Brave New World Summary | Chapterly
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Complete Summary "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." Overview Brave New World (1932) imagines a future that is terrifying not because it is cruel but because it is comfortable. In the World State, humans are genetically engineered, sorted into castes, conditioned from birth to love their servitude, and kept compliant with a perfect drug called soma. There is no war, no poverty, no loneliness. There is also no art, no deep feeling, no family, and no freedom. Where Orwell's 1984 warned of control through pain, Huxley warned of control through pleasure. Citizens of the World State are not oppressed -- they are pacified. They do not rebel because they have been engineered to want exactly what the state wants them to want. The novel asks a disturbing question: if everyone is happy, is there anything wrong? Huxley drew on the real trends of his time -- Fordist mass production, behavioral psychology, and consumer capitalism -- and extrapolated them to their logical extreme. The result is a satire that grows more relevant with each passing decade....