Brave New World

“Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth…People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Tight up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled—after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson—paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.” (205)

I feel that the passage I quoted, and this whole chapter in fact, is very significant in that it explains how their society came to exist. It also brings to light the fact that there are other people like Bernard and Hemholtz, and it seems that they often get to continue their lives by paying for their and others’ happiness, in ways like being exiled to an island with others like them, or by serving other people’s happiness, which seems a very difficult job by Mustapha’s account, especially for a man like him who used to be so interested in truth and science, but had to give it up to take the job of Controller.

This passage shows how their society can continue on “perfectly” even when people like Bernard or Hemholtz crop up. It also explains, as Mustapha tells John, that a society that is all alphas, full of people who are intellectual and who can make their own decisions to a degree, will collapse and end up in civil war. However, it doesn’t seem as though the islands that people have been exiled to have ended up like this, as they would be more “different” thinkers, so to speak, than conditioned alphas.

I think that this opens a large question about the island exiles. I wonder if they eventually could or would ever create a society or civilization to rival the World State, and if these two societies, with radically different belief systems, would be able to coexist, or if it would end in a war, the very thing that seems to have been erased from memory and that which practically caused and created the dystopia of Brave New World.