index

Are we ready for the Brave New World?

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), humanity finally “solves” a lot of problems. War is gone. Disease is gone. Even old age is basically handled. It sounds amazing, until you notice the price tag: a strict caste system, pleasure as public policy, and a drug called soma that wipes away discomfort the moment it shows up. In the World State, people trade freedom, art, and religion for a calm, manufactured happiness.

For decades, we treated Huxley’s book like a warning label, something to avoid at all costs. But as we close out 2025, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re not running away from his vision. We’re drifting toward it, and sometimes we’re even choosing it.

People Are Controlled by Pleasure

The scariest part of Huxley’s world isn’t the slogans or the rules. It’s how little force is needed. Control works because it feels good. The World State doesn’t rely on punishment as its main tool; it removes the conditions that create dissent in the first place. When discomfort shows up, it gets numbed. When longing shows up, it gets redirected into consumption. When emptiness shows up, it gets filled quickly and on demand.

That’s why soma is such a powerful idea. It isn’t just a drug; it’s a governing strategy. Keep people busy, entertained, and emotionally cushioned.
When pleasure is always available, boredom feels unbearable, silence feels wrong, and attention becomes the real currency.

  • This is the core contrast with Orwell:

    • In Orwell’s 1984, people don’t protest because they’re afraid.
    • In Huxley’s Brave New World, people don’t protest because they’re comfortable, distracted, and too “fine” to care.

  • In Huxley’s model, control doesn’t feel like oppression. It feels like comfort.

  • The system stays stable by reducing:

    • pain (no sharp edges)
    • longing (no deep wanting)
    • friction (no sustained conflict)

  • When everything is soothing and instantly available, people can start to lose the habit of:

    • sitting with discomfort
    • thinking slowly
    • wanting something that isn’t immediately satisfied

The Digital Soma

In the novel, soma is the ultimate escape, a “holiday from reality” whenever life gets too sharp. Today, we don’t need a pill for that feeling. We carry it in our pockets.

Our feeds are incredibly good at smoothing out reality. They hand us content that confirms our biases, keeps us amused in short loops, and quietly filters out anything that feels challenging. Autoplay, infinite scroll, notifications, “For You” pages. It’s a machine built to keep you engaged, often at the cost of deep attention and real connection. When the world feels heavy, we scroll.

  • What the feed rewards is rarely truth. It’s usually:
    • comfort
    • outrage
    • novelty
    • dopamine

Signs of Brave New World Today

One of the clearest signals is how sexualized online spaces have become, and how normal it now feels. There’s a growing “gooning” culture on the internet, a self-aware, pleasure-first identity built around constant stimulation. Even outside explicitly adult spaces, the tone leaks everywhere. Under a serious mainstream media post (war, politics, tragedy), you can reliably find lewd jokes and sexual comments that rack up likes with little pushback, as if everything has to be convertible into a quick hit of gratification.

It isn’t only explicit content. It’s the subtle stuff too: thumbnails engineered to tease, “ironic” thirst traps, edits that stay technically within the rules but are clearly designed to trigger attention. This matters because it changes what feels normal. If every context becomes a stage for arousal, then seriousness starts to look uncool, restraint starts to look prudish, and the public square becomes less capable of staying with hard topics for more than a few seconds. Pleasure stops being something we seek out and becomes the default lens.

  • The pattern looks like this:
    • a serious post gets flooded with sexual jokes
    • those jokes get rewarded with likes
    • the reward teaches people what “works”
    • the tone spreads and starts to feel normal
  • Over time, the cost is subtle but real:
    • less seriousness
    • less restraint
    • less attention for nuance

Engineering Out the Struggle

Maybe the most seductive part of Brave New World is its stability. Who wouldn’t want a life with less suffering?

  • In 1932: The World State used genetic engineering (the Hatcheries) to pre-determine social roles and capabilities.
  • In 2025: We are debating the ethics of gene editing and utilizing AI to optimize our careers, our diets, and even our romantic partners.

We’re obsessed with “optimization.” We want to hack our sleep, hack our productivity, hack our happiness.
But in doing so, we risk sanitizing the human experience. As John (“the Savage”) argues near the end, the right to be unhappy is also the right to be free.
Without struggle, triumph means less. Without grief, love loses depth.

Conclusion

To be “ready” for this Brave New World doesn’t mean rejecting technology or progress. It means building the discipline to stay awake.
It means sometimes choosing the difficult path over the easy one, the complex book over the viral clip, and the messy conversation over the comfortable echo chamber.

Huxley’s world wasn’t a tyranny of pain (like Orwell’s 1984). It was a tyranny of pleasure. As we integrate AI deeper into our lives and hand more decisions to convenience, we have to ask: Are we choosing this future, or are we being lulled into it?

We must ensure that in our quest to eliminate suffering, we don’t accidentally eliminate what makes us human.