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Brave New World Revisited
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Brave New World Revisited
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Brave New World Revisited
Ebook155 pages3 hours

Brave New World Revisited

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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"Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time." — New York Times Book Review

When Aldous Huxley wrote his famous novel Brave New World, he did so with the belief that the dystopian world he created was a true possibility given the direction of the social, political and economic world order. Written more than twenty-five years later, Brave New World Revisited is a re-evaluation of his predictions based on the changes he witnessed over that time.

In this twelve-part work of nonfiction, one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late. 

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJul 1, 2014
ISBN9780062368249
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Brave New World Revisited
Author

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    my favorite book of all time. including, Heaven and Hell BNWR tells it EXACTLY how it is.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I know some people don't care for this book much, but for me I just loved it to death. I will admit while reading this book I found it to be creepy and at times frightening. I will admit for the story that was written the book seems too short. I sort of wished it would have went on a little more and we could have explored more about the society created by this author. I also loved how some of the ideas of the "future" were more likely than others. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent companion to Brave New World. Written in 1958, it has just the right about of distance from the original work, yet close enough for Huxley to basically be the same person as when he wrote the original. There is so much to talk about in this short book I'm not sure where to begin. Brave New World Revisited is Huxley's post-WWII take on his book, first published in 1932. What is amazing and almost eerie is how much of what Huxley writes about we are seeing today. The concept of "Endless War," the growing dependence on medication to improve mood and productivity, the increase in surveillance, the power of modern propaganda, mass media, etc. Huxley takes themes from 1984 and Brave New World and extrapolates on what things will look like in the next millennium. Our millennium. What's amazing is how nearly all of this book is still relevant today. Shockingly relevant. It seems we are just now reaching a point where the world Huxley and to a lesser extent Orwell envisioned is a realistic threat.Of course, there are some things that are silly by today's standards. Huxley's theories on subliminal messaging and sleep teaching have never come to fruition. Also, even where he recognizes the danger of drugs emerging during his time, he writes a glowing review of LSD, the drug that dominated his final years. How a brilliant man like Huxley could fail to realize he was prey to his own soma is perplexing. Lastly, Huxley's words on overpopulation are much more relevant now than during his own time, but still have not reached the level of danger he predicted.There are a few moments of annoyance, where Huxley takes small shots at religion, without ever addressing the issue or justifying his assumptions. But these are very minor. Overall, if you recognize Brave New World as a piece of great literature, or you wish to learn about the origin of many of our modern problems, read this book. I did not do it due justice, trust me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    another book on the evils of the future- was pretty good and if you consider he wrote it in 1933 it is excellent . would recomend it to those interested in this genre and would like to read his other works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While written long ago, much of this sounds amazingly contemporary. "Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals..." Hmmm, yeah, anyone catch the most recent Republican candidate debate?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Huxley writes about the world in 1957, 25 years after his most famous novel, Brave New World. This is more or less an academic work where Huxley considers numerous scholars of the period (in particular, psychologists and behaviourists) and comments on propaganda, marketing, social engineering of the day (noting John Dewey and B.F. Skinner a few times). I took the time to write down all the names and works that appear in the book, as much of Huxley's commentary is lost to earlier memories. Nevertheless, his companion book to his major work of fiction is no less prophetic. I couldn't help but wonder first, how Brave New World could have such predictive power in 1932, and then, that he could do the same again in 1957. I suppose this particular work is somewhat lost because it is not a work of fiction. But it has opened my eyes to how the issues of the present are rooted in the past.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't enjoy this much but I suppose I wasn't meant to. I assume it was Aldous Huxley's attempt to warn us about the consequences of using technology to hide from the truth about what we are and our nature.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Last review of the year!I admit I expected this to be fiction... a story picking up where Brave New World left off. Shows you how much I know. Actually, this is a series of essays, in which Huxley explains why he wrote some of the things he wrote in BNW. In that sense, the book reads like an interview on one of those shows like Charlie Rose or Inside the Actor's Studio. It's a little bit self-indulgent on Huxley's part, but it's also captivating. This new volume was written in 1958 - twenty-seven years after Brave New World was penned, and Huxley makes some interesting comments on ways that the world has grown to look more like the world of the OneState.Naturally, Hitler and Stalin are mentioned; both dictators employed propaganda techniques described in BNW. Those comparisons were more or less expected. What I found much more absorbing was Huxley's detailed catalogue of all the new pharmaceuticals developed between 1932 and 1958, which in various ways suggest an effort (conscious or not) on the part of pharmaceutical companies to come up with a drug exactly like "Soma". The most interesting part of this book, in fact, is Huxley's refining of how he thinks a dictatorship would medicate its population. It's a little more sophisticated than what he described in Brave New World. Essentially, Huxley makes a case for tranquilizing (or hallucinogenizing) the population during peace, and amphetiminizing it during war.From the standpoint of 1958, it looked like Huxley's prophecy had been fulfilled... a proliferation of prescription tranquilizers was on the market (as the Rolling Stones sang in 1965: "Mother's Little Helper"), and the country was in a decades-long Cold War, but no hot war. From the standpoint of 2012, things are a little muddier. The number of psychotropic meds available is stunning, and many have a tranquilizing effect, but many of the SSRI meds have a simultaneously uplifting effect. Incidentally, it's also difficult to know whether most citizens would say we're in a state of war or not, given George Bush's advice to go shopping and forget about our foreign military adventures. The world has become very complex.No matter; this book is not really about Huxley saying "Aha! Prophecy fulfilled!" or not. It's about why he wrote what he wrote, and pretty much why he still in 1958 contends he would have written the same thing. This gets to answering questions I posed in my own review of Brave New World, namely: Did Huxley pen BNW to warn the population of creeping totalitarianism, or to rub our noses in it? With this second book, the answer is straightforwardly clear: to warn us. For as much as our society's creep towards the Brave New World is engineered (by people he calls the "Power Elite"), Huxley very articulately denounces it. However he also attributes the march to tyrrany partly to unengineered circumstances, such as the world's increasing population, the scarcity of various strategic resources, the advance of technology, the advent of social sciences, and the unintended consequences of a free market economy. I won't say I agree with every last point, but getting inside of his head for a few hours made for good reading, and further enhanced my appreciation for Brave New World.Most depressing of all, Huxley identifies in our own society a love for gullability and suggestability, which are so easily seized on by those who would control us. Too often, we prize group cohesion over truth; easily-told lies over difficult-to-explain truths, if the latter seem to promote some good; and unthinking slogans which rouse the spirit -so long as the cause is worthy. To illustrate his point, he tells the sad story of the Institute for Propaganga Analysis (IPA). The institute was founded in 1937 in New England, by philanthropist Edward Filene (of "Filene's" department store fame), who was rightly distressed at seeing how effectively Hitler's propaganda was swaying opinions in Europe. The intention of the IPA was to strip the fallacies from Hitler's message, and expose his manipulative trickeries for what they were. At first, the Institute was lauded and supported, but soon the State Department realized they wanted to rouse Americans to war with many of the same techniques. Moreover, certain members of organized religion felt the work of the IAP undermined the spirit and teachings of their various churches. Educators started to voice concern that propaganda analysis would make students too cynical and unruly. Military leaders feared too much critical thinking would make troops unleadable. In short- too many elements within our own "free society" identify with the impulse to control through manipulation- and more importantly, are willing to sacrifice nuanced, critical thinking in exchange for managability of the public to their causes. The IPA was closed six years after it was founded, and its true history is one of the most troublesome anecdotes I've ever heard from a functioning democracy. At the end of this book, the editors saw fit to include a letter written by Aldous Huxley to George Orwell in 1949, after Huxley first read 1984. In my mind, at least, this is a great moment in literary history: a personal communication between the authors of the two great dystopian novels of the twentieth century. Huxley applauds 1984 for its literary merits, and agrees the mechanisms of oppression described therein certainly exist. Huxley sees 1984-style tyrrany as a possiblility, but disagrees with Orwell that it would be a static endpoint in history.He argues that in 1984, political stability is achieved at too high a price (e.g. maintaining a large secret police apparatus to oversee the entire population) which would not be sustainable long-term. The Brave New World is a much more efficient tyrrany; by training a public to love their subservience, the oligarchs of the OneState did not require nearly as large a police force. Where 1984 may be a necessary intermediate for would-be oligarchs, Huxley believes Brave New World better approximates the Power Elite's ultimate model society.Amazing.I'll leave you with a nice passage from page 120:That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am not impressed by the book, but as the author's intent was a revision of an earlier triumph, I'm not surprised. Some of the criticism leveled at Huxley's first pass at prediction were legitimate, but only in hindsight. the book is primarily valuable as point from which to compare the extent to which the critics' strictures were borne out by further experience. it is readable, but unlikely to be read nowadays by anyone uninterested in the original novel as an artifact.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Huxley's addition to Brave New World is a diatribe on overpopulation and states the solution is selective breeding and aborting based on genetic materials. Surprising since this was written 15 years or so after WWII and Hitler's great experiment. Huxley attempted to support his argument by stating this is the only way to save the planet. Unfortunately, his rhetoric could only be seen as positive by those who are naive and uneducated, the very people he suggested should not be alive.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Dated -- obviously--, boring and written in an uninteresting way.