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Huxley's Notes
For the 1946 reprint of Brave New World Aldous Huxley added a foreword in which he discussed his novel. Huxley felt that a major defect in the work was that he limited the Savage to only two choices at the end, an insane life in Utopia or the life of a primitive in the Indian village. The choice is between insanity or lunacy, and the Savage finishes by choosing insanity, ending in his despairing suicide. Huxley felt that the choices were too limiting, and that sanity should have been an option via "a society composed of freely co-operating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity." Huxley also commented on the lack of scientific marvels. Several critics had complained that even though the concept of nuclear fusion as a power source was well known, nowhere is it used in the novel. Huxley explains the omission with a powerful quote, "The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals." Aldous Huxley concluded with a discussion on totalitarian governments. His vision of the future is a world in which totalitarian regimes dominate the realm of real world politics. He asserted that the goal of totalitarianism is to make people love their servitude, for which he offered several necessary steps: 1) an improved technique of suggestion starting in childhood, 2) a developed science of human differences so that each individual may be placed into the proper societal role, 3) a new narcotic which is less harmful but more powerful than heroin, 4) a "foolproof system of eugenics," which he implied to take much longer to achieve than the previous three steps. Brave New World should be viewed as this sort of totalitarian state projected six hundred years into the future.
ClassicNote on Brave New World
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