In the final chapter of his Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes:

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. . . . What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Postman wrote these words in 1985, fifty-three years after the publication of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thirty-six years after the publication of George Orwell’s 1984. Nearly forty years later, Postman’s words seem even truer; in fact, they seem as prescient as those of Huxley. Though the dark vision of 1984 was, in great part, enacted in the totalitarian states of China and the Soviet Union, the kinder, gentler dystopia of Brave New World has been fulfilled, at least in part, in the western democracies.

Postman explains succinctly the difference between the vision of Orwell and Huxley as it has manifested itself in the west in his Foreword:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. 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 feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Although Brave New World is one of the best and most influential dystopian novels, I find it difficult, at times painful, to get through. It simply hits too close to home to count as pleasant reading. Whether or not science will reach a stage where babies can be conceived and mass produced in laboratories, Huxley’s fictional glimpse into a future world where the connection between sex and procreation is severed, where mothers and fathers are replaced by a nanny state that nurtures, educates, and indoctrinates children, and where the family is superseded by a collective that denounces monogamy, privacy, and individual interest as selfish, oppressive, and anti-social seems all too real—and realizable.

Yet, while so many of these dark prophecies have come to pass in our modern age, there remains a hope for us that is altogether absent from Huxley’s Brave New World. Though the waves of secularism mount ever higher, they crash upon the bulwark that is historical, doctrinal Christianity and retreat again into the sea. In this article, I will praise Huxley for rightly forecasting the storm to come, but criticize him for missing the light shining in the darkness on account of his fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity.

Totalitarianism in a State of Pleasure

The genius, and horror, of Huxley’s dystopia is that, as Postman saw, it would not need to be imposed upon an unwilling citizenry. To the contrary, most citizens would stumble over themselves to live in a state where everything is managed for their pleasure and amusement. Don’t be fooled by the strict caste system of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons that defines Huxley’s utopian London. Though it is true that the Deltas and Epsilons toil at menial labor while the Alphas and Betas live luxurious lives, the distinction should not be confused with that of Marx’s oppressed proletarians and oppressive capitalists.

In Brave New World, each class is physically shaped, mentally equipped, and emotionally conditioned to be fully content in their societal role. From before birth, their bodies are sculpted genetically, their brains are enhanced, or weakened, chemically, and their personalities are molded subliminally to exactly suit the jobs they will perform and the lives they will lead from cradle to grave. By means of what Huxley dubs hypnopædia (“sleep-teaching”), all castes are continually brainwashed by slogans that define them and guide them in how to interact with themselves, their world, and the other castes.

None of the castes revolt, not only because they are socially engineered to enjoy their job, but because the state occupies them with a continual round of pleasures during the hours when they are not working or sleeping. Those pleasures are more or less expensive and elaborate depending on the caste, but all pleasures are ultimately linked to two key factors: all are encouraged and expected to have contraceptive sex, promiscuously, with a continual round of different partners; all are given a constant supply of soma—an opioid drug that brings pure pleasure with no ill side effects. To make things sweeter, scientific developments in body chemistry ensure that all people, whatever their caste, remain young, fit, and sexually active until their death.

What does the state ask in return? Only that its people live as happy, peaceful, uninquisitive consumers. Anything old, whether they be books, ideas, beliefs, institutions, or rituals, are forbidden, but nobody cares because all their wants and desires are met. There was no need for religion to be persecuted and stamped out by the controllers of the state; it needed only to be rendered unnecessary and irrelevant, and it passed away without a struggle. What need is there for a divine Director when the blessings initiated by Henry Ford’s assembly line have transformed life into an efficient, streamlined, prepackaged, perpetual trip to Fantasyland? Indeed, in the novel, people act, justify, and curse in the name of Ford rather than in the name of the Lord, greeting and blessing each other with the sign of the (Model) T rather than that of the Cross.

By 1985, Postman could see how accurately Huxley had predicted a soft totalitarianism of pleasure and triviality where the free peoples of the west fritter away their political rights and personal liberties for a negative peace, a cowardly security, and a shallow happiness. Certainly, by then, it should have been clear to anyone with eyes to see that Huxley had foreseen the inevitability and long-term effects of the sexual revolution and the birth control pill, the rise in consumerism as an American virtue, and the massive growth in information, entertainment, and news media.

Today, the cable television of the 80s has blossomed into the seemingly unlimited social medias of the twenty-first century, which control people’s thoughts in a way that would have astounded even Huxley. In any case, it is clear to me that Huxley foresaw with uncanny accuracy the opioid crisis (caused by the proliferation of legal rather than illegal drugs), planned obsolescence (where things are thrown away rather than mended), the social erosion of the nuclear family (and its demonization as bigoted and regressive), and the near obsession with achieving perennial youth (including plans to upload a person’s consciousness into a computer so he can live forever).

No Doctrine, No Hope

The plot of Brave New World—of which there is precious little—incorporates a clever device that allows readers to gain an outside perspective on Huxley’s carefully managed utopia. In New Mexico, there yet remains a vestige of the old days: a reservation where dwell a group of primitive Indians riddled by disease, strife, and superstition. There, horror of horrors, the savages, as they are called, still marry and bear children and conduct rituals to honor God and their ancestors. To this reservation, curious Alphas and Betas who have the financial means travel to catch a glimpse of the sorrows and indignities from which they have been rescued.

Some twenty years earlier, a female tourist had fallen down a precipice and been left behind. By some fluke, her contraceptive regime failed, and she became pregnant with a child that she delivered in the reservation. Normally, she would have returned to London, but, too ashamed that she has become that most dreaded of things, a mother, she remains on the reservation. Here, she teaches her son, John, to read and, by luck, he acquires a copy of the complete plays of Shakespeare from which he learns all he knows about life and death, joy and suffering, God and purpose. Throughout the novel he quotes copious verses from Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet), though the ironic title of the novel comes from The Tempest, a late romance that, unlike Brave New World, has a happy ending.

I find it significant that the first Shakespearean line John quotes comes from Macbeth, for that play begins with three witches who set the tone for the tragedy by declaring, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” What makes Brave New World such a fascinating, and disturbing, read is that all of morality and meaning are turned topsy-turvy in the novel, something that John encounters when he is brought to London and tries to reconcile his traditional virtues with the selfish, utterly relativistic values he witnesses.

That clash produces most of the drama and tension in the novel; but it also represents its greatest weakness. John’s devotion to God cannot prevail, for the religion Huxley gives him is abstract, syncretistic, and anhistorical. A mad jumble of doctrineless Christianity, mystical totemism, nature worship, and guilt-driven asceticism, the religion of the savages knows nothing of a transcendent Creator who entered his creation to bear, on the cross, the sins of the humans he made, and to defeat, by his resurrection, the power of sin, death, and the devil. The highest spiritual element in John’s religion is the search for Oneness, but then that is not finally different from the inhabitants of London who seek their own Oneness through sacramental orgies.

Aldous Huxley died on November 22, 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis. In 1982, Peter Kreeft published an imaginary Socratic dialogue in purgatory between these three men titled Between Heaven and Hell. When the subject turns to comparative religion, Huxley argues for the same syncretistic universalism that he gives to John: “there are two levels or dimensions in religion—the exoteric and the esoteric, the outer and the inner, the public and the private, the revealed and the hidden. The outer shell of a religion is its creed, code and cult; its words, works and worship. But the kernel, the inner essence, is the experience of oneness.”

Lewis responds—and his response addresses well the ultimate impotence of the religion Huxley holds up against the dystopian future he conjures in Brave New World—by accusing Huxley of

using Oriental categories to interpret Christianity. . . . the esoteric/exoteric distinction is itself an esoteric, not an exoteric doctrine. It applies to esoteric Eastern religions but not to exoteric Western religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are public, open, democratic religions, religions of a Book, open for all to read, not religions of hidden experiences known only to the initiated mystics. They are religions of history and of the deeds and words of God in history. Christianity is ultimately the Word of God in history. All public facts, not private mysticism.

Relationship between Brave New World / 1984 and Armstrongism

For those of us who have lived through it, Armstrongism is an iconic paradoxical mixture of both the Brave New World and 1984. Ministers, especially those of the ilk of Roderick Meredith and the still standing David Pack, preached that they wanted everyone to be happy — without conveying one shred of joy to any of us — while living in a locked down dystopian slavery where the majority were have not proles and the minority were the inner circle. They demanded full resources to press forward to The Kingdom while giving nothing in return but empty promises, platitudes and servitude. The future was always so bright, shining ahead of us, while, in fact, there was absolutely nothing ahead.

Shortly [from this point in time], Americans (and not a few illegals) will be making a choice: Armstrongism — the choice of integration between culture becoming a prison or culture becoming a burlesque. By voting for entropy — printing money while it has less and less ‘energy’ — in order to give the communism of the old Soviet Union where everyone was apathetic and everything was run down, based on the perverted Marxist theories to influence people to think that they can get something for nothing, all the while giving everything to achieve nothing based on empty false prophecies of freedom and prosperity. It’s “government money” — except it isn’t. It’s our money. It is the money of the people. Greedy oppressive government wants to take it all so a few can dominate us all in power because they think they know what’s best for us. Unfortunately, science will never back them, they will never achieve any of their vague promises and the rest of us will be miserable. It will certainly spill over into other countries worldwide.

Just like Armstrongism.

You could tell them that they should make another choice. Remember though, here at The Painful Truth, we’ve been telling Armstrongists for over 25 years. Sure, we’ve helped a few help themselves, but the Armstrongists — though seriously declining into their self made entropy of lies — keep pursuing their non working theories, achieving that integration of dystopian burlesque.