Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Happiness Book Review)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in a dystopian novel written in 1932 and made into a series in 2020, where the protagonist, Bernard Marx, visits a society where everyone is happy. This happiness is brought about by a happiness-producing drug called Soma. This leads to Bernard becoming vocal voice about why society based on ideals that happiness can’t and will not last. 

For example, Bernard describes this happy society as empty, without open-mindedness, and freewill. There, people are overly optimistic about negative things like death. Respectfully, people are not enjoying the benefits of negative emotions like jealousy, inability to challenge the status quo, especially when it is not right, and are unable to feel negativity, especially when it is called for, such as during hard times, in life-threatening situations and death. 

Brave New World vs Current World

Certainly, Huxley’s book was written before we knew about happiness. Still, this story is an excellent metaphor for what people today think about happiness.

Today we are living in a society where happiness is desired, but it takes a second place to other social and economic metrics, like having money, buying cool stuff, and marrying and having children. Sure, we do all these things for the sake of happiness, but happiness is just not a priority. The priority is the idea that all these things should lead to happiness, but not happiness itself. 

As such, when we hear someone state that happiness is possible, it is transformational in the sense that it will make almost every other aspect of our life better, and that we should forgo all these different objects that make us happy for the happiness itself, we get skeptical. Certainly, things can’t be that easy and straightforward, right? Certainly, we aren’t happy and there are good reasons why this is the case. After all, our current society today is the most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen, and things like smartphones and access to pineapples in Russia are a clear sign of desired progress, right?

Huxley Didn’t Know About The Superiority of Happiness

Still, virtually all aspects of life improve when we are happy and deteriorate into an unhappy state. People behave differently when they are happy and many things that people pursue when they are unhappy become irrelevant. It’s like having two different people. 

In other words, a society built on the ideals of happiness is an entirely different place, which some unhappy people can’t understand and find somehow disturbing. After all, it’s better to cry inside a Lamborghini rather than in a Mercedes, or so we are told. To this, I always reply that it’s better not to cry, even if we have to give up both the Mercedes and Lambo. 

Fixing the World With Happiness

Moreover, many problems that haunt our society today would be automatically addressed and, perhaps, some other problems would take place, but in comparison, the benefits would outweigh the costs. This is, of course, the reason why we are so passionate about making the world into a happier place and why we believe that if we could make the world even 5% happier, the positive effect of happiness would be astronomical.