Huxley is correct that to achieve this level of zombification, otherwise free citizens, must undergo a program – a revolution he calls it – of their ‘minds and bodies.’
The mind-numbing virus that liberalism creates through techniques of psychological suggestion, perpetual bombardment of disinformation and propaganda that mind-virus infected, free will negators gobble up for self-serving reasons, finds its roots in an ill pathology. This pathology becomes acute as it expands into social/political totalitarian ideology and public policy.
In Brave New World mind-virus infected zombies, people who have been engineered to not tolerate what they perceive as reality without taking the tranquilizer drug soma, take part in what the social-engineers in the novel call ‘social stability.’
In our own time and society, these are the mind-virus infected totalitarians that, only after the fall of the Iron-curtain, have become conditioned to throw around the word de-mo-cra-cy, in the same way that the communist government of China, North Korea and Cuba use the word: the absolute power of elite oligarchs. This is a fine example of how hypocrisy and disingenuousness are the fuel that runs postmodern progressivism.
The director of the center for indoctrination, censorship, and social-engineering and in Brave New World arrogantly pronounces, “the security and stability of Society are in danger. Yes, in danger, ladies and gentlemen.”
What gull.
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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.