Joshua Young

The Brave New World made simple: 1. The World State’s motto is Community, Identity, Stability. These words are lies. There is no community – only interchangeable units. No identity – it is assigned before birth and conditioned before thought. Stability is the only honest word, because stability is the only actual goal, and everything else was sacrificed to achieve it. 2. Mustapha Mond, the Controller, has read Shakespeare. He has read the Bible. He has read everything that was ever great or true or painful about being human – and he locked it in a safe and runs the system anyway. He is not a true believer. He is the man who knows exactly what he buried and considers it a reasonable trade. He is the fattest pig, with better manners and a longer bookshelf. 3. The conditioning doesn’t break you. It makes you enjoy your cage. This is the upgrade from every previous tyranny – you don’t need guards if the prisoner has been engineered, from conception, to find the cell comfortable. Soma — the drug that makes obedience pleasant — is just the maintenance dose. The real work was done before anyone was born. 4. “Everyone belongs to everyone else” – the most totalitarian sentence ever dressed as liberation. It does not mean you are free to love everyone. It means you are forbidden to love anyone in particular. Depth, loyalty, grief, true love — all the things that make a person irreplaceable to another person — are the first things the system removes, because they are the first things that would make you resist it. 5. The man born outside the system — the Savage — asks for the right to be unhappy. To be cold, dirty, afraid, and alive in the full sense. Mond grants him, graciously, that the right exists – and explains, patiently, why no one wants it anymore. This is presented as a debate. It is not a debate. It is a man explaining to a relic why relics are no longer made. 6. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, the Savage – all three feel that something is missing. None of them can fully name it. This is precise: the system doesn’t suppress the hunger, it removes the vocabulary for it. You cannot demand what you cannot describe. You cannot mourn what you have been engineered not to know you lost. 7. Huxley’s message: Orwell feared they would ban the books. Huxley feared no one would want to read them. The boot on the face is easy to recognize and resist. The silly entertainment — the soma tablet, the orgy-porgy, the centrifugal bumble-puppy — these are harder, because they feel like enough, and by the time they don’t, you no longer have the words for what’s missing. The most complete tyranny is the one that makes abolishing itself unthinkable. Not forbidden. Unthinkable. "You will own nothing and be happy"

I hear this often but it makes no sense. How is having a high IQ in any way a curse?