I just finished reading Brave New World for school and it was brilliant. I was doing some research about it for the project and came across some pretty wild opinions seemingly created by the posters political bias. Don’t get me wrong, there are of course political elements to the story and they can definitely be discussed but to me the book was much less political than say 1984. To me BNW has themes more related to the human condition rather than a critique of any one real world political machine.
But besides that I saw a thread on r/breadtube (a leftist subreddit) about someone claiming the novel was a piece of right-wing reactionary literature and literally boiled down the whole thing to “promiscuity bad; drugs bad; and atheism bad.” No offense to the OP of the post but this genuinely floored me. I don’t know how someone could read the whole thing and come to that conclusion unless their own political bias is so strong that as soon as mentions of promiscuity were brought up in the context of critiquing the society they turned their brain off, didn’t think of why promiscuity is encouraged, and left the book thinking it was nothing but a critique of hedonism.
For anyone wondering, as it seems to be a somewhat common opinion that the book is strictly critiquing promiscuity, the reason this is so is pretty much stated in the book. Lack of sex leads to desire, unquenched desire leads to passion, and passion leads to instability. Stability is emphasized as being the number one quality of the Utopia and we can logically then see why the state does the things it does. The citizens are kept at a constant level of contentedness feeling neither too good or too bad as to not inspire passion in either direction and the drugs are encouraged to use whenever feelings of negativity might seep in. The concept of god in the book also never makes the case that atheism is bad. Rather, the reason the state represses the notion of god is because belief in a higher power creates devotion, devotion leads to passion, and passion leads to instability.
And so I explain all this so you can understand my point of view and why I’m disappointed that some seem to hold the perspective of the OP in which a political bias stops their critical thinking in its path and ultimately prevents them from enjoying a damn good book. It reminds me of the hate-in scene in 1984 and how the clips of it on YouTube have commenters saying “this is how the left wing is” or “this is how the right wing is” without realizing that they themselves are actually the people in the scene.
And just fyi this isn’t a critique of any specific political ideology. I myself am progressive I just find it odd and a little disappointing that others can’t see beyond themselves or their politics to possibly consider new perspectives.
by Status_West_7673