Brave New World was written in 1932. Though this was almost 80 years ago, Aldous Huxley’s classic book says as much about now as it did then. Huxley’s fears have become all too true.

Huxley imagined a world where all that mattered was consumption. The masses had to be distracted in order not to think, but just do. You just needed to go with the flow in the river of happiness. Interestingly it was a world that combined communism with capitalism, just like the next world power, China.

One of the distractions in Brave New World was the ‘feelies’. These were movies with extremely simple plots. The masses were mesmerized by them. How have things changed today? Transformers 2 was the highest grossing movie of 2009. Simple plots and a bunch of razzle dazzle is the formula for the summer blockbuster season. Don’t think, escape.

The feelies were highly sexualized movies. Today we too are mesmerized by porn. Shaw Cable’s highest profit margins come from porn. Porn is the biggest money maker on the Internet.  Sex sells pretty much everything.

Soma was the drug of choice in Brave New World to keep the masses happy. Whenever doubts popped up, you just popped in a soma. Today we give out pharmaceutical drugs like they are candy and marijuana and other escape drugs can be bought practically anywhere. In reality people are still not happy. In a world happiness survey, despite the highest usage of anti-depressants, the United States ranked only 114 out of 143 nations. Our response is to just take more drugs.

The masses in Brave New World are conditioned how to think and use repetition to drive this home. Today, a much more subtle and perhaps more powerful way of doing this is through advertising. We are bombarded by these constant repetitions everywhere we go. Yet we don’t even realize how conditioned we are through advertising. Everyone thinks they are invincible, yet we keep buying in. Scary.

In Brave New World everything was about increasing consumption. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning noted, “imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption.” Lenina tells Bernard that “old clothes are beastly” and goes on to say that “ending is better than mending.”

Today the economy is the same. Planned obsolescence is the key to keeping consumption increasing. Perfectly functional items are thrown away to be replaced by newer items, which will soon too be thrown away. Items are built not to last. Ending is good for the economy, but devastating to life on earth. Don’t think about why, but if you do, that is what drugs (legal or illegal) are for.

The Controller says in Brave New World, “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age.” How is it any different today?

Today all the rage is happiness and positive thinking. If you are not fitting in, are critical, are unhappy with war, poverty, environmental destruction, don’t go about changing the world, just change how you feel about it. Positive thinking can be disastrous though. As Barbara Ehrenreich says in ‘Bright Sided’, the goal is to “see things as they are,” to avoid financial and planet collapse, personal bankruptcy,  in addition to asking why so many people are getting cancer in the first place. But we troop positively on just hoping things just magically work out.

I would say that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future was as prescient as any writer of the twentieth century. Author Neil Postman sums it up best when he said that, “What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.....Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Unless we learn how to cut through the sea of irrelevance, it indeed will.