[boxed]

I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.

It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.

If Brave New World is a dystopia, what does that make the world we live in now? It has to be some kind of super-dystopia, because it's worse in every way you can possibly imagine.

[arethuza]

I'm pretty sure that if the Culture discovered a world like that of Brave New World they'd work to shut that society down pretty quickly as they'd be appalled at the idea of creating underclasses by intentionally exposing embryos to poisons (alcohol?).

The the society of Brave New World would fail as a utopia because of the "What would the Culture think?" test ;-)

[boxed]

I'm not saying it's the best possible utopia.

[keiferski]

I don't think it's that complicated: because not everyone thinks "being happy" is the utmost peak of meaning or purpose. Many people desire challenges, difficulty, a grand narrative that comes with ups and downs.

[boxed]

And those people exist and are handled specifically in Brave New World. It's just that the system fucked up a bit and took a long time to find the protagonist of the book. But consider the world you and I live in where a vast majority of people who want challenges like this can never have them as they are stuck being dirt poor, or in criminality or something. It's gotten a lot better in the last 100 years, but it's no where close to BNW.

[KingMob]

In the Culture, those are the people who join Contact/Special Circumstances, so they get what they want too.

[KSteffensen]

Ursula K. LeGuin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' deals with this

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

[jaimebuelta]

that's not the point of Brave New World? We like to interpret it like a dystopian book (and I still think it is), but the book challenges you into explaining WHY.

It certainly plays the "moral" card, and more back when it was released. It FEELS dystopian because it plays at a different moral than ours. Oh, a world totally devoted to hedonism, with no families, everyone drugged all the time, where eugenics creates a cast system where people are clearly not equal.

Right now some of those things are less shocking than in 1932 (sexual promiscuity, for example), but Huxley makes a great work into presenting a good case on how the society presented WORKS and it is, at least, superficially a paradise. The book, after all, was written as a response to other "utopian" books that were describing "ideal societies".

I think that a lot of people, even today, gets a gut feeling that's a dystopia, and feel more identified with John the Savage, which is totally out of place and hates it. But I think that the genius of the book is that it presents a world that we can interpret as bad while their inhabitants live in bliss.

[boxed]

Yea.. I mean it's a dystopia FOR HIM. But that's not a statement of the society as a whole.

[tivert]

> I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.

> It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.

If you're locked up in prison, but the food is really, really good, aren't you living in a utopia?

[boxed]

It's not just the food. It's the social interactions are good, you get to go to great plays and other entertainment, and you have a work that is exactly matched to your cognitive level so you feel challenged by it but not frustrated.

[pharmakom]

The book tackles this directly.

[goatlover]

Are they really truly happy? I got the impression they were superficially kept content by drugs, sex and social engineering. I recall strongly disliking their society.