Just finished pic related. I am 100% convinced the future depicted here is better than what we're heading towards.
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Just finished pic related. I am 100% convinced the future depicted here is better than what we're heading towards.
Kinda funny that the management take-away was that you don‘t need to make people THAT content
Yeah when I first read this I realized we didn't have 90 percent of the luxuries they had but we did manage to recreate the aspect of their society that mad the guy an hero so at least we got that part down
They had to have a massive war to get there though.
Mustapha Mond didn't hate the people that came before and he didn't hate his own people. That's the main difference with the track we're on. Our world controllers hate us and they hate our history. There will be no limit to the atrocities that they inflict upon us. Just look at what happened in the 20th century after he wrote the book.
>it's another moron that thinks life should only be pleasures after pleasures
Life is suffering, anon. You must suffer to enjoy life. You must resist temptation and struggle with your sinful nature. That's the point of life.
people have been saying this for centuries--what a load of banal shit. frick you, i will enjoy my life. that's what it is about.
Your bitterness only proves him right.
Except this isn't BNW. In fact, the average epsilon would live a more social and fulfilled life than an imageboard poster.
Huxley understands this. The book says that every month all of the casts have to report to a special center (I forget what it's called) where they have their adrenals massaged so they experience trauma, fear, and anxiety. Now, if you want to argue that a surrogate traumatic experience is less than the real thing, sure maybe.
I don't recall that in the book. Did you read it or are you referencing something from the movies?
here you go...
“What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
(“Twelve and a half million dollars,” Henry Foster had protested when the Savage told him that. “Twelve and a half million—that’s what the new Conditioning Centre cost. Not a cent less.”)
“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. “Quite apart from God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”
“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
It says they have the physical response but doesn't say they experience it.
True, it doesn't say that. I suppose I just assumed they would be conscious and experience part of it. Similar to the feelies where they are allowed to feel negative emotions to reenforce social values. Like in one of the feelies a Black person steals away a woman from being gangraped like a woman should be.
I think you might be right though. I read Soma as their reaction against ever experiencing negative emotion (because they don't reflect on V.P.S. or anything when they experience it in the book). It makes small mistakes like Lenina accidentally killing a few hundred (or thousand?) seem more inevitable.
The different casts seemed to use soma differently, but like you say, Huxley leave out a lot of information. It seems like the lower casts use it to get through the boredom of their existence and the idle time they have after work. Whereas, the higher cast characters in the book are taking it to relieve the suffering they experience from the complex emotions they are feeling as a result of their own rationalizing about the inherent contradictions in their society. Lenina and her unconscious desire for monogamy is an example of this at the beginning of the book.
>Lenina and her unconscious desire for monogamy
Where did you pick that up from?
It's in chapter 3 maybe? Fanny and Lenina are talking in the locker room and Lenina admits that she hasn't been pnumatic with anyone but Henry Foster for an extended period of time. Fanny chides and convinces Lenina to go on a date with someone else. But Lenina still has reservations so she takes soma to overcome her desire.
You have great recall, anon. Did you read the book recently?
Not him but you can't? It's not Les miserables.
Different readers pick up on different things.
>You must resist temptation and struggle with your sinful nature. That's the point of life.
uh huh... keep telling yourself that, christisraelite
>You must suffer to enjoy life.
Cope
I don't even know how to respond to this.
>S-Science will fix it!
We've been around for 200,000 years according to Google. We still haven't fixed something simple as poverty and never will.
Poverty has been solved already multiple times throughout history
Your stance reminds me of Pentti
That much was obvious to me when I first read it about 30 years ago. Even then I thought of it as a period comedy that ends, so to speak, happily, its Beta hero retiring to some suitably remote and tranquil and luxuriously equipped academic island. I read 1984 first in my junior year of High School along with the rest of the class, at 17, around 1980, and even then felt that he was indulging in a kind of weirdly escapist fantasy of another sort, that is of a world he couldn't or wouldn't bother to endure if if it got that much worse than the one he was accustomed to. Of course it's all a matter of time-scales and one's sense of entropy on the grand scale, and while I agree with you in general, I also find H. G. Well's figure of 800K years or so, in the Time Machine, till civilization comes to its last twilight, preposterous as it is touching.
>its Beta hero retiring to some suitably remote and tranquil and luxuriously equipped academic island.
I guess you didn't read the last chapter.
Not the guy you're replying to but i think he meant Bernard and not Jhon (of course he made a mistake there in that Bernard was a defective alpha, not a beta). Bernard and his chad friend did retire to the island, Jhon is the one who ended up anhero'ing himself
>Beta hero retiring to some suitably remote and tranquil and luxuriously equipped academic island
Anon, I....
He's just swaying there bro...
1984 is more like an alternate history future, BNW is technological sci/fi
the point of BNW was never to scare you with some horrible dystopia. there was a place even for the detractors in that civilization. the novel is about alienation. you're suppose to relate to the savage in how he's absolutely lost in a modern world; it's a metaphor for contemporary society. one of the most misunderstood pieces of literature.
Why do you think he kills himself when he gives in to the frenzy of the orgy porgy? If anything he should have killed himself while he was still without sin like jesus on the cross.
he wasn't a theologist he didn't have coherent beliefs like that
Fair enough. However, this is the reason I tend to agree with the IQfy memers who say that the world system in BNW was Huxley's paradise. He paints the Native Americans, the only alternative to the world system, as filthy, libidinal wretches who live an inauthentic existence. This is, of course, ridiculous. Call them prairie Black folk all you want, they're not as bad as Huxley paints them. And it's hard to imagine they would have degenerate so far due to outside oppression. The world system OTOH is ruled over by benevolent dictators like Mustapha Mond. His people are well taken care of by scientific progress etc. etc. The two men who have managed to become individuals are cast as as depressives and neurotics by the author. Bernard in particular becomes almost maniacal in his self-interested antisocial behavior. Then there's John who's the Oedipean offspring of a beta minus and a drunk Indian. He's read nothing but Shakespeare and doesn't understand it, and even more embarrassing, he fails to quote it properly numerous time. Huxley portrays John as a false messiah who gives in to his desires ensuring the damnation of us all. John's final act is a message to the reader that there's no nobility in choosing another path. Mustapha Mond and John both know the world system is not damned, but you have to choose to live it because it's the only rational and logical choice. Science proves it.
It's definitely an interesting interpretation but I don't think the point is whether John is quoting Shakespeare properly or understands it "the right way", it's that he has this piece of old world knowledge that allows him to interpret events in a new way instead of just accepting their given meaning. John is supposed to represent ourselves (less so these days) as this halfway point between a civilized and a traditional society and how such a thing can't survive at either of the two extreme ends one of which he thought we were rapidly approaching.
Well I guess that's the problem with progress, there's no compromise. To OPs original question, we end up with some version of BNW no matter what.
I meant to say that Mond and John both know that the world system is damned or at least Mond knows it's imperfect. Mond doesn't care though, he takes the same reddit atheist cope that we've seen for the past 15 years - science isn't perfect, but it's the best we have.
I am reading this rn too, I don’t get why trannies say it would be so good for incels, status and some guys getting more women is still a thing, in the very beginning one of the students complains about having to beg for sex for weeks
Aldous loved their society so much he wrote a follow up which is just 400 pages of him begging you to have sex with his wife.