/lit/ - Literature

>>22151393

Study maths/science to understand the universe around you (see /sci/ sticky), Literature (to turn you into a human being, see /lit/ top100 chart), also read a summary of western philosophy, then pick a philosophy you'd like to study of any kind, doesn't even matter which as long as it replaces all the shitsludge that's been poured into you. The four books that make up the trial of Socretes are a good start.

A lot of history is massively distorted, so be cautious about what you pick to read (who funded the author?). Same for anything politics.

Also, unironically, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. School teaches you an obedient slave mindset that's important to break (go school, get job, be poor slave for 60 years, die). Studying business / money is pure fucking horseshit, but it's the prison by which modern man is enslaved, and you can't liberate yourself from it without studying it.

>>21831421

Neither.

Huxley lived in a prudish time. Zips were considered very controversial, shocking and immoral during his time because they allowed people to take their clothes off too easily; hence why Lenina has them. As a modern reader, you wouldn't think of zips as a symbol of mindless hedonism, but consider the entire book through that context and how readers of the time would have reacted. The human modification and the conditioning of the babies with electric shocks are meant to read as an absolutely disgusting and mortifying image for the readers of his time. As modern readers, we're exposed to these ideas enough that they don't even seem that outlandish.

A lot of the book questions the blind pursuit of pleasure as society often seems to make this its ultimate aim; however pleasure is usually shallow and meaingless. Lenina wants the Savage, but her lust is repulsive to him because he desires love / a meaningful relationship, which is beyond her comphrension. Keep in mind the book was written in 1932, and the values of the time.

It's also a prediction of a future dystopia in the vein of 1984. People are manufactured. They are brainwahsed with 'ending is better than mending', so that they constantly discard things and have to get new ones, thus creating artificial scarcity so that they have to work to create the things they are constantly discarding. This prediction has become extremely true of today's consumerism as any brief research into planned obsolescence shows.

The point is that the 'perfect society' is completely meaningless. It's like the general example of an AI being told to cure cancer, so it kills all humans; the solution is worse than the problem. The 'perfect society' is a hell on earth.

The savage desperately escapes 'the perfect society' because he wants to feel pain, because pain and suffering is ultimately what gives us purpose; without it we have no reason to live nor nothing to strive for; we exist relative to it. He tries to flee the society, but it catches up with him and overwhelms him. He succumbs to the lust for pleasure, and realising his helplessness and inability to excape his own desires, destroys himself in despair.

Looking up 'universe 25' is a good point for comparison.