I have been interested in reading this book since I first heard about it, I guess that must have been about a decade by now. So it was about time that I finally read it. This book is of course most often compared to Orwell's 1984, with people arguing whether our world most resembles 1984 or Brave New World, often concluding it has elements of both. 
 Although I understand why Brave New World became so famous and I wouldn't stop anyone from reading it, I find Orwell's 1984 a much more compelling book. 1984 is more realistic, while Brave New World is more of a satire. Exaggerated in order to give us some things to think about. I guess it is also a bit funnier and less dark. Some things don't make too much sense. The people are not emphatic at all and are fully incapable of learning from each other (for humorous effect I suppose). And you wonder why a society that is so conditioned for happiness, is still a society of social-climbers and ruthless bullying and gloating. And then there is of course the total disappearance of political conflict, the impossibility of infinitely encouraged consumption in a world of finite resources. But still, the disturbing image of large Bokanovsky groups of Epsilon Minus twins roaming around is already reason enough to read the book. 
 Let's talk about the political philosophy of it all. I guess the reason that I find Orwell's 1984 more compelling is that I'm probably also more politically aligned with Orwell than Huxley. Anyway, I thought that Huxley's foreword from 1946 was quite interesting after reading the book (it is a bit strange actually to have a foreword that spoils the entire plot, it should've been an afterword instead). It clarifies a lot about Huxley's own thoughts and ideas around Brave New World. In there he seems to be quite the conservative elitist and anti-democrat with not much faith in the masses, suggesting that, unless we move towards a vague sort of decentralized self-help society where science serves humanity rather than the other way around, the population will have to be controlled and government managers will have to assign individuals to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy. Ehm, okay. 
 Him blaming 'nationalistic radicals' (from both right and left) for the first and second world war is also rather confused, also that he includes Bolshevism in it. Now of course, Stalinism can be seen as quite nationalistic, but it certainly didn't have all that much more expansionary drifts in it than the 'liberal democracies'. And I find it always a lot more powerful to look at how political-economic structures lead to things like war, rather than pointing at individuals ('nationalistic radicals'), and he could do with reading some Hobswawm or Polanyi. 
 But he does get to the point that after world war two, many people pretty much figured out, especially with the introduction of the atom bomb, that as after the Thirty Years War, we'd have to go back to an age of limited and partial ruinous warfare in order to prevent world destruction. For this he says power will be more centralized and government control will have to increase. Only an unlikely large-scale popular movement towards decentralization can prevent this from happening. He argues that states will be more totalitarian and argues rightly that rule by coercion (mass imprisonment and firing squads) may be too inefficient. "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude". But conditioning and schooling is still rather inefficient. As he goes on "The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts of arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals". This is very true and obvious in our society. Don't talk about the real things; let's constantly distract everyone with all sorts of irrelevance. 
 But silence is not enough.. "The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude". I like that definition of happiness. Huxley then goes on how the totalitarian regimes will need Brave New World type of discoveries, greatly new improved techniques of suggestion and drugs that are less harmful than gin and heroin and at the same time more pleasure-giving. 
 I like how he wrote down these things back in 1946, but it didn't really end up happening. Of course there are lot of parallels to be drawn between BNW and our current world. Prescripted anti-depressant medicine, television and videogames, and the bullshit that is mainstream news. It is all rather reminiscent of BNW, but the big difference is that many of the distractions we live with are not imposed by some sort of Controller in the government. Repression and population control are really sophisticated, but you cannot directly link these with the distractions that prevent us from rising up collectively. And it is probably still Fear (absent in BNW), more than happiness, what allows us to be controlled. 
 Also, Huxley's rather conservative condemnation of sexual promiscuity and how an increase of sexual freedom will help the totalitarian dictator is rather counter-intuitive to me. Funny how in 1984 sexual freedom was considered a threat to the status quo.