27. Brave New World: The Dystopia That Came True?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Book Club – Episode 27

Brave New World: The Dystopia That Came True?
Hosted by Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett
Released: August 10, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Dominic and Tabby (Tabitha) dissect Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, exploring its historical context, enduring influence, and the book’s haunting prediction of a future society shaped by conformity, consumerism, and the suppression of individuality. The hosts debate whether Huxley’s vision has more accurately anticipated the modern world than Orwell's 1984, and delve into the personal lives and philosophies of both authors, their influences, and their troubled relationship. Through wit and lively dialogue, they question the relevance, merits, and drawbacks of a society engineered for happiness.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Opening Reading & Initial Impressions

[03:00–05:43]

• The episode opens with an evocative reading from the second chapter of Brave New World, setting the stage in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.
• Key Insight: Newborns are conditioned from birth to fit specific societal roles, taught to hate books and nature to encourage conformity and consumption.

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy. So it was decided to abolish the love of nature.” — Tabby [05:28]

• Huxley’s world, though sanitized and superficially happy, strikes the hosts as eerily unsettling beneath its cheerful veneer.

---

2. Comparing Dystopias: Huxley vs. Orwell

[05:43–09:43]

• Brave New World is juxtaposed with 1984:
  • 1984: Brutal, physically oppressive, Soviet-inspired, full of hardship.
  • Brave New World: Chirpy, sanitized, less overtly repressive, but insidious in its methods.
• Both books feature disaffected central characters (Winston Smith vs. Bernard Marx), but Huxley’s is "lighter, more colorful," and less fear-driven.

“There’s a lightness to it that is totally at odds with kind of the heavy gloom of 1984.” — Dominic [09:43]

---

3. Aldous Huxley: Life, Influences, and America

[09:54–18:29]

• Huxley, a product of intellectual aristocracy, had a difficult youth marked by trauma, partial blindness, and academic redirection from medicine to literature.
• Connections to figures like George Orwell (taught him at Eton), Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, and his eye-opening sojourns in America—his fascination and revulsion toward American consumerism and modernity prompted the genesis of Brave New World.

“The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration, for the worse, of established standards.” — Huxley, quoted by Co-host [16:16]

• Huxley’s later life: emigration to America, immersion in California, engagement with countercultural icons, scripts for Hollywood, pacifism, spirituality, and psychedelics.

---

4. Historical and Literary Context of Brave New World

[20:59–25:28]

• The title derives from The Tempest, and is itself an ironic reference—Miranda’s awe is misplaced as the "brave new world" is deeply flawed.
• The book’s world is explained via a guided tour of the Hatchery, revealing a focus on world-building over character introduction or narrative tension.
• Ford, not God, is the society’s deity—reflecting a fusion of industrialism (Fordism) and psychoanalysis (Freudism).

---

5. Society, Conditioning, and Control

[25:28–36:23]

• The World State exerts totalizing, but non-violent, control over its citizens via genetic engineering, conditioning, and enforced happiness; individuality is crushed.
• Pavlovian techniques (referencing Ivan Pavlov) and hypnopaedic indoctrination begin at birth, ensuring unthinking obedience and satisfaction with one’s lot.
• Family, love, and emotional attachments are obscene; sex has been stripped of intimacy, serving as mass entertainment and another means of distraction.

“The word [mother] is obscene... The idea of any love, attachment, family, relationship—they regard this with absolute horror.” — Co-host [31:24]

• Soma, a drug for enforced bliss without side effects, symbolizes the ultimate instrument of passivity.

---

6. Plot and Character Analysis

[36:23–38:53]

• The story itself is secondary to the world and its ideas; characters are largely vehicles.
  • Bernard Marx: An outcast Alpha with a failed conditioning, more sulky than rebellious.
  • Helmholtz Watson: A would-be writer suffocated by lack of adversity.
  • Lenina Crowne: Finds comfort in conformity, notable more for her looks than depth.
• The narrative shifts with the introduction of John ("the Savage"), whose outsider status and education in Shakespearean ideals provoke the only real clash of values in the book.

---

7. John the Savage & The Conflict of Civilizations

[41:31–51:13]

• John’s upbringing on the Savage Reservation, with its remnants of the old world and Shakespearean ideals, highlights the paradoxes and failures of both worlds—neither the "brave new world" nor the "savage" world is truly utopian.
• The failure of both worlds is exposed by John’s inability to find fulfillment in either: torn between Huxley’s sterile, controlled society and the brutal, primal reservation.

---

8. Satire, Targets, and Social Critique

[51:13–55:58]

• The book lampoons American mass culture (Hollywood, jazz), Fordist industrialization, and 1920s/30s intellectual snobbery about popular entertainment.
• Huxley also parodies utopian optimism—specifically H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, which posited a progressive future without conflict or religion.

---

9. The Final Confrontation: John vs. Mustafa Mond

[65:21–71:37]

• The debate in the latter chapters between John and the World Controller, Mustafa Mond, distills the novel’s core dilemma:
  • Is it better to be safe, happy, and unthinking, or to accept suffering, art, and danger for the sake of freedom and authenticity?
• Mustafa Mond is witty, humane, and ambiguous—casting doubt on whether Huxley even sees him as a villain.
• The book’s ambiguity is both its strength and limitation.

“You want the right to grow ugly and old and impotent. The right to have syphilis and cancer... to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” — Mustafa Mond [70:42]

“You never really know which side you ought to be on. Cause you don't really know which side Huxley's on.” — Dominic [71:39]

---

10. Huxley vs. Orwell: Which Dystopia Wins?

[73:32–78:53]

• Huxley, in a later letter to Orwell, claims Brave New World is a more likely future than Orwell’s 1984.
• The hosts discuss the seductions of modern technology, leisure, and digital distraction, suggesting that Huxley’s "soft" totalitarianism (rooted in pleasure, not repression) may be a closer analogy to the 21st-century West.
• Despite this, the hosts point out the elitism and snobbery inherent in Huxley’s critique of mass culture, and the weaknesses of Brave New World as a novel.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s a world devoted to the cult of the US industrialist Henry Ford... Ford is a godlike figure—not quite like Big Brother... In the way that we would say ‘Oh God,’ or ‘My God,’ they say, ‘Oh, Ford.’” — Dominic [25:00]
• “If you have a regime like that Orwell describes...it’s got to be held so taut all the time that eventually... [it] will snap, whereas because Huxley’s is governed by happiness...it can continue forever unquestioned.” — Dominic [74:49]
• “I think his point was always that if you have a regime like that in 1984, it's going to snap at some point... whereas [Huxley's happiness] can continue forever unquestioned.” — Co-host [74:49]

---

Segment Timestamps

• [03:00–05:43] — Opening reading, introduction to Huxley’s world
• [05:43–09:43] — Dystopian comparisons: Orwell vs Huxley
• [09:54–18:29] — The life of Aldous Huxley
• [20:59–25:28] — Title and literary context
• [25:28–36:23] — Conditioning and social structure
• [36:23–38:53] — Plot and characters
• [41:31–51:13] — The Savage Reservation & John’s introduction
• [51:13–55:58] — Satire and critique of mass culture
• [65:21–71:37] — John vs. Mustafa Mond: The philosophical core
• [73:32–78:53] — Orwell vs. Huxley: Modern relevance and critique
• [79:18–81:44] — Ratings, final thoughts, and upcoming books

---

Assessment & Ratings

• Dominic: 5/10 “adorable viscose velveteen shorts”
  “As a novel, the characters are so thin they might as well not exist... I think the 5 out of 10 is generous, and that's because of its longevity... but as a reading experience, it's just so dull.” [80:31]
• Tabby: 6/10
  “I just found it an easier, cheerier read than 1984... not a thrilling read... I think the story is a bit thin... but I am going to give it an extra point for those opening chapters.” [81:05]

---

Conclusion

Brave New World is dissected as both a work of satire and prophecy, more concerned with world-building and intellectual provocation than narrative engagement. Its cultural and historical roots are laid bare—American consumerism, intellectual snobbery, anxiety about mechanization, and utopian dreams. The hosts find Huxley's vision increasingly resonant in a world of digital distraction and manufactured pleasures, but admit the novel struggles as a piece of storytelling.

---

Upcoming on The Book Club

Next up are classics including For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rebecca, Lolita, Lord of the Flies, Jane Eyre, and more—offering a diverse reading list for future episodes and promising equally spirited discussions.

---

For discussions, extra content, and participation in the next book ratings, sign up for the Book Club newsletter at thebookclubhq.com.

Transcript

[Tabby]

This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

[Dominic]

I for one know that I would much rather join a dystopian uprising or attend one of Jay Gatsby's fantastic parties than look at my bank statements.

[Tabby]

Yes, I want to use my brain power to focus on the really big questions. Was Heathcliff born evil? Was it the Moors who made them that way? And crucially, who is going to be the next fairy love interest in a court of thorns and roses?

[Dominic]

But alas, because we do eventually have to look up from our books, Klarna is there to handle the real world.

[Tabby]

Money Admin so Klarna gathers your spending in one place so that way monitoring your payments doesn't feel like a psychological thriller. You can pay in a way that suits you, you can track your deliveries, get instant refunds, and you can even earn cash back on things that you

[Co-host Dominic]

were going to buy anyway.

[Dominic]

And there's buyer protection built in so you actually feel secure when you shop.

[Tabby]

Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money so that you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna Balance Account required to receive cashback points Limitations, terms and conditions apply for

[Pharmaceutical Advertiser]

adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks followed by injections under the skin skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur before treatment. Get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about about tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit trempharadio.com

[Parenting Advertiser]

hey parents, how do you make smarter choices for your kids? College today. That's where Sally can help with Sally. You can find scholarships, funding options, tools and guidance all in one place. And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations. College is only worth it if you do it right. So don't just help your kid, go help them. Go smarter. Sally.com GoParents.

[Dominic]

The director and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor. Infant nurseries Neo Pavlovian conditioning rooms announced the notice board. The nurses stiffened to attention as the director came in. Set out the books, he said curtly, in silence. The nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out. A row of nursery quartos opened invitingly, each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.

[Co-host Dominic]

Now bring in the children.

[Dominic]

They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumbwaiter laden on all of its four wire netted shelves with eight month old babies, all exactly alike. A Bokanovsky group, it was evident, and all, since their cast was delta dressed in khaki.

[Co-host Dominic]

Put them down on the floor. Now turn them so they can see the flowers in the books.

[Dominic]

From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure. The director waited until all were happily busy. Then watch carefully, he said, and lifting his hand, he gave the signal. There was a violent explosion, shriller and even shriller. A siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded. The children started, screamed. Their faces were distorted with terror. And now the director shouted, for the noise was deafening.

[Co-host Dominic]

Now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.

[Parenting Advertiser]

Wow.

[Dominic]

Hello everybody. That is from the second chapter of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in February 1932. And we are in London in the far future. We're in the 2,540, to be exact, or as the characters in the book call it, AF, which stands for after Ford 632. So six centuries after the first Model T car rolled off Henry Ford's assembly lines.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Co-host Dominic]

Hello, everybody. So we are on the fifth floor of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre where the director is giving the students a tour. You chose the scene as the reading. It's a brilliant scene actually. So he's shown them the fertilizing room, the buckling room. He's shown them these places where these thousands of identical twins who have already been sorted into their intellectual and social classes and they're being born artificially using the Bokanovsky process. And now they're in the conditioning rooms and the babies are basically being taught to hate and fear books and flowers. So books, because they don't want them reading and they don't want them to question the value of society. They definitely don't want them listening to books, podcasts.

[Dominic]

Definitely not.

[Co-host Dominic]

And they don't want them to like flowers because then they would go on useless country walks and they wouldn't consume anything.

[Dominic]

What purpose does that serve to society?

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. So it was decided to abolish the love of nature. So even if you haven't read Brave New Worlds, you will gauge from the opening reading that Huxley's vision of the future is not necessarily all fun and games, is it?

[Dominic]

No, it's not. And I think because of that, because it's kind of. It's a dystopian vision of the future. It's often bracketed with George Orwell's 1984. They're both modern literature's great dystopian classics and they offer sort of nightmarish warning about where the world is heading. And then speaking of another great dystopian classic, in her preface to the Vintage Classics edition, Margaret Atwood said that in the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was obviously George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984, and that offers a horrific vision of the future, and she says, a brutal, mind controlling totalitarian state. And the other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism, one of conformity achieved through bottle grown babies and hypnotic persuasion, of boundless consumption and of officially enforced promiscuity, and of soma. And I think even people who haven't read Brave New World have heard of Soma. And it's a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. And in her own novel, the Handmaid's Tale, she draws on both of those. And we actually did that on a miniseries that we did on the Rest Is History back in September. And we've also, obviously 1984 on the book club already. And we're going to delve a lot more into the personal links between Huxley and Orwell a bit later on. Because in some ways, yes, the books are very different and the visions that they proffer are very different, but they're also pretty similar, wouldn't you say?

[Co-host Dominic]

I would say so. I was thinking about this. Both 1984 and Brave New World, the opening chapters, we meet a disaffected employee of the state. So in 1984 it's Winston Smith. In this book, it's Bernard Marx. And they work in a towering sort of government office block in Bloomsbury in central London. And in both cases it's decorated with a huge slogan, the slogan of the party or the state. So in this case, the slogan is community, identity, stability.

[Dominic]

It's all warm and cuddly.

[Co-host Dominic]

It's very warm and cuddly. Exactly. Well, actually, I think the mood is not quite as forbidding as in 1984. So when you start 1984, it's very physical straight away, it's very visceral. I remember when we did our episode, we were talking about the scene when Winston goes into Victory Mansions and there's a smell of boiled cabbage and the lift doesn't work and he's got his ulcer or whatever, his varicose veins, and it's very gritty and it's very textured. Yeah, it's very Soviet in feeling. It's very kind of. It's a sort of cross between the Soviet Union and 1940s bombed out austerity Britain. This book is much more sanitized, cleaner. It's less physical.

[Dominic]

It's also quite chirpy. You know, everyone's quite chirpy because by the very nature of this society, everyone is happy.

[Co-host Dominic]

That's so true. It is chirpy. And even that scene, the bloke giving the kids an electric shock, he's pretty chirpy and he has a shout to be heard above the noise and all

[Dominic]

of that, but everything's nice, everything looks nice, everything's where it should be, everything's clean, tidy.

[Co-host Dominic]

Now, I hadn't read Brave New World before doing this to my shame, but I've always seen people saying, well, actually, Orwell's book is more physical and it's more. It's sort of grimmer and it's probably better known. But Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a better prediction of where we're heading because of its vision of people enslaved by consumerism, by promiscuity, by drugs. This is what's happened to us under 21st century capitalism. Now, whether or not they're right, that's a different issue. Does it mean that Brave New World is better as a novel? I am not so sure. And we will come to this. Had you read this book before, Tabby?

[Dominic]

I have. I had. I read it at university. I remember sort of enjoying it, but I didn't think loads about it afterwards. I definitely wasn't massively engaged with kind of the ideas it was putting across. I find it now, as I did then, a much easier read than 1984. Not necessarily better, but easier because of what we've just said. It's a much brighter, more colorful society and there's a lot less fear than there is in 1984.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Even if, you know, when I reread it this time, I found it much more disturbing. But again, there's a lightness to it that is totally at odds with kind of the heavy gloom of 1984.

[Co-host Dominic]

It's quite a whimsical. At times.

[Dominic]

It is quite whimsical. And for instance, in a funny way, it feels much more old fashioned than 1984 does. I think. Even though it's very much rooted in a particular time place, politically, economically, 1984 feels more modern. In the reading, I felt like this felt quite old fashioned. I felt like it belonged alongside, I don't know, the CS Lewis's in terms of the way that it was written. But that brings us to Aldous Huxley himself, because, like George Orwell, he's a genuinely fascinating and remarkable character. They even went to the same school.

[Co-host Dominic]

They did.

[Dominic]

But, Dominic, indulge us with your own spontaneously conceived and very witty comparison, which we definitely didn't discuss before recording this episode.

[Co-host Dominic]

I like to amuse Tabby with my tremendous witticism. And I said to you, Aldous Huxley felt to me like he was basically like, if you put Virginia Woolf, P.G. wodehouse and George Harrison, he's only gone

[Gwen Washington]

and done it in a blender.

[Co-host Dominic]

This would be the result of this. Huxley would be the result.

[Dominic]

Right, Is that my cue to laugh uproariously and congratulate you on your insight, which is what it says I should do in the notes.

[Co-host Dominic]

This is great insight. What would you start the podcast here? Never get better.

[Gwen Washington]

Yeah.

[Co-host Dominic]

Okay. So basically, Aldous Huxley, he has something of the sort of the writer of the country house social comedy. He has something of the sort of bohemian intellectual upper class. Hence Virginia Woolf.

[Dominic]

Absolutely he does, yeah.

[Co-host Dominic]

He has the fascination with Eastern mysticism of the George Harrison. So there you go. He is a product of the late Victorian intellectual elite. So his grandfather, a very famous man. In his turn, Thomas Henry Huxley was known as Darwin's bulldog. And Thomas Henry Huxley would go around having debates with people about evolution.

[Dominic]

Sounds like a great. Such a ball.

[Co-host Dominic]

He was the great popularizer. No, you're quite wrong. In 1860, this was top quality entertainment. You'd go and see Thomas Huxley savaging the Bishop of Oxford or something, to

[Dominic]

be fair, that would be entertaining.

[Co-host Dominic]

So this is what would happen. And then Thomas Huxley's son was Leonard Huxley. So he was a teacher, he was a writer, he edited magazines, and he married the granddaughter of Dr. Arnold of Thom Brown School days fame.

[Dominic]

Yeah. You're a big fan of his.

[Co-host Dominic]

No, massive fan. Love Dr. Arnold, love Tom Brown's school days, love all forms of boarding school culture.

[Dominic]

And she also, following in those lofty footsteps, she also set up a school.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah. Set up a school herself. Brilliant. Brilliant family. Anyway, they do send. They're unbelievably worthy. I think I would not have got on very well with them.

[Dominic]

No.

[Co-host Dominic]

So Aldous is their third son. He's born in Surrey in 1894. His family, they called him Ogee, which is short for ogre. Aldous Huxley gets sent to prep school and Eton, and he has three big traumas in his life.

[Dominic]

Number one, actually.

[Co-host Dominic]

Right, exactly. Actually not dissimilar. When he's 14, his mother dies of cancer. Then his brother, who's called Trevenan, kills himself. And he was very old, close to his brother. His brother suffered from depression. And then at Eton, Aldous Huxley got this eye infection, which basically meant that he was virtually blind for two years. And weren't you telling me that he really was effectively blind for the rest of his life?

[Dominic]

He was certainly in one eye. People disagree about this. But, for instance, one thing I read said that Huxley had told him that he was basically totally blind in one eye, and the other one wasn't great eyes, either. But he'd said, sort of, very much in keeping with that sort of British stiff upper lip of that time, I don't give a damn. But you would give a damn, wouldn't you? And it's interesting because if you watch him on YouTube, which I did, I fell down a bit of a tunnel, he looks blind, okay. One of his eyes is totally clouded over. But the bad news is, for a very intelligent boy and with a very impressive family, this means that he can't become a doctor, which is what he'd hoped to be. The good news is that he's rejected for service in the First World War because obviously he can't see. So he goes to Balliol College, Oxford. He gets a first in English. I'm so struck by this. This is an epoch of very impressive, prolific young intellectuals, because he writes poetry, stories, he writes all sorts of novels, travel books, biographies. So impressive. But he also needs to make money. So he does all sorts of actually very interesting jobs. He works as a farm laborer. He works for House and Garden magazine. He even works for Vogue. Those are two things that you wouldn't think to put together, I think, in one's mind. And then he spends a year teaching French at His old school, Eton. And of course, one of the boys he teaches is a teenager called Eric Blair. And this is George Orwell. George Orwell never wrote about Huxley or Eton, to be honest. But another boy, a guy called Stephen Runciman, who wrote these massive tomes about the Crusades, which aren't necessarily thrilling, he said that Huxley was a useless teacher and couldn't see anything. I mean, obviously, and was very nervous and had no authority. And I think that kind of fits with the image of him. He's kind of. You can imagine him at this time being sort of a willowy young man, slightly caught up in his own ideas and his own work, not with those of the boys that he's teaching.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yes.

[Dominic]

And then in 1919, he marries a Belgian refugee called Marie. And it's during this time that he's hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group and he becomes friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose writing had a massive influence on Brave New World. And actually, people said that it was basically just a copycat of some of Russell's writing. I think that's a bit unfair. And the writer D.H. lawrence, who I'm a big fan of, but he actually clashed with the Bloomsbury Group quite a lot because he disagreed with a lot of their ethos of free love. For instance, you can see that in Brave New World, their aesthetic approach to life. And he actually wrote a book satirizing them, which a lot of them took offense to, and they had a bit of a falling out. And he's doing lots of that at this time, writing short stories, novels, most of them forgotten today. Kind of acerbic comedies, a bit like that one, the satire of the Blooms group. Comedies are manners. It's posh socialites going around house parties, talking about alternative lifestyles. Terrifying. It's a window into my own life there. And people at the time, though, think that it's very free thinking and witty and original.

[Co-host Dominic]

They sound terrible, really. I was reading up on these books

[Dominic]

by Mitford, I think.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, exactly. You know my views on the sort of bright young things and whatnot. I just think this sounds like Evelyn War or something, but without the laughs.

[Dominic]

Yeah, that's true, but Nancy Mitford has a lot of laughs. Gotta give her that.

[Co-host Dominic]

Okay, fine. I know you love Nancy Mitford. So anyway, he spends a lot of time abroad, doesn't he? A crucial moment in 1926, he goes to America for the first time and he is really overwhelmed by it. So this is America in the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. It's Ford Motor Cars, it's skyscrapers, cocktail bars. And he, like a lot of British visitors at this point, you know, this is after the First World War. Britain feels quite tired. America's very exciting. And he thinks this is going to be this extraordinary threat to European civilization. And a year later, he wrote to a friend, the thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration, for the worse, of established standards. And this basically gives him an idea. What would the world look like if it all turned into America? What if it became Americanized? And ultimately, this is the genesis of what will become Brave New World. There are, of course, lots of other influences, too, which we will come to. But he writes Brave new world in four months in the summer of 1931, when he's staying in France. And obviously, this is the book that ends up defining his reputation forever. It's not the only thing that he did, is it?

[Dominic]

No, no. If we just stick with Huxley himself. So he churned out dozens more books and then 30s, 40s and 50s, all different themes. He's working with novels, travel books, books about religion, politics, philosophy. He's considered kind of a great mind at this time, not as a great novelist. And it's really odd, given what you just read out, this antipathy that he has to an American consumerism and capitalism. He moves to America in 1937, which

[Co-host Dominic]

is so odd, but it's the fascination, don't you think? It's the mingled fascination and repulsion kind of thing.

[Dominic]

Exactly. And particularly someone that's grown up in a very traditional, aristocratic English family. This must just seem like a fantasy world. Not necessarily in a good way. And then so he moves to New Mexico and then to Southern California, and they live in Santa Monica and then Hollywood, and he's hanging out with people like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, which seems so incongruous to me, given what he was like a stick insect of an English gentleman.

[Co-host Dominic]

But even more incongruous is what he's doing. Right? Yeah.

[Dominic]

So weird. So he's doing a bit of script work. So he writes a version of Pride and Prejudice, then Jane Eyre, and then Walt Disney gets him to do a script for Alice in Wonderland, which is never used, but in a way that is quite fitting, because he's a man that loves a trip. And Alice in Wonderland is quite trippy.

[Co-host Dominic]

It is.

[Dominic]

And writer Christopher Isherwood visited him in California and said he looked like a bird, benevolent and quick with interest in his surroundings. When he talked, his beautifully sensitive features seemed literally to shine with enthusiasm. He was interested in so many subjects that he could talk to anybody, anybody that is, who was also interested. I think that's like those ridiculously clever people that are like that. Children and teenagers, scientists, ranchers, actresses, priests and professors. And then he spent some time in the Mojave Desert and then went back to Los Angeles. And in later life he is notable for three great enthusiasms which were very unorthodox, I would say for this time, but very much forward looking. So one is pacifism, and this is philosophical pacifism, not religious, which is why he couldn't legally register it himself as a conscientious objector in the US and then also, and increasingly so, Eastern spirituality. So he becomes a massive fan of the Bahavad Gita. And he's always going on about meditations. Love, you know, the visionary wisdom of India. I mean, so many ways, Dominic, you and he are birds of a feather. Because when you're not talking about love, wearing a caftan and open toed shoes, I don't know what you're doing.

[Co-host Dominic]

Oh, my word.

[Dominic]

Yeah, a great meeting of minds there. But he's also, as I alluded to earlier, taking a lot of psychedelic drugs. He takes mesculine in 1953 and this is when he writes the Doors of Perception about what he sees and experiences on that trip. And then he becomes an enthusiast for lsd. And he said of another trip that he had that it was much more intense and he sort of learned a lot more.

[Co-host Dominic]

Okay.

[Dominic]

But then he tragically fell ill with cancer in the early 1960s. And so harshly and cruelly and unfairly, he lost the ability to speak for a man that loved ideas and loved talking. I just think that's tragic. And on his deathbed he asked his wife to inject him with LSD. And he died on the 22nd of November 1963. He dies on the same day as CS Lewis. But both of these great literary deaths are outshone by another much more famous death, and that is the assassination of jfk. And he dies six hours before Huxley dies. Seems an extraordinary coincidence.

[Co-host Dominic]

It is, yeah. So Huxley's death was kind of totally overshadowed, as you say. So it was an amazing life really. But he would be forgotten, I think today if it weren't for Brave New World. And. Well, let's come to the book. There are loads of influences to unpack, but if we just plunge into it as the first readers did in 1932, so the first thing they would have seen, first thing you see when you read it is the title. It's a brilliant title. But then, of course, it comes from Shakespeare. It comes from the Tempest. So act five of the Tempest. Prospero's daughter Miranda says, oh, Wanda, how many goodly creatures are there here? How beauteous mankind is. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it. And even in the Tempest, this is an ironic joke. So Miranda is talking about a load of people who've turned up on her desert island. And she doesn't realize that these are actually very bad people, because these are the people who betrayed and exiled her father in the first place. And Prospero very wryly says, tis new to thee, and everybody laughs. Huxley's title is very well chosen as well, because Shakespeare is woven right through the book. So Shakespeare has been banned in this world in the future, but Shakespeare will find a way back in, as we will see. So we see the title, then we're into the book and we're into the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. And basically this is a device. I think it's quite neat. Some critics say it's a bit clunky. The director of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre is giving a lot of students a tour. And because he's giving them a tour, he can explain exactly how the world works.

[Dominic]

I think this is really well done. And I actually thought that when I was rereading it this time, because there's a long period at the very beginning when you don't you think, oh, it's something to do with farming maybe, or, I don't know, just some random lab work. And then you hear the word fetus and you're like, oh, what is going on here? I think it's very well done.

[Co-host Dominic]

I think it is well done. But the comparison in 1984.

[Dominic]

So in 1984, there's a lot more show, don't tell.

[Co-host Dominic]

I would say in 1984, 1984 is show don't tell. Whereas this is a lot of tell. But also two things. Number one, we already mentioned 1984 is very physical and visceral. So when we go into Victory Mansions, it feels like there's this high stakes, emotional stakes. This all feels very bloodless. It's a tour of a laboratory. And therefore, you know, that can only be so interesting. There's a lot of exposition, but there's no feeling. And part of that is because we're not really introduced to an interesting character. Couple of chapters go by and there's basically no real named character at all. So in 1984, we're in Winston Smith's head right away. And we really believe in Winston. We believe in him as somebody with a backstory. We think he exists, but we don't meet a single name character who really matters in the first few pages of Brave New World, which suggests to me, when I was reading it, Aldous Huxley is much more interested in the world than he is in the story. And that turns out to be correct.

[Dominic]

I think the other thing with Winston Smith is because we are in his head the whole time, you automatically connect to a certain perspective and you're kind of rooting for this tingle of, I don't know, rebellion or seditiousness or question, you know, he's questioning his world in this. There isn't really a hint of that till halfway through. And all of the characters that we first encounter are very jolly, very at ease and very at peace with their world. So why would we question it either? It's a flat to rain, there are no bumps, hillocks, and there's nothing three dimensional, which means that you're automatically only skimming the surface to start with. Anyway, back to the world. So the year is, as we've said, is AF632. So we're in the middle of the 26th century, and in the past there was a terrible world war, an economic collapse, and this actually ties back to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, because we get only a very small sprinkling of what happened in the past here. That's not really the point. Whereas in 1984 there's a long passage dedicated to explaining why we are where we are.

[Co-host Dominic]

Where we are.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And then this economic collapse is followed by the foundation of the world state. And this dominates every aspect of life. But it is not domineering in any way. I would say here in Brave New World.

[Co-host Dominic]

You mean that's in overtly domineering?

[Dominic]

No, it's not overtly domineering because it starts at birth and it quietly, casually guides you every step of the way, but it doesn't punish you because you wouldn't think to rebel, I suppose. Yeah. So it's a world devoted to the cult of the US industrialist Henry Ford. And he is a titanic figure in the 1920s because his factories led the way in mass produced assembly line cars. So these are the cars of the future. And Ford here is a godlike figure, not quite like Big Brother, I would say, in it's more divine than that, because in the way that we would say, oh God, or my God, they say, oh, Ford. Or our Ford or Ford's day. And it's taken the place of religion as well. So the top bar of the cross has been chopped off, so it's been replaced by a T. So it becomes

[Co-host Dominic]

a T. Like a Model T. Yeah,

[Dominic]

a Model T, exactly. But Ford has also become conflated with Sigmund Freud for reasons that we'll get into. And the world is divided into 10 zones run by world controllers. So the Western European zone, which is based in London, is ruled by his Ford ship, Mustafa Mond, which is also kind of a clever in joke. And he's at the top of a social hierarchy of strict castes and classes. So you have Alpha plus, and they are sort of clever, brilliant intellectuals all the way down. So the book club, if you will. And then you have the very bottom. And this is epsilon minus semi morons. So the state's motto, as you said, is Community, Identity, stability. And it's a totalitarian collective dystopia. And all individuality is totally suppressed. So we saw that in that opening reading. All the babies, little newborn babies, are dressed in the same khaki. You know, they're dressed in the same uniforms right from the very beginning. But unlike Big Brother, the controllers don't need to rely on any sort of secret police. There's no terror, there's no violence. They rule by conformity, conditioning, and essentially kind of happiness. Contentedness is weaponized. Your role in society is determined before you're born. And often people say that it's uncertainty that unsettles humans and the potential for deviation or the potential for having to kind of question your future. People in this society don't have that. And, you know, because you've been conditioned not to question anything from birth, and assuming that you follow the preordained path laid out for you by your caste and by your conditioning, you're treated pretty well by the state. You have a sort of fairly lovely time.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. So this is so where Orwell's prophecy is really about politics, this is one partly about science. So it's obviously an age written in the 1930s. People are fascinated by eugenics. People today have seen it as a prophecy of our world, of genetic engineering and things. And the very first chapters of the book, as you were saying, Tabby, they do feel like a sort of scientific panorama. So you're touring the Hattering and conditioning center. In his essay on the book, John Sutherland, great critic, says it's a bit like a twisted version of the book of Genesis. So this is the. We get our sense of how the world began and how human beings begin. They're created not by God, they're created by scientists and test tubes and incubators. And thanks to this thing called the Bokanovsky process, you can clone effectively tens of thousands of identical twins to carry out their allotted tasks in society. And of the embryos, when they get the female embryos, two thirds of them, they give them male hormones and they turn them into what are called free martins. And these are women who can't have children, although, as the director says, they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards.

[Dominic]

Lovely.

[Co-host Dominic]

There's a sense always in that Huxley is not really very frightened by his dystopia, that he's having a little bit of a joke.

[Dominic]

I felt that the whole way through. That's why there's absolutely no kind of jeopardy or anything. Cause he's kind of just having a laugh the whole time, too, I think.

[Co-host Dominic]

I think so.

[Dominic]

George Orwell is like, beware, Beware.

[Co-host Dominic]

So these kids, they will use X rays and they use heat conditioning, and they use oxygen deprivation to affect their development.

[Dominic]

And the point is, this is actually something that is quite unnerving. So they give or take away oxygen, depending on how clever they want that baby to be.

[Co-host Dominic]

But crucially, they will make you love your conditional. So, in other words, you won't feel bitter that you are not very clever. They will condition you so that you would never want to be clever and you'd rather look down on people who are.

[Dominic]

Exactly. But also, so once you're born, you have more conditioning. So hence the stuff with the flowers and the books. And this is all inspired by ideas of the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov. And I think lots of people have heard of Pavlov's dog. And you're even conditioned when you're asleep. So this is called Hypnopedia. And this is actually still very popular today. This is, again, this is something that Pavlov wrote about. So, for instance, it's when pregnant mothers will play Mozart to their stomachs so that the children grow up with a love of Mozart or become geniuses.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

They say it makes them more intelligent. Because of this, human beings are reduced to being totally passive creatures. You know, everything is predetermined. Your destiny is laid out for you, your tastes are decided, your views, even

[Co-host Dominic]

the clothes you wear is determined by the state.

[Gwen Washington]

Yeah.

[Co-host Dominic]

And listeners might be wondering, well, what about the place for parents and family?

[Dominic]

It's an interesting part of the ideology,

[Co-host Dominic]

I think, and there's absolutely no place at all they don't occur whatsoever. And this takes us to the point that you made earlier about the conflation of Ford and Freud. Our Freud and our Freud. So basically, the people of this world believe that sometimes our Ford used to call himself our Freud whenever he spoke of psychological matters.

[Dominic]

Yeah, the Holy Ghost versus the father.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. And that when he appears in the guise of Freud, he reveals the truth about the horrors of the old world. The world of fathers and mothers, of perversion, of sadism, of chastity, which is another form of perversion. And that this was all terrible and wicked and cruel. And that to the people growing up in the year AF632, the idea of having a mother and father at all is. It's not just immoral, it is actually physically repulsive. The word is obscene. The idea of any love, attachment, family, relationship. They regard this with absolute horror.

[Dominic]

Yeah. It's not even just a taboo. I don't know. It's the way that we'd. I don't know, look upon paedophilia or something like something that you. Absolutely sick.

[Co-host Dominic]

It makes your skin crawl.

[Dominic]

Exactly. Yeah. It makes your skin crawl.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. And as a result of this, because they've severed completely the link between sex and procreation, Sex itself is just a matter of leisure. So you can sleep with different people all the time. There's no consequence. And there's actually absolutely no emotional content to it. It's purely a form of sort of physical entertainment. And as a result, they're very happy for children to mess around kind of sexually, aren't they? Which is quite a disturbing detail in the early chapters.

[Dominic]

It is, but it's another form of conditioning, I guess. It's like another happiness drug. So children are encouraged to get stuck into what is called erotic play. So on this tour that these people have been taken on, which, you know, we described it in the opening reading. The third part of it is children playing outside, naked in the sunshine. Aw, how lovely. And then I quote, in a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labor of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game. And you're like, God. What? Tosie takes you by surprise. And the director says, charming. Charming. And then a little boy is taken away because he. She doesn't want to join in. And the staff think this is weird and abnormal. And it leads into a conversation about how people in the Ancient past before the coming of our Lord.

[Co-host Dominic]

Our Ford.

[Dominic]

Yeah, yeah, our Ford were such freaks. They treated an erotic play as immoral and they did ghastly, disgusting things like get married and have a relationship with someone that, you know, gave birth to you. Yeah, and it's motherly. The word mother and father is

[Gwen Washington]

the

[Co-host Dominic]

ultimate swear words, effectively. So there's a couple of jokes, I think, going on here. So I think so much of Brave New World is meant to be. It's a big in joke. It's a sort of intellectual in joke. So a lot of it is. You mentioned Bertrand Russell. He had set help to set up this school called Beacon Hill, which was a progressive school that had kind of sex education and the kids were dancing naked and stuff. This is so 1920s. And actually it's kind of joking about that. I don't think they beat each other to death with conch shell. I think that's the difference.

[Dominic]

That's a comfort.

[Co-host Dominic]

And then the other thing, the great joke that runs through, obviously Huxley is a Victorian, he was born at the end of the Victorian period. And the joke goes through. Brave New World is whenever people try to behave in a Victorian way, they're regarded as immoral. So there's a bit where a heroine, insofar as the book has a heroine who's called Lenina, and she's talking to her friend Fanny and they're talking about the director and they say, oh, the director, he's such a stickler for kind of morality, you know, he's so always so well behaved. And Lainina says, yes, he patted me on the behind this afternoon. And Fanny says, there, you see, that shows what he stands for, the strictest conventionality, you know, because basically free love is seen as moral and any form of self restraint is seen as really shocking. So in this world, the top fun that you can have is you go to a sort of dance or a singing session that escalates into what they call an orgy porgy.

[Dominic]

Orgy porgy. Orgy porgy. They all start chanting it that I was slightly lost by.

[Co-host Dominic]

And if you then went and you didn't enjoy yourself, you were unhappy, you would make yourself happy by taking Soma, by taking the drug. And the drug again is, I think there's an element of an in joke about the drug. The Victorians, the 1920s actually is an age of big backlash against drugs. So people have been anxious, sort of from the 1880s, the last sort of 30 or 40 years, they've become increasingly anxious about intoxication. It's the age of Prohibition in America. It's an age when actually a lot of drugs are being outlawed in the 1920s. So the idea that people are giving out drugs for free and making themselves happy again, it's Huxley kind of poking fun at the taboos of his own time.

[Dominic]

Yeah. And it serves to keep society happy and therefore passive. Cause the minute people start to have sort of apparent, you know, sort of different thoughts or start to question things, you take your lovely soma and you drift off on a little cloud of contentment.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So this is the world that we're in. So what about the story? I think it's really telling that we haven't mentioned any characters yet, because this book is definitely not really about characters or story. They're secondary to the ideas. So insofar as we do have characters, we have one. We have Bernard Marks, Mark's tellingly, tellingly called. And he's an Alpha plus sleep specialist. And his conditioning, we're constantly told, has gone wrong. Cause he's too short for his cast. He doesn't fit in. He's a loner. He doesn't really like promiscuous sex or communal fun. He has a crush on someone. You're not meant to have crushes on people. You just sleep with people for the hell of it. He also doesn't really like taking Soma, which is also totally weird.

[Co-host Dominic]

He wants to feel things. And you're not really meant to want to feel things.

[Pharmaceutical Advertiser]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

You're not meant to feel things. He doesn't have a backstory, though. Unlike Winston Smith, Winston's is gradually revealed.

[Co-host Dominic]

Remember the thing about his mum, when he lost his parents, or sort of the chocolates? Yeah.

[Dominic]

He has no personality beyond a mild strain of bitterness born of being the runt of the litter. And we know so little about him, he's just a vehicle. But he has this other, I think, more interesting dissident friend who's a guy called Helmholtz Watson. He is too clever for this society. Basically. He's lusting after some strain of original thought and he's stifled by the world. And he loves writing. He writes the state propaganda, but he writes heretical poems instead about being lonely. And he basically thinks that this is a world that doesn't have enough sadness to write well, which is also, I think, kind of like a bit of an in joke. And then we have one other vaguely interesting character who you mentioned, and this is our heroine of a kind. And this is Lenina Crow, and she is a beta vaccination. Technician. She's basically fits in very well into this world and it doesn't really occur to her to question most of it. But there is one thing that's slightly unusual and that is that she has an inexplicable fondness for Bernard, despite him being a dweeb by the standards of the. And the dullest man in the world. Yeah. And she also, for instance, has an affair with someone for a month when you're not meant to do that. You're meant to continue to sleep with lots of different people and people think that's a bit odd. She has no personality though, really. We're just told again and again that she's pneumatic. And that basically is her personality.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, it is. Basically she's very fleshy, good looking, no whiff of rebellion.

[Dominic]

She just has a lovely waist. She's got auburn hair. And that's all we need to know.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah. So about a third of the way through the book, we get to the great turning point in the story. So Bernard wangles a pass to take Lenina on holiday and he chooses to take her to one of the few places on that is not under the control of the world state. There are a series of reservations where sort of indigenous life can continue. And this is what they call the Savage Reservation in New Mexico. And there the descendants of the Pueblo Indians live basically untouched by the modern world. And when Bernard and Lenina get there, they're in for a massive shock because they're going to meet a character who will challenge their assumptions and their principles in a way tabby that they cannot possibly imagine.

[Dominic]

We'll meet him ourselves after the break.

[SoFi Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by SoFi, the all in One finance app. The sooner you start investing, the more potential you have to build your money, even for beginners. Sofi makes it simple with an easy to use app to get you going. SoFi is offering up to $1,000 in stock when you open and fund a Sofi self directed brokerage account. Learn [e-mail] Spotify brokerage offered through SoFi Securities LLC. Member Finra SIPC terms apply. This episode is brought to you by SoFi the all in One finance app to bank, borrow and invest. Say goodbye to account fees and give your bank balance balance a glow up with a Sofi high yield savings account. Get over 8 times the national average savings rate and an epic welcome bonus when you sign up with eligible direct deposit. Sign [e-mail] Spotify SoFi checking and savings offered through SoFi Bank NA member FDIC terms apply. This episode is brought to you by SoFi, the all in one finance app where you can bank, borrow and invest. It's time to achieve your financial ambitions. Earn more on your savings with a SOFI Bank High Yield Savings account. Ditch your higher interest credit card debt with a SOFI personal loan or start investing on an easy to use platform with SoFi. Invest wherever you are on your financial journey, SoFi's got you covered. Learn more at sofi.com Spotify.

[Dominic]

So welcome back to the Book club, everybody. Now, just before we resume our story, we have a little bit of our own social conditioning for you. So a reminder that there will be more about this book and all the other books that we've done in our brand new and totally free newsletter. And this lands in your inbox every Saturday. And there are loads of tips about further reading. We have reviews, you can send in your own thoughts, let us know what you thought, give it your own rating and and lots of listeners do that. So it's a beautiful little tender chat community of listeners. And you'll also get advance warning about events, tickets to live shows, and about the books that we'll be doing way, way in advance. So I think both of us would totally agree that you ought to sign up@the bookclubhq.com for book club Notes, our brand new booklet.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

Now back to Brave New World. So what happens when Bernard and Lenina arrive in New Mexico?

[Co-host Dominic]

So they've got to the Savage Reservation, which is cut off by electric fences from the World State, and they're really sort of shocked and surprised by what they see because here, life goes on. Huxley does not present the world of the Savage Reservation as a bundle of laughs.

[Dominic]

It's not utopian at all.

[Co-host Dominic]

No, no, no, no. It's a lot of tribal dancing, which some people may think sounds brilliant, but it's a lot of like ritual flagellation. There's a lot of alcoholism, a lot of sexual jealousy, violence, all of this kind of thing. And they meet here, however, two characters who completely so one of them is a woman called Linda. And Linda is actually from their world. She was a beta minus from the fertilizing room and she came, she was the director's girlfriend very briefly, and he brought her to the Savage reservation more than 20 years ago, but she got lost in a thunderstorm and she got left behind. And so she's been there ever since. And because she was from the World State, she believed in kind of free love and stuff. So she slept with all the men on the Savage Reservation and their wives all hated her, obviously. And she became a massive hate figure. She became ostracized. And she's completely addicted to kind of booze and mescaline stuff because she doesn't have soma.

[Dominic]

She craves soma. And so she has to fill the gap with alcohol.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. And then here's the thing. When she came to the Savage Reservation, she was actually pregnant by the director, although she didn't realize it. And she had the child there, which was a traumatic event for her because she didn't even know what childbirth was.

[Dominic]

And she.

[Co-host Dominic]

It kind of. It seems that she's been part in some obscene ritual.

[Dominic]

She doesn't even have a word for mother, you know, and, you know, she knows it, but she's repulsed by the fact that she is one.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. And she had this son who she called John. And John is basically in this story what Miranda is in Shakespeare's play the Tempest. So he's the offspring of the person who got trapped on the desert island, so marooned. And John, like Miranda in the Tempest, when he first sees his visitors, he basically is like, oh, brave new world. Oh, isn't this brilliant? And he and his mother are gonna come back with them to London. And they're very excited about what they're gonna. You know, he can't wait get to see this world that he's dreamed of. What's it gonna be? It's gonna be great fun. And actually, of course it isn't.

[Dominic]

Yeah. And the second half of the book is really John's story. So it's so interesting. You know, if there is a protagonist in this book, it's probably John. We only meet him halfway through. And the first thing is he tells Bernard all of his recollections of growing up. And it's so grim and miserable because it's the side effects of a mother brought up in this dystopian society, raising a boy that has a mentality more akin to our own. And the confusion that comes with that. I think that's so well done. But people call him the Savage or Mr. Savage. And he's a celebrity when he returns. And that's basically how he functions in this story. He's kind of. He's sort of a classic noble savage from the 18th century, from 18th century literature. He reminded me of Pocahontas when she came from the New World to London. And he's innocent and idealistic. He is the product of nature, and he's unspoiled by civilization. But there is one huge cultural influence on him. And this is Shakespeare, because a volume of Shakespeare was left in kind of the savage camp by someone else. And all he knows of the world and human nature comes from Shakespeare. So he's always quoting the Tempest, Hamlet, for instance. His understanding of love comes from Romeo and Juliet. So his morality and his cultural touchstones are basically that of a 16th or 17th century English person. You know, think about the strength, you know, how important religion was at that time, how much there was to disapprove of. So John is absolutely appalled by what he discovers of life. In af632. He's in love with Lenina. But because of the Shakespeare that has been his conditioning, he can't get his head around her promiscuity and her sensuality. And he's disgusting, disgusted by it. Just as people in AF 632, 632 are appalled by him and Linda, but especially Linda, because they find her disgusting. And the thing is, Huxley writes her as disgusting, fat, dirty, smelly, stinking of booze. And there's this great scene when it all comes to a head and Linda is dying in hospital. And John thinks of her as his mother and so loves her and is attached to her. And you're not really meant to get attached to people, so. So there's universal horror at the fact that he insists on coming to her bedside. People don't watch people die. You know, who cares? You no longer serve society. You're done. So no one understands it. They don't get why he's sad. They think he's gone mad. And then these small children are brought in, are brought on a tour to get used to the idea of death. It's more conditioning, but, you know, and get used to it. Basically. You watch it and you feel nothing. And they're eating eclairs and they're shocked.

[Co-host Dominic]

They're trying to eat there. Claire, this is folks.

[Dominic]

And there's this disgusting savage crying over his mother. They're appalled to see him cry. They probably wouldn't really even know what crying was. And then he gets in a massive row with the staff who say, you know, you're getting in the way of their conditioning. You're gonna put two months onto their conditioning. And then he lashes out and causes a riot. Cause he's so repulsed by these little twins and their confusion and their questions about Linda. So he hurls everyone's soma out the window, which starts a riot. And he shouts, but do you like being slaves? Do you like being babies? Yes. Babies mewling and puking. Don't you want to be free? And men, don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are? You can see there's almost a bit of Shakespearean, like, I don't know, Julius Caesar or something in there. Yeah, yeah, I'll teach you. I'll make you be free whether you want it or not. And there you get a hint of the zealotry that will later consume his character. So finally, John Bernard and Bernard's mate Helmholtz are brought in to see Mustafa Monde. And this is when we really meet Mustafa Monde in the flesh. And he's the world controller. And this is the climax of the novel. And this is a bit like that sort of scene with big brother in 1984. O', Brien, o', Brien, where you discuss what it all means and the ideology behind the world. You look behind the curtain. It's a bit like when they go to the wizard of Oz.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yes, exactly. So actually, this is a good moment to stop and to say, well, what does it mean? What is Huxley trying to say? So we said at the beginning that the genesis of it was when Huxley went to America in 1926. So Huxley, I think, was primed to look down on America because basically that was what intellectual bohemian people in Europe did. And that was a tradition that is deeply rooted in kind of British writing, like Charles Dickens did it when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit and stuff. And Huxley had said to his brother at the end of the First World War, the worst thing about the First World War would be the inevitable acceleration of American world domination. And what he means by that is kind of American culture and American economic power as much as political. So I think a lot of Brave New World is explicable as Huxley's disgust, his contempt for what he sees as everything wrong with modern American consumer culture. So especially la. He went to la. I like la, by the way, But Huxley didn't. Huxley said. Called it Joy City. And he didn't mean it kindly. He said, well, he said to a friend, it's the nearest thing to utopia yet seen on our planet. After 24 hours of it, you begin to pine for the slums of Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg. So the things that I like about la, I like the fact that it's very different from European cities. I like the sky, the blue skies. I mean, admittedly, there's a lot of smog, the beach, the kind of California lifestyle, the sunniness and stuff, but lots of British visitors go, and they find that repellent.

[Dominic]

I didn't find it repellent, but I think I know something slightly understand something of what Huxley is saying that I find it a little bit without feeling and without. There are sedimentary layers of, I don't know, history and there's nothing old. And so I know what is meant by that kind of Dostoevsky St. Petersburg thing. And also I'm terribly pretentious, so there's that. But similarly, I think clearly Huxley does have a love hate relationship with it because, yes, he despises its shallowness, but as we said earlier, he finds it intoxicating and fascinating. There's a reason that he ends up living around that. And in lots of ways the London of Brave New World is essentially California in 1926. They use dollars, they live in skyscrapers. There's this obsession with looking young and beautiful all the time. Hence they're so disgusted by Linda. They chew sex hormone chewing gum. They wear clothes with zippers. And Huxley said the zipper was America's national crest. You know, everything happens quickly and easily and everything looks nice. The music is clearly jazz. So the Westminster Abbey Cabaret uses electric sky signs to advertise Calvin stopes and his 16 saxophonists. Literally, that's just gobbledygook to me. And there's an even more obvious target, and this is Hollywood. And Aldous Huxley had visited America at precisely the point when silent movies are being overtaken by the talkies. So there's the jazz singer in 1927. And then brave New World, I think, quite cleverly takes this a step further with the Feelies. And Lenina takes John, who she has a crush on, to see Three Weeks in a Helicopter and all super singing, synthetic, talking, colored, stereoscopic feely with synchronized scent organ accompaniment. So it's all, you know, it's meant to be kind of overwhelming and totally take you away from the real world. It's a bit like taking Soma or something.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, you're sort of. It's almost like a kind of VR type thing. You'll feel it, you'll smell it. It's completely immersive.

[Dominic]

It's playing with the ide of escapism, I guess, in the extreme.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, completely. But the film they see, it's kind of very dodgy, isn't it?

[Dominic]

Really dodgy. It's like Birth of a Nation or something. It's really simplistic racist plot. It's a black man whose conditioning accidentally is reversed. So he kidnaps and rapes a Blonde woman. Then she is rescued by three handsome young alphas and thanks them by having sex with them. John is repulsed by this and totally unmoved by it. Leonina is swept away on a tidal wave of romance and eroticism.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, she thinks it's brilliant. And I think this is another joke because basically there was a film franchise in the 1920s that had this plot. Effectively it was the Rudolph Valentino films, the Sheikh and Son of the Sheik. So it's about a woman being kidnapped and, you know, sort of ravished by princes in the Arabian desert and stuff. Hugely popular silent films. So when people read about this, they'd have seen the joke. And actually, I think if you read Brave New World with that in mind, so much of it, so much of the so called prophetic, forward thinking critique of consumer culture is actually your standard 1920s intellectual slightly sort of sneering at mass culture, you know. So basically it was so common for the Bloomsbury Group and their descendants to sort of look at mass culture, mass entertainment in the 20s and to say it's for morons. It's such shallow.

[Dominic]

It's a lot of snobbery, actually.

[Co-host Dominic]

It is, I think, a little bit. So I think this is a difference to George Orwell. So Orwell, in 1984, remember, he says, like, if there's hope, it lies in the proles. He kind of likes ordinary people and the songs they sing and what they, you know, their sort of everyday culture. Aldous Huxley, in his world, the masses are basically absolute morons who are brainwashed. So the things that he doesn't, like obstacle golf or the game they play, which is called centrifugal bumble buppy.

[Dominic]

They're mindless and slightly infantile, aren't they? But everything's shiny.

[Co-host Dominic]

But the 1920s and 30s is a huge age for the expansion of leisure, like in Britain. So dance halls, cinemas, all of these things, football matches, whatever. Huxley, I think, is one of those people who looks on these things and says, you know, this is just popcorn for morons.

[Dominic]

But what would Orwell have made of something like LA or that sort of booming American culture?

[Co-host Dominic]

Well, he was very anti American himself, actually. Yeah. So you're right. Orwell has the sort of instinctive suspicion of America, of a British intellectual. Definitely.

[Dominic]

When Orwell speaks about liking the proles, whatever, I think he kind of means a doughty Englishman.

[Co-host Dominic]

He does, he completely sits in a

[Dominic]

country pub or whatever. It's slightly different, but I know what you mean. I do think that, that occasionally Huxley slips over into sneering a tiny bit.

[Co-host Dominic]

A little bit, I think. A little bit.

[Dominic]

A little bit, anyway. But it's not just American consumerism that he's satirizing here. There's loads more going on. So in May 1931, Huxley started writing. When Huxley started writing, he told a friend that it was a novel about the future, on the horror of the Wellesian utopia and a revolt against it. So who's he targeting here? It's one of the great British writers of the earliest 20th century. You're a big fan of his work, I think I am. And he's another enthusiast for utopias and dystopias and he's always imagining possible futures. And this is H.G. wells. And in 1923, he wrote a book called Men Like Gods, and it imagined a man from Sydenham called Mr. Barnstaple who was accidentally transported into the far future, 3,000 years ahead. The future. There he discovers the future is actually brilliant and there's no religion, there's no politics, everybody's free, everybody's honest and everybody's happy. Then he comes home, determined to make it a reality, committed to this revolution that will not stop until old Earth is one city and utopia set up therein. It's like, you know, kingdom of heaven on earth or something.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

He knew clearly that this revolution is life and that all other living is a trafficking of life with death. So this is clearly Aldous Huxley's main target. He wants to parody this idea that we're moving towards some sort of rose tinted progressive paradise, but sans religion. Religion is taken out of it. Which is kind of interesting because that's what Blake is doing as well, in many ways, with his writings. And Aldous Huxley tells another friend, I've been having a little fun pulling the leg of H.G. wells, but then got caught up in the excitement of my own ideas is.

[Co-host Dominic]

So I actually had a look at this book. I found a copy of it online.

[Dominic]

Did you?

[Co-host Dominic]

Men Like Gods. It looks rubbish.

[Gwen Washington]

No.

[Dominic]

Oh, how come?

[Co-host Dominic]

Well, it's forgotten, I think. Forgotten for a reason. It's a terrible name. Mr. Barnstable is a really boring character. It's a ridiculous idea that he's catapulted into the future. It's brilliant. Then he comes back and he decides he wants to. There's no story, it's no tension. Anyway, so clearly what happened is all the Turks. He sat down in 1931 and he thought to himself, well, I've been to America, I've been to la. It was awful. HG Wells has written this terrible book. I'm going to spoof H.G. wells book and combine it with the parody of LA. And that's what Brave New World is going to be. But he's also drawing very deeply on the anxieties, specifically, of the early 1930s. In the Everyman Classics edition of Brave New World, there's a brilliant essay by David Bradshaw, great literary scholar, and he talks about Brave New World and the ideas that run through it. And the central ideas, he says, are stability and control. So stability is one of the words of the motto, control. I mean, obviously there's world controllers. And the reason that people are interested in this at the time, obviously, the world fell apart in the First World War, and then there was the Russian Revolution and whatnot. And in 1931, when Aldous Huxley wrote the book, the world has fallen apart again because the Great Depression has happened in Britain. There was a massive political crisis. The labor government fell apart. Huge spending cuts like massive unemployment and whatnot. Huxley was planning to go to America that summer to basically do research for his book, and he postponed it because. And falling apart. So you can see that the idea of getting back to some form of stability is very much on his mind. He's always been interested in state planning. He's always been interested in the idea that so common among intellectuals in the 20s and 30s. They're like, there should be a national plan by very clever people like him. So they plan everything out so nothing like this can ever happen again.

[Dominic]

A philosopher utopia or something.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so you've got that idea on the one hand, and then the other idea, which we've said so many times now, Henry Ford, our Ford, is the presiding genius, the deity of this society, and this is Fordism. And the idea of Fordism runs right through Brave New World. So basically, Fordism is the idea of mass production using assembly lines. So basically, the factories that built the Model t car from 1908, and then that similar technique is rolled out in factories worldwide. And it's what we're so familiar with today. And lots of people at the time said Fordism is like the wave of the future. It's catapulted us into an entirely new age, basically, in the future. I mean, they weren't wrong. In the future, skilled workers will stand on assembly lines. They'll be trained to work the assembly line. They'll make thousands and thousands of identical products, and then they'll go home and they'll watch TV or whatever, built by themselves in their Factories that they've bought with the wages that they've earned. And the man behind Ford is Henry ford. By the 20s, he was easily one of the most famous men in the world. I mean, he was the equivalent of Elon Musk or something.

[Dominic]

Yeah, that's a good comparison.

[Co-host Dominic]

So when Huxley sailed to America for the first time, in the ship's library, they had a copy of Henry Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work, and Huxley read it on the voyage. And in Brave New World, it's like their bible. It's their sacred text or something. And. And just before Huxley started writing this book, Henry Ford had moved into Britain. So he bought this huge tract of land in Dagenham, east of London. This became the big Ford factory. Still exists, actually, in sort of suburban Essex, East London. And they had housing estates, they had schools, they had leisure facilities. It's basically like, like, people at the time said, this is the town of the future. They call it Fordopolis. This is what it'll be like. You know, we live in company towns with. Everyone will go to the same communal kind of, I don't know, cinema or the pub or the kind of bowling alley or whatever.

[Dominic]

It's like the Cadbury, the little Cadburyville or whatever.

[Co-host Dominic]

It was on a Bournville, but on a much bigger scale.

[Dominic]

Yeah, it was a little bit like a Marie Antoinette with a petit folly. What was it called?

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, the petit triangle.

[Dominic]

Petit, yeah, exactly. Where it was like, we're going to live in, like, Disney cottages and have our milk delivered to us.

[Co-host Dominic]

Well, that's what Bournville is. But we're all.

[Dominic]

Exactly. But this wasn't that.

[Co-host Dominic]

Not at all. Not at all. And so basically, London in Brave New World is Fordopolis on a massive scale. This is Hux's nightmare that the world will become one giant Ford plant, assembly line, people making assembly line things, and this will go on forever. Like, history will stop and there will be nothing but this.

[Dominic]

And also the fear that. That turns you into unthinking drones. You live out the motions expected of you and then that's it. So it's a bit like he was worried that people would stop reading, they'd stop engaging with ideas.

[Co-host Dominic]

And it's hard to challenge this because basically, Bernard Marks, you know, our supposed hero at the beginning of the book, he's not really a challenge to this. He's no threat at all.

[Dominic]

He's just. He's depressed about how the fact that he's low down in the system, it's not the system he's questioning, it's his place in it. It.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah. And he's just a bit bored and disaffected and he doesn't really know where he fits. But, yeah, the state, actually, as we discover, they're fine with that. If you're a dissident, they'll ship you off to the Falkland Islands or to Samoa or something, and there you can live with other dissidents. And they're not going to kill you. They're not going to put you in prison or anything like that. They can deal with you.

[Dominic]

They're not going to put rats on your face.

[Co-host Dominic]

No. They're not going to put rats on your face. However, John, I spent, I guess the savage, because he's come from the savage reservation and his mindset is so different. He kind of is a bit. They don't really know what to make of him, do they?

[Dominic]

No. He's much more of a threat, though, because he hasn't been conditioned into acquiescence, which obviously Bernard has. So, you know, for instance, he's got this love of Shakespeare. And Helmholtz, Bernard's friend, loves to write, but there are parts of Shakespeare that Helmholtz just can't understand. He's like in Romeo and Juliet, he doesn't get the romance because he can't understand it, because he hasn't been allowed to understand anything. Anything other than that which he's been taught to know. And in many ways, John is a very familiar cultural figure. So the savage raised in a lost world, who comes out and comes into contact with modern civilization. The most obvious example of this is, of course, Tarzan. And his debut is in Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in 1912 and then in the Hollywood films in the 1930s. And he is the naive innocent in a world that he doesn't really understand.

[Co-host Dominic]

John is.

[Dominic]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's like Candide in Voltaire's Candide.

[Co-host Dominic]

Candide, yeah.

[Dominic]

Yeah. And he travels the world in the mid 18th century and slowly loses all of his optimism and his illusions, thanks to what he sees. You know, he loses his innocence the more that he sees and understands. It's a bit like he steps out of some primordial Garden of Eden.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

Very imperfect here, which is basically what I mean.

[Co-host Dominic]

John wasn't in. John's life beforehand wasn't brilliant, but he's horrified by what he sees in London. The sort of the London of the world state. The only thing is, though, I thought when John was introduced into the book, I thought, okay, finally we've got to our hero But I found him really unlikable as a character and I found him unsatisfied. I just thought he was a bit priggish and a bit annoying.

[Dominic]

Oh, I totally agree. He's infuriating. And he is actually, I think a walking warning against a conscience. Self righteousness, a different form of zealotry. And I think that Huxley's attitude to the Savage Reservation is similarly ambiguous. It definitely is not one of admiration. So putting it in New Mexico is another in joke. So he's very good friends with D.H. lawrence, the English writer, and he stuck by Lawrence when Lawrence was essentially cancelled for his ideas and the books that he was writing in the private life and his private life and everyone else dropped him. And Lawrence has moved to town in New Mexico in the early 1920s and for Europeans he was by far the most famous person living in New Mexico at that time. And Lawrence is famously progressive about sex. So he is the writer of Lady Chatterley's Lover which was banned. And he loved all the tribal stuff. Free love, primal sexual energy, Kama Sutra. Let's be authentic.

[Co-host Dominic]

Lawrence holds the world record for using the word loins in novels.

[Dominic]

Yeah, burning loins. Exactly. I think it's telling Dominic that you've recognized and let's all be authentic, free, true, blah blah blah, blah. That's a massive insight into your attitude to this, isn't it? You've given yourself away enormously.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, well I do find Dea Storrance a bit. I think he totally insists upon himself.

[Dominic]

I like his books though. But he's like his ideas are kind of that of sort of early mid-1960s hippies or something.

[Co-host Dominic]

Well, they definitely appeal to it. You're not wrong. And I think when we do like Sons and lovers or women in love.

[Dominic]

I love sons and lovers.

[Co-host Dominic]

We can go through some of the passages in that where it's like the burning his loins but I can't come on every page.

[Dominic]

But in Brave New World the Savage Reservation is horrible. It's really grim. Everybody's off their face on mezcal. They're always self flagellating, having these mad tribal dances. It's really dirty. There are fleas everywhere. And the joke about John is that he's the opposite of Lawrence. So he's living in this place in New Mexico, but he's a massive of prig. He's very fastened up, he's very puritanical. It's a great joke.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. And so then we have the confrontation between him and Mustafa Mond and I think so this is so Interesting. So John is like super over earnest. He's very puritanical, he hates this world. But Mustafa Mond, the World Controller, who we've been built up to believe is the great villain who's controlling this, he's actually very calm, he's worldly, he's wryly. His name is more of Hux's jokes. So Mustafa, the most famous Mustafa in the late 1920s, early 1930s by far, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, a modernizer, a secularist, a reformer who has dragged his country into the sort of shiny new world of the 20th century. And then Mond, Sir Alfred Mond was the first chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries. Ici and Huxley had been to their huge new plant outside Middlesbrough just before writing the book. He thought Mond was brilliant. He said Billingham, the plant was the triumphant embodiment of the spirit of planning, an ordered universe in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence. So actually, so many readers, I think, get this wrong.

[Dominic]

I agree.

[Co-host Dominic]

They think, oh, Mustafa Mond is the villain. This world is terrible. Huxley's very ambiguous about this world. Mustafa Mond is the most, I think, the one character in the book that you would actually want to have like a drink with or something.

[Dominic]

I actually agree.

[Co-host Dominic]

He's quite funny, he's quite wry and self aware. The reason he got to be World Controller was that he was free thinking and skeptical and questioned this world. And so the bosses said, oh, you know, you've basically got a choice. You can go and live on an island with other dissidents or do you want to run it? And he was like, well, I'll run it.

[Dominic]

For instance, he's read the whole of Shakespeare. So when John quotes Shakespeare at him, he says, oh, yeah, of course, but I mean, I'm one of the very few people that is allowed to read it because having ideas got me here, ironically.

[Co-host Dominic]

So he's very cynical, you could say he's almost like those sort of people running the Soviet Union who actually were reading all the Western books that they banned in the 1970s.

[Dominic]

Yeah, yeah. He's cynical of human nature because he knows how to manipulate it.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly. So in other words, you know the comparison we made so many times in 1984 when Winston and O' Brien have their big chat at the end of 1984 and O' Brien is like, we're going to be the boot stamping on the human face forever. Here's some rats. All of that, it's really chilling and I think the Mustapha Monde, John Conversation. Also for me, it reminds me of a scene. There's a scene in the Brothers Karamazov where the Grand Inquisitor is meeting Jesus and Jesus has come back from, you know, Jesus come back to earth. And the Grand Inquisitor says to him, well, actually, you know, yes, I can. You know, he's very cynical and he's like, well, we're going to kill you. Because basically people are better off being not free and not having the right to choose. They're better off under the despotism of the Church. So, you know, we're going to basically crucify you again or whatever. And in both 1984 and the Brothers Karamazov, the confrontation is very kind of high energy, high stakes, dark, kind of chilling. Haunts you, all of this. But in Brave New World, it's all very throwaway and it's all very sort of jokey and ambiguous. And I think. I mean, I agree with the critic David Bradshaw, who says the reason for this is that Huxley cannot never decide does he like his world or does he not like it? Because actually, all through this time, Huxley is sort of saying state planning's a really good idea. He quite likes the idea of telling people what to do. He likes the idea of everything being controlled and stable and settled, and he fears chaos. So actually, I think his sympathies here are as much with Mr. Vermond as they are with John the Savage.

[Dominic]

I mean, you even. You just need to look at a comparison between Linda, who's been living in a, I suppose, kind of primal utopia, or Lenina, who's been living in this ordered, you know, perfect dystopia. And, you know, which one you find more attractive, you know, which one you'd rather be living with. But also there's all the stuff about science. So people often see Brave New World as a warning against the horrors of eugenics. You know, it's a nightmarish. It's a nightmarish vision of society created artificially in a lab. But Huxley was very interested in eugenics. I mean, I think we find that shocking today. And he did turn against it later in his life, but in the 1920s and 30s, loads of intellectuals were into it. So before Brave New World was published, he gave a talk on BBC radio and said. Said we might need to use eugenics to stop the rapid deterioration of the whole Western European stock. I think also, I suppose we hadn't had the threat of the Nazis yet and what they came to represent for Eugenics. But before then, it was pretty standard and he was on that way, and he. And he was with that.

[Co-host Dominic]

And that's why we get to that crucial confrontation between Mond and John, that the absolute core of the book.

[Dominic]

Book.

[Co-host Dominic]

And they're arguing about what they want. What was the. What's the. What's the root of a good society? And. And Mond says, look, you know, people are happy, and if they're not happy, we give them the soma and they go. Which he calls Christianity without tears. And John says, but I don't want that. I. I want God. I want poetry. I want danger.

[Gwen Washington]

I want.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, I want freedom. I want sin. And then Mond has this. I mean, Huxley gives him a brilliant comeback. Mond says, fair enough. That's what you want. You want the right to grow ugly and old and impotent. The right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy. The right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow. The right to catch typhoid. The right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.

[Dominic]

But I think that on the one hand, when you first have John say it, I want it all. I want it of every kind. In a way, I think there's something admirable about that. You know, taking the highs and lows of life makes it so much richer. The shortness of it, the brevity, whatever it may be. But then, as Jon progresses, towards the end of the novel, he becomes so monstrous himself that you don't know who to back anymore, because he flagellates himself the whole time. He doesn't want sin. He's terrified of sin. He starves himself. He sees Leonina and he's attracted to her, so he attacks her.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, he's basically gone mad, hasn't he?

[Dominic]

Yeah. You never really know which side you ought to be on. Cause you don't really know which side Huxley's on.

[Co-host Dominic]

Do you know what? Basically, the controller's argument, Mon's argument is directly the opposite of the thing we were talking about in our Circe episode. So in Circe, Madeline Miller's book, the final choice that Circe makes is she chooses mortality over immortality because she says the suffering, the brevity, the pain is what gives life its richness and makes it worth living. And when you and I were talking about that, we were like, yeah, she's right. Brilliant. Yeah, that is. But now when I think, would I rather be John, like, whipping myself and living in Filth, or would I rather be going to the orgies and off my face on Soma? I think actually that's not such a bad life.

[Dominic]

But I think the point is that you're meant to be finding some kind of balance between the two. Extremity of both sides are wrong.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, fair enough. Fair. So anyway, we should talk about whether. Which sides we're on at the end.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Are we on the side of orgies or on the side of self flagellation?

[Co-host Dominic]

Surely you can do both. No, I mean, the combination of those two things is the dream. Anyway, at the time, people, lots of highbrow critics loved the book. They loved all the stuff mocking jazz and leisure and Hollywood and stuff. There was one funny review in the New Republic in America. It said, basically, the world's. The world's falling apart. Japan has attacked China. There's fascism. Nazism is about to emerge in. In Germany. The world's in the Great Depression. Aldous Hux has written a book saying, the big problem is that everyone's too happy. So. So in a second, we'll talk about Huxley's very poor behavior with George Orwell. I think Orwell undoubtedly read Huxley's book. Orwell was much more influenced actually by a book. Sam Rock Jr. Is one of his favorite books we. By Yevgeny Zamyatin. And Orwell said. And other people have said, oh, Huxley must have ripped off Zamyatun as well. But actually, Huxley claimed he'd never read it.

[Dominic]

He claimed he'd never read it. It's like the Suzanne Collins scandal all over again. He claimed he'd never read it, but a lot of people said that that was a lie and that he had had. But then Huxley did slightly disgrace himself because When Orwell published 1984, Huxley wrote him a really condescending, patronizing letter saying, essentially, well done. You did well. But mine is better. Because he said, within the next generation, I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco hypnosis are more efficient as instruments of government in clubs and prisons. And that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. It is poor, I have to say, but I also kind of agree with what he's saying. I think his point was always that if you have a regime like that that Orwell describes, 1984, it's going to snap at some point. You can't continue. It's got to be held so taut all the time that eventually, and I suppose he admits that in his vision of the proles, whereas because Huxley's is governed by happiness, there is a fluidity and a languor to that that means it can continue forever unquestioned.

[Co-host Dominic]

Exactly that. It's more insidious. Lots of people have said, oh, Huxley's vision. Ultimately, it's a sort of classic highbrow critic thing to say. Well, Orwell's is all very obvious, isn't it? It's very much of the Cold War, whereas Huxley's is more prophetic. So there was a critic here, James Marriott, who wrote, a podcast critic of the film. I do.

[Dominic]

I'm a big fan of James Marriott.

[Co-host Dominic]

So he loves this bloke called Neil Postman who wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to death in 1985. And this bloke postman said TV, technology, all of that. We are in Huxley's world that basically Orwell said that we'd be beaten and books would be banned and all of this, Huxley was much more accurate. Huxley imagined a world where you wouldn't have to man books because no one would want to.

[Dominic]

No one would read them.

[Co-host Dominic]

Basically a world in which instead of being oppressed and held down, we'd be seduced by the feelies and by rumble pumpy or whatever it's called, what's it called? Bumble Puppy. That basically everything we'd have too much leisure, too much fun and that that would enslave us. Anyway, which of the visions of the future do you find more accurate and more chilling? 1984, Orwell or Huxley's Brave New World?

[Dominic]

I'm gonna go with Brave New World. And I fear the point I'm about to make is terribly banal. But I think all the eugenic. Not the eugenic stuff, none of that. Not the science stuff. I think soma, though. I'm going on the basis of the ease of life these days and the fact that everything now, thanks to phones and social media, is the press of a button away. Everything is so easy, you know, we don't even have to read. We are conditioned by the ads that are constantly being sent to us in the form of cookies or whatever it may be. You know, it's so easy to slip into a thoughtless state debate when we are scrolling endlessly, myself included. I'M totally susceptible to all this stuff. And I suppose it would sort of be. Why would you read a book when there are so many easier things to do with your time, that curiosity isn't necessarily encouraged when life in the west anyway is as easy as it is, you know, and also when things move around so quickly, ideas have to be really significant. The news has to be really significant to catch our attention for more than, I don't know, five days.

[Co-host Dominic]

So you're thinking we're living in Huxley's world. Something more like Huxley's world.

[Dominic]

Something more like. I mean, Huxley said once that someone said, oh, how do you think your vision of the world looks when you wrote Brave New World versus Now? And he said, I think it's come along much more quickly. I don't think it's as extreme as that, but I kind of do think we are subjected to our own inventions now. Whereas I think that 1984 is much more a vision of a comparison kind of post war Soviet reality.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah. Which it clearly is.

[Dominic]

What about you?

[Co-host Dominic]

I think all that's too bleak, though. I mean, in.

[Dominic]

God, I'm surprised you have such a bleak.

[Co-host Dominic]

I have human nature, but not of the world. Like, I think the world is quite nice.

[Dominic]

I think that's a reflection on human nature. I think that if we're offered the easy option, we'll generally take it.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, but lots of people don't. Lots of people listen to books, podcasts and they read books and stuff.

[Dominic]

It's true, lots of people don't. But less people read books and it's to book whatever. Obviously not listen to book podcasts, but less people read books now than they used to because when they used to read loads of books, there was less other stuff to do.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, there wasn't as much other stuff to do, but I mean, that's fine. People can do what they want.

[Dominic]

I think people can do what they want. Absolutely. And you can't. You actually can't be a snob about this. You can't be an intellectual snob about it or criticize the. What the majority of the people are doing. I include myself in this for sure, but I still think it has.

[Co-host Dominic]

I mean, this is one of my issues with the novel. I think there is too much snobbery in the novel. And I think his way of thinking about people playing their obstacle golf and stuff. I think play as much golf as you like, if that's what you want to play. So let's talk about the book itself. I mean, I do think Orwell's vision is a. Is more of its time than Huxley's. Huxleys has more. Although Orwell has all this brilliant stuff about rewriting history and rewriting the classics and people being cancelled, that does. That has lasted very well. And I think. I think if you live in an authoritarian regime, surely Orwell's vision has got more. Speaks to you more.

[Dominic]

I also just think as well that you shouldn't look down on a comfortable, I don't know, well, nourished society. That's always a good thing.

[Co-host Dominic]

Agreed. So let's. Now I've suggested the ranking. I battled heroically to resist the temptation to rank it out of pneumatic blondes at Orgy Porges. So instead, to show my commitment to self restraint, we're ranking it in lovely green Malthusian contraceptive belt, which is what they wear.

[Dominic]

I think you missed a trick. I think we should have been ranking it in adorable viscose velveteen shorts.

[Co-host Dominic]

Oh, that's much better. The velveteen shorts is the winner. Clearly. Clearly. So who's going first? You can go first. All right, I'll go first. I'm giving it out of 10, a shocking five. And I'm giving it five for this reason. I don't like novels of ideas, really, by and large.

[Dominic]

I think that's totally fair.

[Co-host Dominic]

A novel that's just a vehicle for ideas. Just write the ideas down an essay, don't disguise it as a novel. I think the ideas in Brave New World are mildly interesting, but no more than that. I enjoyed reading the History of It more than I enjoyed reading the book. I think it appeals to people who don't like the modern world, who don't like mass culture, who don't like technology, people who sort of are a little bit foggyish. Oh, the world's going to hell in a handcart. I don't really agree with any of those things, you know, as you know, Tabby, I. I quite like them. I like video games, I like the modern world. I like all that sort of stuff.

[Dominic]

Yeah. And when people. I actually do agree when people are like, well, you know, look at the world, we're living into it. It's like we've literally never had it so good.

[Co-host Dominic]

Now, as for the novel, as a novel, the characters are so thin they might as well not exist. The story is utterly insipid, to my mind. I mean, there's no story, basically.

[Dominic]

Oh, gosh.

[Co-host Dominic]

There is no tension, there is no drama. I couldn't give a damn about Bernard and Lalinina and the other people. As. As a novel. As a novel, as a story, I think it's rubbish. So I think the 5 out of 10 generous is generous, and that's because of its longevity, its importance, the ideas behind it, the history behind it, which are all very interesting. I think people should read it because it's part of the canon, but actually, as a reading experience, it's just so dull. Anyway, enough, Tabby. What do you think? You're gonna give it? Give it, give it 12 and shame me.

[Dominic]

No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm gonna give it six adorable viscose velveteen shorts out of ten. I just found it an easier, cheerier read than 1984. I do think it's a more convincing vision of the future. I was genuinely intrigued to see what became of John, where he'd end up. I lost interest, to be honest, as the book went on. And I think those two opening chapters are really well done, but it's not a thrilling read. It's not a massive page turner, as you say. I think the story is a bit thin. I think all the characters are a bit thin, and I'm not a massive fan of books of ideas, but I am going to give it an extra point for those opening chapters.

[Co-host Dominic]

So, what have we got coming up? We've got one of your absolute favourites next week.

[Dominic]

No, I wonder if it will still be. That's the question. So, yeah, we've got For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. We've got Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. We've got Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, A Month in the country by J.L. carr, American Psycho by Brett Easton E. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I like to think that that's a nice eclectic lineup.

[Co-host Dominic]

It's a very eclectic lineup. And that is a rebuke to people who say that people are only interested in playing. What is it? Bumble Rumble or whatever.

[Dominic]

Bumble Bonk.

[Co-host Dominic]

Yeah, whatever it's called. So those are the books to read on the way to your next orgy, Porgy.

[Pharmaceutical Advertiser]

All right.

[Co-host Dominic]

All right, Bye, everybody.

[Dominic]

Bye.

[Gwen Washington]

I'm Gwen Washington from Snap Judgment, the storytelling podcast from kqed. Imagine an iconic piece of paradise overrun by one of the most horrific fires in recent memory. Everyone flees. Everyone, one except one person who decides to fight the flames alone. The moment when nature, institutions and technology fail at the exact same time. That's all. Systems down. A new Snap Judgment miniseries from kqed. Tap to Listen now.