Do you believe equality and equal treatment under a law to be undesirable?

[sapphi_snake]

Kasz216 said:

Yeah, it's called being a fictional book.

The problem with Soma and pleasure by distraction is two fold.

1) Drugs don't effect people the same way.

2)  Distraction by amusement doesn't work, because everytime your working your crappy unimportant job, your not being amused.

Outside which, living in the Brave New World society would just be horrifying.  I mean, Huxley's whole point was that such a society was on it's way down the pipes and should be avoided at all costs.

If he saw the world today he'd probably think we were well on our way to such a society.  For example, I currently work in one of the areas in the country with the largest unemployment rate in the country in Las Vegas.  In the area by where I work I think it's something like 14%?   Though I'd say over half of my customers are unemployed, it's easy to tell because unemployment debit cards look different from regular ones.

They all come in, take money off their unemployment cards and throw them in the slot machines hoping to get rich.  They're upset with their lives but also generally apathetic because they get enough money to eat and to fuel their hopes of hitting the "Big One". 

However would see the Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements are the exact reasons why it won't work out in the end.  People want more then just distraction.

Heck, even look at the communist Utopia of Star Trek, they have jealousy.

 

That's not to say such a society couldn't work.  It just couldn't work with humans.  Even in the most "community" based societies there was more then enough indivualism out there to make such a system useless.  Even in an area where confusinism ruled there would be a large amount of jealousy and discontent over who could help the state best.

Oh, and additionally.... Brave New World is about fascism, not communism.

Outside Soma you could argue hitler's gameplay was page for page out of that book.  Though instead of Henry Ford he wanted to replace Germany itself as a sort of god like figure that replaced all relgions.

If I remember correctly, Huxley himself states the main difference between Nazi Germany and a Brave New World was that technology was more advanced in his book.

 

Food for anyone who actually thinks that would be an ideal society.  Of course, some people think "The World Stood Still" was a utopian tale as well...

When it was about a Giant Robot who murdered anyone who did anything so mildly violent as slapping someone.

To be fair the movie did release in 1951 but i mean... still!

I'm well aware that it's a fiction book, I wasn't beign serious with it.

BTW, I don't know if you've read it (I remember you saying that you don't like reading fiction), but soma wasn't used to make people enojoy their role in society unjealously. Eugenics (which would've been replaced with genetic engineering had Huxley written the book at a later time), segregation and indoctrination were. Eugenics was used to make sure the people from a certain cast were all similar physically and intellectually (cloning was actually used for the non-Alpha and Betas, so they'd be the same), the indoctrination started since birth, and was used to convince people that their cast was the best, and all other casts were bad, and the segregation was used to make sure people of different casts didn't interact with eachother (they were actually made to develop a repulsion for anyone not of their cast).

The only 'jealous' person in the whole book was Bernard, and that was because of an accident while he was concieved, that made him be inferior physically to the other Alphas. Add the fact that there were no diseases, famine, poverty etc., and even the lowest of the low didn't have to face the hardship that poor people face nowadays. The only issue in that society was trying to get people to accept their role, which was only an issue for the Alphas who were intelligent, as everyone else was too dumb to be able to contemplate such matters (not to mention that, as I said before, there were no real hardships).