Thursday, February 16, 2006

Am I Evil?

On recommendation a while back I read Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World' the opposite of Marxist socialism it was capatalism pushed to its extreme where the concepts of Henry Ford prevailed. People were produced en masse and conditioned to perform specific duties in society. World controllers maintained the social order by censoring new ideas and exiling malcontents and divergent thinkers. The population avoids antisocial behaviour like the plague. Monogomous relationships have been abandoned and pnuematic girls go out with handsome men and are subdued by soma the literal opiate of the masses.
There's some guy who comes from a spiritual and trying native american reserve and he creates upset in the mechanical society etc.
At the end I put the book down and said 'so?' to me it doesn't seem that bad. Conditioning everyone to find meaning in there lives. I mean so long as I could be a world controller you know and explore new ideas. But if I'd been conditioned in my upbringing to enjoy cleaning phone booths hey I could dig that too.
Does that make me evil? I dunno. I'm pretty happy now but I wasn't particularly shaken or even frustrated by the ideas in Brave New World. We bread livestock for eating what makes us so special? I wouldn't eat a human being but surely we could bread singaporeans to be accountants or something. I mean accountants are always in demand.

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