T o t a l i t a r i a n
BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle there are ten world controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. He governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by the state. The individuality of BNW's two billion hatchlings is systematically stifled. A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role in the hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. There are only ten thousand surnames. Value has been stripped away from the person as an individual human being; respect belongs only to society as a whole. Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection. The individual's loyalty is owed to the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of tension and anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma - the World State controls its populace no less than Big Brother.
        Brave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation. As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls both. Naturally, we find this control disquieting. One of our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural (i.e. selfish DNA-driven) biological endowment is that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated by others. Huxley plays on these anxieties to devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.

        It must be noted that this right is not immediately in jeopardy. Huxley, however, evidently feels that the threat of compulsory well-being is real. This is reflected in his choice of a quotation from Nicolas Berdiaeff as BNW's epigraph. "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?" Perhaps not all of the multiple ironies here are intended by BNW's author.

        Huxley deftly coaxes us into siding with John the Savage as he defends the right to suffer illness, pain, and fear against the arguments of the indulgent Controller. The Savage claims the right to be unhappy. We sympathise. Intuitively but obscurely, he shouldn't have to suffer enforced bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind". Yet the argument against chemical enslavement cuts both ways. The point today - and at any other time, surely - is that we should have the right not to be unhappy. And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional, we shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others.

        But what will be the price of all this happiness?

        It's not what we might intuitively expect. Perhaps surprisingly, freedom and individuality can potentially be enhanced by chemically boosting personal well-being. Vulnerable and unhappy people are probably more susceptible to brainwashing - and the subtler sorts of mind-control - than active citizens who are happy and psychologically robust. Happiness is empowering. In real life, it is notable that mood- and resilience-enhancing drugs, such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tend to reduce submissiveness and subordinate behaviour. Rats and monkeys on SSRIs climb the pecking order, or transcend it altogether. They don't seem to try and dominate their fellows - loosely speaking, they just stop letting themselves be messed around. If pharmacologically and genetically enriched, we may all aspire to act likewise.

        Admittedly, this argument isn't decisive. It's a huge topic. Humans, a philosopher once observed, are not rats. Properly-controlled studies of altered serotonin function in humans are lacking. The intra-cellular consequences of fifteen-plus serotonin receptor sub-types defy facile explanation. But we do know that a dysfunctional serotonin system is correlated with low social-status. Enhancing serotonin function - other things being equal - is likely to leave an individual less likely to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated. Brave New World is exquisite satire, but the utopia it imagines is sociologically and biologically implausible. Its happy conformists are shallow cartoons.

        Of course, any analysis of the state's role in future millennia is hugely speculative. Both minimalist "night-watchman" states and extreme totalitarian scenarios are conceivable. In some respects, any future world government may indeed be far more intrusive than the typical nation-state today. If the ageing process and the inevitability of death is superseded, for instance, then decisions about reproduction - on earth at least - simply cannot be left to the discretion of individual couples alone. This is because we'd soon be left with standing room only. The imminence of widespread human cloning, too, makes increased regulation and accountability inevitable - quite disturbingly so. But challenges like population-control shouldn't overshadow the fact that members of a happy, confident, psychologically robust citizenry are far less likely to be the malleable pawns of a ruling elite than contented fatalists. A chemically-enslaved underclass of happy helots remains unlikely.

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