Brave new world by Aldous Huxley

“...I mean this is the rather alarming picture that you're being persuaded below the level of choice and reason.” 
― Aldous Huxley in an interview with Mike Wallace (1958) 

Imagine having your dream job and loving it, having the freedom to copulate with whomever you want without it being improper, and being able to be drugged for hours on end without the hazard of negative consequences.

Sounds absolutely blissful, doesn’t it? But to attain this utopia, you sacrifice art and intellect and trade curiosity for stability.

Not a bad deal.

The Brave New World, however, is a dystopia. Aldous Huxley develops an intriguing ‘New London’ in which everything should be perfect, yet ‘perfection’, like all abstract things, is subjective.

Is 'happiness' even real if it’s not an outcome of trials and tribulations? Does one's existence really matter if one does not have the freedom of choice?

Brave New World, with its conditioned populace and lack of warfare, is contrasted with the Savage life, which embraces art and poetry but is strife with disease and filth. The great thing about the writing is that no point of view is forced onto the reader. Even the conclusion is up to interpretation. What is established, though, is the impact of early conditioning on one's values and desires.

“Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions.”

One of those books that may send you into a state of existential crisis, one that begs the question: whether Huxley was penning a novel or a prophecy?