Discussion Prompt by Seth Loh

Community, Identity, Stability. 

The irony of the “World State’s” motto is that as you read Huxley’s masterpiece it becomes clear that none of those ideals actually exist. Sure, there’s “community” in the sense that “everyone belongs to everyone else,” so nobody is alone—ever. Your “identity” is found in your class which is hypnopaedically instilled in you through sleep hypnosis so you like being a beta, or a semi moron epsilon. Also, you have no reason to be angsty or passionate which would lead to wars and “instability” because instead of “giving a damn”, you could simply “take a gramme.” But aren’t these just artificial versions of the real ideal?

Brave New World thrives on this type of replacement:real pain is replaced with soma, real pleasure with state-approved entertainment, real family with engineered relationships, and real individuality with uniform consumer identity. These surrogates reflect a fatal problem — Honestly, one where there may be too much to write about. So… in sticking with a major theme of the book – a place where everything is artificially created – I thought I’d let ChatGPT take inspiration from my past write-ups (plus some other prompting and editing, like forcing it to add a CS Lewis quote *cheers*) and do this write-up for me….(sorry Tony). Here it goes…

In stepping into Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, readers are greeted not by a bleak dystopia of war and oppression, but by something far more unsettling—a world where suffering has been eliminated, desire satisfied instantly, and discomfort expertly avoided. It is a civilization engineered for stability, where every citizen has a role, every appetite a remedy, and every emotion a pharmaceutical solution. Yet beneath the shine of order and efficiency lies a haunting question: if nothing is ever truly risked, can anything ever truly matter? In Huxley’s world, the price of peace is the soul.

Central to this artificial paradise is soma—a wonder drug that keeps society running smoothly. It dulls anxiety, erases grief, and removes any reason to question. It is escape without cost, comfort without confrontation. But the more the citizens swallow soma to silence their discontent, the clearer it becomes that they’ve forfeited the very things that make them human: their ability to wrestle with pain, to pursue truth, and to endure the struggles that shape real identity. What do we lose when we no longer feel the weight of reality? And what kind of man is left when all his edges have been softened by pleasure?

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” That is the quiet tragedy of Brave New World. It is a society built on wishful thinking—on the belief that if we can eliminate all sorrow, we will find peace. But Huxley’s vision reveals the opposite: the more we pursue shallow comfort, the more truth slips through our fingers, and despair takes its place—sterile, smiling, and unacknowledged.

Through characters like Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, and especially John the Savage, Huxley offers contrasting visions of masculinity. Bernard craves individuality but is undone by insecurity; Helmholtz hungers for meaning, sensing that his talent is wasted in a world without depth. But it is John who becomes the novel’s moral center—an outsider who sees that love, grief, awe, and sacrifice are essential parts of the human experience. He does not want to escape pain; he wants to understand it, grow through it, and be shaped by it. When he declares, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger,” he speaks with the voice of someone who would rather live a full and turbulent life than a shallow and safe one.

This vision challenges our modern understanding of what it means to be a man. In a world that often encourages numbing over feeling, ease over effort, and image over integrity, Brave New World pushes back. It insists that true manhood is not about control or compliance, but about courage—the courage to think deeply, feel fully, and stand alone when necessary. It’s about choosing authenticity over convenience, conviction over comfort.

In the end, Brave New World is not simply a story about the future—it is a warning for the present. It urges us to ask: are we becoming more like the citizens of the World State, trading meaning for entertainment, distraction for discipline? And if so, how do we reclaim the grit, depth, and honesty that define real manhood—not just in the world of fiction, but in our own lives today?