Fifty-five years ago, on this day in 1963, Aldous Huxley passed through a psychedelic portal to the other side. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day, but the legacy of his most popular novel, Brave New World, lives on.
Even fifty-five years after his death, Aldous Huxley’s best-known work, the satirical dystopian novel, Brave New World, has a message which resonates. It was published in 1932, a tumultuous epoch between two world wars, when totalitarian ideologies gripped the world’s nation states and intellectual elite. The idea of utopia didn’t seem too farfetched for many living in his time. However, from our historical perspective, it may seem absurdly earnest to strive for utopia because we know how those 20th century experiments turned out. Into this void has stepped a new pretender to the utopian throne, led by technocrats from Silicon Valley.
The genius of Huxley’s book, a satire, one has to remember, was that it was able to distance itself from the elixir so many were partaking in at the time: the optimism that a platonic ideal of a perfect world state was possible; the erroneous belief that if only the right strong man or doctrine came along, all of our problems would be solved. Huxley could easily have published Brave New World today, with some minor updates, and it would be just as relevant — for we’re now guided by visions…
