[BOOK CLUB] Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Session #1 (Chapters 1-3, pgs 1-56)

[QuiteFrankly]

Here is the open thread for Session ONE of BRAVE NEW WORLD

SAME AS BEFORE:

Leave us with thoughts on Lewis' use of language, the mental imagery it paints.

Most provocative scenes, excerpts, dialogue, or general themes.

Are you confused by anything?

Character Analysis (Favorites/Least Favorites, Arcs and Development, etc)

And, as it will be important for the entirety of this book, what modern parallels do you see? Slippery slopes, Prophetic outcomes, etc.

These are just some questions to get your brains churning. Feel free to share whatever comes up for you as you are reading along. And most of all, have fun!

[ARMINIUS]

Anyone else noticing an unusually large amount of difficult words, I thought I had a decent vocabulary but finding I have to look up the definition of a lot of challenging words.

[Karina]

I thought I was the only one.!!! I agree the words were difficult.

[AuthorSinger]

Huxley has a scientific background too so all the terms…yikes!

[brandiewithabee]

7 pages in and my eyes are already popping out of my skull. Safe to say I am thoroughly disturbed 😳

[Jjule]

My stomach turned to the point I had to stop reading.
Couldn’t take it.

But looking forward to the book club .

[DyslexicAngel]

I, too, find it quite disturbing. Reading this book has me feeling nausea....and then I wonder is it because I find it disturbing or, as in Chapter 2 where the children were conditioned for reject roses and books, have I/we been conditioned to acknowledge what is transpiring before us?

The other day, while reading I became aware of an unsettling feeling that we are living a life we have no control over....that no matter what choice we make, what decision we form, it all leads to the same inevitable outcome (e.g. the Borg - resistance is futile kind of thing).....and so I put the book down because I did not want to have that powerless thought overtaking my day.

I heard the other day, and I apologize I cannot remember the author, that a well known dystopian writer was also a scientist and wrote a paper on the 20-60-20 rule.....20% of the people will conform to a change without question - 60% will are we the understand change is necessary and will conform - and 20% will not conform. So, are we the 20% that will not conform because our eyes are open......I am also reminded of 2 movies. 1. Predestination and 2. the other is/are the trilogy Divergent/Insurgent/Allegiance or Hunger Games for that matter (e.g. Chapter 2 and factions are colour coded)

So far.....I enjoy the writing.....like the challenge of learning some new words and finally, since I'm stubborn, will overcome the nausea and will keep going. I am encouraged that there are others that feel the same way I do as to how unsettling this book has been so far.

Looking forward to the book club tonight.

[WinstonDave]

Suck it up buttercups, this is is Aldus telling of the plans of the League of nations now known and the UN, his Brother being a founding member. As they say evil must make their plans known so we have a choice. Opt in or not it is your choice at your peril.

[AttitudeAtAltitude]

Have been looking forward to beginning Brave New World for months. I asked for it for Christmas in anticipation of the QF book club. My older sister got it for me and included this note: “Thanks for the wishlist. That was very helpful. I hope you enjoy this book. The paperback version was in Chinese, and I almost bought that one because to me that would be funny. But, returns would be a hassle so, English it is.”


I’ve always struggled with literary analysis, but here are a few things that popped out at me while completing the reading:

Keep the embryo below par, the lower the caste, the lower the oxygen. Dumb it down so it’s more easily controlled. Doesn’t that sound awfully familiar. Lower the standards to the point that even those above average give up and degenerate to sub-standard.

All conditioning aims at making people like their unescapable social destiny. Makes me think how our world conditions us to create the feeling of inescapable destiny. These are lies to keep us trapped on their hamster wheel

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. What a horrible perversion of “what God has joined, let men not separate.”

Can’t have lower caste people wasting the communities time over books. And God forbid they read something that might decondition them. Why do you think they’ve gotten rid of real classic literature study in schools and why they’re rewriting children’s books (dr Seuss, Dahl. Etc.)?

“We condition the masses to hate the country…”

Moral education ought never be rational. If people are always confused about what is right, they’ll blindly follow the state to avoid being “wrong.”

“Not so much like drops of water, thought water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.” Great imagery here.

“Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.” === “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

“Everyone belongs to everyone else.” This is what we are currently be subjected to with the pronouns and drag shows for kids bullshit. We are expected to affirm and celebrate their degeneracy, regardless of the harm done to us or our children, because we exist to validate their fragile reality. Our reality (meaning actual, objective reality) must bend to theirs or we are bigots and transphobes!

“An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction…” You mean like this: https://youtu.be/pTyJ77Y7XB0

[njsf]

Totally agree. We can see many of these goals being transparently pursued (and achieved!) at the present time.

The 24/7 news channels are nothing more than hypnopaedic conditioning, creating hate out of nothing.
The division of people into casts is well underway, with treatment by the elites of the people merely as cattle and/or pets.
Erasure/rewriting of history and language
Endless supply of drugs for escapism
Sterilization

[DyslexicAngel]

Well said.....I agree with you....thank you for the link. I'll check it out.

[WinstonDave]

Oh and if you find "every one belongs to everyone else" just you wait. it gets pretty bad and gross, and will show how the trans and drag show plays into their vision of the future. Welcome to the Orgie Porgies I've referred to in chat.

[mlynne72]

This is my first time reading Brave New World and though I have been familiar with some aspects of it (i.e. take the soma and I tried watching the NBC version of it on Peacock which was awful) I have to note a few things:
The wording is confusing at times and I found it hard to figure out what was going on and who was saying it.
The imagery and ideas are so disturbing ... like young children encouraged to engage in erotic behavior....made me think stuff we see today like drag queen story hours , etc. because this book might has well have been written last week. I am incredulous that it was written in 1931? Wow just wow.
Thanks for the book club Frank!

[DyslexicAngel]

This is my first time too, with no knowledge of what to expect.....imagine my shock when I started reading (*grin)

[CrudeITGuy]

Yes, 1931 this dystopian story was written. Huxley was amazing in his foresight.

[Linda Semmel]

The phrasing lupus-coloured led me down a rabbit hole. I looked up lupus, which I’d heard of but never actually realized was an autoimmune disease where people develop a reddish-purplish rash that also has pain associated with it. Huxley talks about the children having lupus a few times in the first 3 chapters. My thought was that the experiments had triggered the lupus in the children, much like the shots have created some autoimmune diseases in people. You can’t mess with biology without consequences.

[njsf]

Indeed I am very familiar, having a family member that suffers from it. This is probably a reference to the specific symptoms of lupus: Purpura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpura

The specifics of the auto-immune disorder is that the immune system is often incapable of recognizing the body's own cells, so it starts attacking them all, most often in the cartilages thus it causes early rheumatoid arthritis, and can lead to cytokine storms.

It is treated with daily doses of the forbidden H medicine of '20 which is way having seen somebody taking it for 10 years, the BS did not took hold with us very early on ;-)

[AuthorSinger]

I’m about to dive in and have never read this book before. Hopefully I will be more consistent than I was with CS Lewis…love Jay Dyer and Frank’s combined intellects and hoping to “have hope” when all is said and done. Thanks for the challenge, Frank and Frankie’s!

[Casey_Cackalackee]

I was also having a hard time with some of the words being used. Then I started to figure that some of the words I didn’t know were now lesser-used words in the English language and some of them were part of the indoctrinated mythos of the world at which we’re looking. Effective cult followings almost always have their own dictionaries of words and phrases. I’m definitely noticing that theme being woven in from the start.

[Scrappy1307]

Everything conveyed is cold and calculated. Statistics rule the day. Society is trained by repetition(not unlike our current education system) which inhibits the brain from independent thinking.
Ford is a fitting figurehead given the “assembly line” business of people making.
The level of Sexual deprivity shows how committed to the cause one is.
The nature of how words are used take on new meaning as Huxley gives us the parallels of present day society. Babylon..I.e…anywhere controlled by the banking elites includes a counter reality in which facts themselves are the enemy and have the ability to corrupt.

Personally I am thrilled to be apart of this book club, seeing as I finally listened to my wife and just did something with the zeal I have for great books, coupled with Quite Frankly(an intrepid part of my day!). So cheers to all! This book is new to me and am excited to dust off some cobwebs to do some mental calisthenics.

[Illuminated.0001]

It truly is so cold and so calculated. It's disturbing. It makes me think of these common core education programs, critical race theory, pushing of transexual agendas on tiny children who should be concerned with their favorite colors and animals. The simple things in life that make us grateful and appreciative of the small blessings we are given in life to hold dear to us in hard times as adults.

Present day we concern children with questioning their basic biology. This book is certainly eye opening to how close we are to a reality like this and how far we are from the simple life of a living nuclear family and the ability to be comfortable with our biological gender. The simpler days running around with the neighborhood kids playing and using our imaginations just being kids.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

[cristoa]

This is my first time reading Brave New World but not surprised how disturbing it is. I'm particularly disturbed by the babies being conditioned to avoid the beautiful things in nature by being shocked. It reminds me of being told to stay off the beach and don't go outside or you'll die during the plandemic. There's much to be disturbed about in this book and I find it very difficult to read but I'll continue on. Looking forward to hearing what others think about it.

[Jjule]

I became literally nauseous. Had to stop reading.
altitude above summarized really well the parts that were so distressing.

I will turn in to the Book Club. Because I love them.
but I can not read.
nightmare material

[Lenac]

Same here. I had to put the book down after reading the first 3 chapters. After listening to Frank & Jay discuss it, I will pick it back up now and try to finish.

[Black0rchid]

What is odd, I was less disturbed the first time I read this (when I was a teen) [though disturbed nonetheless]

This time was much more difficult and I've a much weaker stomach now. As a mother, the children issues bother me far more; or maybe it's the horrible experiences in Law enforcement; Then again, it could be I'm just a big mushball the older I get.

This time, it made me sick to my stomach so I kinda skipped through to void the oogie evil shart.

[WinstonDave]

Ostrich reaction will not fix anything. What this book is telling is all around us. 1984 is bad enough an only half of the problem this is the better part and much ignored and why we are where we are.

[Mairenyc]

This was my first time reading 'Brave New World''. I now know why I avoided it. I thought 1984 was bad. I had so many mixed emotions as I read these first three chapters.

I worked my entire professional life in Maternal-Child health among the 'viviparous' and their families. As I read the descriptions of creating a caste system of mooreless. cloned beings, I felt queasy. I remembered the talk around the nurses' station when we heard about the first IVF baby, Louise Brown. And just eighteen years later, they cloned the sheep Dolly. Reproductive technology rapidly took hold with more couples needing IVF to have children. It was big business. Out of reach for many. I often wondered if it was the chicken or the egg. Destroying the family and our human connections, the very essence of our human experience, has been the wet dream of the elites for a very long time. It is horrifying to
see how so many of their strategies outlined here by A.Huxley are now in play. Social onditioning, MK Ultra stood out already.

~p.16 "All conditioning aims at making people like their unescapable social destiny." (We will own nothing and be happy. 15 monute cities springing up rapidly)

~p.29 "Suggestions from the State" (Take the last 3 yrs as a prime example)

[njsf]

As with so many advances, there uses for good and uses for evil.
If only Ethics was a discipline much more thought and followed

[njsf]

Forgive the lengthy post as I did not have the time to make it shorter... 😀

These 3 chapters are a dizzying display of many themes of our times, all with the hidden goal of world control sold as the greater good
1. Dissolution, through indoctrination, of human bonds like Family, Love
2. Promotion of science as religion, scientists as gods
3. Manipulation of history and language through derision and fear mongering, subliminal programming
4. Intentional stunting of human development towards artificial development of casts, beyond even eugenics
5. Pharmaceutical/medical manipulation of humans to provide the escape dystopia causes in nature
6. Promotion promiscuity and degeneracy, promotion of child sex as entertainment to

Chapter 1

What a start! The jarring parallels with the modern globalist agenda start right on the 1st paragraph. What can possibly be a better slogan for the globalists than "Community, Identity, Stability". Soup letter community of identity politics anyone? What about stability as an antonym for "climate change" ? And what more could clamor dehumanizing as "Hatchery and conditioning centre", conjuring images of human beings as reduced to nothing more than cattle/pets.

I found the imagery of the use of "ghostly" to describe the workers and the environment very appropriate for a soul-less and sterile endeavour.

The visit of new students and the deification of the director in their presence, together with his "HomoDeus" stance as the description of the "replication" process, with its greek letter named caste system.

I found particularly interesting how the Alphas were normality:

One egg, one embryo, one adult -- normality

Also now I know the perfect description for many of the events being forced upon the population: "Bokanovsky's Process". After all what could be more appropriate to describe poisoning of the soil, water, air and the body than:

bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development.

with all the steps where the eggs are subjected to harmful "tests" where many die, or stop development, all to get twins/robots, also

"The lower the cast", said Mr. Foster, " the shorter the oxygen". The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton...

It also did not escape my eye the parallel with universal tracking and contol:

- Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index
- Containing all the relevant information
- And co-ordinated every afternoon
- On the basis of which they make their calculations

The disturbing describion of the rest of the process together of the fluids and the placent reminded me of the recent video artificial womb, including how the sterilization was achieved by radiation, and the allusion to transgenderism (freemartins).

Chapter 2

The dehumanizing continues with the evocation of Pavlov for behavior conditioning, reducing the human being to nothing more than a product of the environment, removing the possibility of a soul.

The current sociological experimentation is also a very clear parallel with the scene where the Deltas grow an "instictive hatred of books and flowers", just as schools these days are conditioning children to hate themselves and the families, only love the figure of authority (the teacher). This is the mental prison being erected before our eyes: destruction of the family unit, critical thinking, personal responsibility, not to mention the discovery of beauty which could lead to discovery of spirituality (which in my opinion is why the hatred of flowers was also instilled in the Deltas, no matter the economic motivation description)

Here one can also see the interplay of language shaping the world and vice versa (the ignorance of the words parent, father, mother, born). Whereas in 1984 language was taylored to prevent certain thoughts, in here we see how after conditioning to reality words even stop to be used and disappear, not by suppression but by lack of usage.

It was also very revealing to me, in the scene describing hypnopaedia, how the teaching for test scores is another component of the non-education of the children, as they can recall by rote answers, but grow not to put 2 and 2 together.
And then one is surprised how people cannot "see the obvious". And yet, the effectiveness of its use for indoctrination by reinforcement of the position in the cast system, after the "Elementary Sex" class. How reminiscent of all the indoctrination caused by all the TVs in the commercial spaces tuned to the news channels (like CNN), subliminally conditioning.

But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason

It is also patent the hubris the mainstream journos must feel in the current environment:

"The mind that judges and desires and decides -- made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are _our_ suggestions! " The Director almost shouted in his triump. "Suggestions from the State".

Chapter 3

In the garden we can see what the normalization of sex for pleasure since infancy will lead to, complete moral reversal, like the case of Polly Trotsky (indeed what an evocative name) who refuses to participate in erotic play and gets in trouble for it and the dismay at the concept of morality associated with sex. We can see how more and more sex is indeed being viewed as entertainment, decoupled from love, emotion, spirituality.
The gallery of names continues with Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne and prominent above all Ford, including allusion to the model T.
The primitive and animalistic imagery brought forth associated with home and motherhood is disturbing but one can see how it is a necessary condition for such dystopia. For if there is a bond between mother and child, the state has a harder time. So such bond must be derided, ridiculed:

And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, ...

What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insan, obscene relationships between the members of the family group!

Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)... brooded over them like a cat over its kittens...

My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure!

And other associations against family and personal connections, favoring promiscuity, detachment:

The world was full of fathers -- was therefore full of misery; full of mothers -- therefore full of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts -- full of madness and suicide

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy.
"But every one belongs to every one else." he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb

I really do think you ought to be careful. It's such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At 40 or 35 it wouldn't be so bad. But at your age, Lenina!

I also found interesting the contrast in the back and forth (at time mind bending) between the indoctrination of the young students, and the dialog between Lenina and Fanny, where one could see both the result in adults of the indoctrination in Fanny and the signs of resistance (and hope) in Lenina (what irony of a name for a main character...)

No less dizzying was then the mentions of how Christianity, democracy, liberalism all were obstacles, and how war the then economic collapse presented the choice between World Control and destruction... The eternal choice politicians promote for their own gain.

Was puzzled also by the full intent beyond the portion where the removal of the inhibitions of old men, where instead of dedicating to thinking -- augmenting humanity's reservoir of wisdom, educating -- now with the same desires of a 17 year old. Seems not that shy from pedo reference.

[Artgirl8160]

I "read" this in junior high school, just the cliff notes because I couldn't get through the actual copy. Now I am using the audio version, I must say I don't feel so bad that my younger self couldn't get through this book. It is so disturbing on so many levels, messing with the little babies, the conditioning it's just all so immoral. I do not like this book at all. I'm looking forward to the insight from tonights meeting.

[Jane]

I read this book 40+ yrs ago in school. Although I don't remember the details, I remember that my overall impression was that it was science fiction, an imaginary world. As I am rereading this now, I'm in shock at how much of of this "imaginary world" is in fact a reality NOW! The conditioning and repetition of lies by the MM, the sexualization of children, the loss of parental rights, erasing history, attacks on Christianity, the woke philosophy of toxic masculinity. I could go on and on. I'm blown away that Aldous Huxley was so prescient!

[njsf]

The best way to predict the future is to plan it

[WinstonDave]

As to njsf's point Aldus' Brother Julian Huxley was a founder of the League of Nations precursor to the UN so this book in reality is them telling of their plan.