/lit/ - Literature

>>23088636
>in which anon interpets something deliberately bad as good because he would get sex

No shit it's an utopia. That's the point faggot. The question is the cost we have to pay for that utopia.

>>23088651
How can it be an utopia without diversity and lgbt rights?

>>23088636
I also want to note how incredibly similar Hegel's Philosophy of Right is to Plato's Republic. The idea of overarching unity is the same, but Hegel draws on Plato's later work in The Laws and the Statesman to put the locus of social control outside individual philosopher kings and into emergent, historical social institutions.

Yet Hegel errs by making freedom the end goal. For Hegel, happiness is secondary because freedom entails happiness. A free people will not choose what makes them unhappy (although they will choose duty).

In this, Hegel makes the goal of a perfect society unattainable. He wants to get all men out of the cave, when this is not possible. The shortest path to happiness lies in the vision of A Brave New World.

What is freedom but the freedom to do as one pleases? So what is society has engineered what will please you? You still get all you want.

Self-control isn't necessarily freedom. As Nietzsche and Hume point out, how is this not another form of tyranny? Should reason not be the slave of the passions? It is slave morality to make each individuals rational part of the soul their master, disallowing others to do what will make them happiest.

Hegel and the Patristics are dangerous in this respect and should no doubt be banned. The Philosophy of Right is a corruption of The Republic.

>>23088636
>A Brave New World is a utopia
Glad you were able to understand that much

>>23088658
ABNW doesn't mention gays but the society would obviously allow for them. They are down with mandatory drug fueled orgies, it doesn't seem they would mind people of the same sex having intercourse.

Diversity is probably there too. There is eugenics, but there is no reason to assume different races wouldn't persist to some degree because of the breeding stock they began with.

Diversity just isn't an issue because society is already rigidly stratified based on one's eugenic pedigree. It's definitely an anti-racist society in that it won't tolerate racism since this would fracture the harmonic unity of the whole.

>>23088651
The cost is that movie plots are bland.

>>23088636
I was gonna try and frame a buddhist critique along the lines that papering over the essential suffering of human existence denies people their opportunity to recognize the illusory nature of this life, attain enlightenments and escape samsara, but then I realized all it takes is one influential boddhisatva on the planning committee and it'll become trivial to reshape society efficiently toward that end.
The automation of births allows an optimal number of self-aware niches for rebirth at any time, and the minimization of suffering reduces the rate at which negative karmas accrue. It may not be perfect, but it's still a better way to spin the wheel than what we currently have.
Sound off if I've blasphemed buddhabros

>>23088829
Sounds perfect.

>>23088829
You fail because your starting paradigm is deficient. Man's telos involves his rationality. A good human life requires reflexive freedom, not the mere sating of desire. Ultimately, man living into his authentic nature culminates in the contemplation of the Divine Nature (Saint Bonaventure, Merton). We are restless until we rest in God (Saint Augustine).

We are dead when sin rules over us, when we are the mere effect of causes external to ourselves. We must overcome desire, instinct, and circumstance in order to seek what is truly good, not just what appears to be good or is said to be good by others (Saint Paul, Romans 7, Plato). We die a death of autonomy and personhood when circumstance and desire rule over us, and only the Logos, the rational part of the soul can set us free. The search for what is "truly good," itself entails a sort of transcendence, a going beyond current beliefs and desires.

So to, we must embrace what lies without us in love. For to hate something is to have that thing act as a cause over you. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by that thing, defined by what you are not. But the apophatic, panentheistic God of Saint Denis and Miester Eckhart cannot be limited in this way, nor can Plato's God. Love is the identification of the other with the self, a transcendence of boundaries. God, to be truly God, must be truly unlimited, identified with all. And so, in order to "become like God," as Plato suggests, we must transcend ourselves in openness to knowledge of what is truly good and in embracing all things in love, such that we identify their good with our own. As Eckhart says, such a God "boils over" in love, resulting in creation.

Men must be "forced to be free," as Hegel says, and this is why "criminals have a right to be punished."

Can man attain to such a thing? "For people this is impossible, but for God all things are are possible," (Matthew 19:26).

>>23088646
Explain why is the world presented in BNW "deliberately" bad.

>>23088959
You could consider Huxley's own essay on the book. He wanted to present and abhorrent dystopia and compares his work to 1984.

https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

>>23088636
>/lit/ - Normies are Retarded Discussion
Huxley wrote the rebuttal into his own story in the character of John the Savage, who demonstrates how there is no love in the utopia

>>23088959
Niggers exist there

>>23089222
witnessed and BTFO, this argument is over

>>23088636
It’s a time honored tradition here for teenagers to make these threads. Congrats.

>>23089217
Would you rather be in love but be a wagie who barely sees their beloved and only sees them at the end of the day after being drained of all energy or have unlimited access to drugs, no crime, no taxes, and orgy porgy with a different pneumatic girl every few days?

>>23089882
Not an argument.

>>23089222
Based and checked

>>23089091
>brainwashing, over-organization, propaganda, drugs and genetic engineering bad bad bad bad
What a retarded take on his own book lmao

>>23091294
He reveals the plan in the form of a warning, while his brother is over at the UN making it manifest.

>>23088636
You make this thread every week and you get proven to be a complete retard every week. Give it a rest and fuck of back to r*ddit you pathetic nigger. Because you will never be a real woman.

>>23091312
>while his brother is over at the UN making it manifest
UN and the World Economic Forum isn't doing anything too wrong. Change my mind.

>>23091344
You will never be a real woman, change my mind nigger.

>>23088651
Huxley wrote both a dystopia, Brave New World (1932) then followed it up 30 years later with a utopian counterpart with his final novel, Island (1962)

Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia", somewhat influenced by H.G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1910, dealing with subjects like corporate tyranny and behavioural conditioning). H. G. Wells' novel The First Men in the Moon (1901) had concepts that Huxley added to his story. Both novels introduce a society consisting of a specialized caste system, new generations are produced in jars and bottles where their designated caste is decided before birth by tempering with the fetus' development, and individuals are drugged down when they are not needed

Huxley said that Brave New World was was a parody of the utopian novels of H. G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905), and of Men Like Gods (1923).

For his part Wells published, two years after Brave New World, his own Utopian Shape of Things to Come. Seeking to refute the argument of Huxley's Mustapha Mond—that moronic underclasses were a necessary "social gyroscope" and that a society composed solely of intelligent, assertive "Alphas" would inevitably disintegrate in internecine struggle—Wells depicted a stable egalitarian society emerging after several generations of a reforming elite having complete control of education throughout the world. In the future depicted in Wells' book, posterity remembers Huxley as "a reactionary writer"

In Brave New World, the "Dr. Wells" (e.g. “Dr. Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute.”) is knock at H.G. Wells. The only other living write Huxley put in Brave New World was George Bernard Shaw (e.g. Dr. Shaw is Linda's London physician who supplies Linda with soma)

>>23091312
But he's wrong in key respects. Because of when he lives, he is focused on the possibility of some all encompassing government taking control of human life. This is sort of the opposite of what we've seen. States have become weaker, not stronger.

Huxley's analysis missed a crucial fact, that the concentration of productive power and value in the hands of a few large entities will tend to make those entities more powerful, not necessarily states. He particularly fails to predict how companies will become transnational and thus able to frustrate government control and taxation efforts by simply threatening to pack up and leave, taking their jobs with them. Nor how powerful corporations could engage in state capture of regulatory bodies and leverage international treaties for their own ends. The "Magnificent 7" tech companies now have more market cap than any nation's total stock market except for the US itself, but they are international beings.

His overpopulation thesis misses a crucial element. That population decline will begin hitting developed countries first, even as the population explodes in Africa. So he fails to see that population growth won't be an indigenous problem, but rather a problem of global inequality that sends vast migrant streams into wealthy nations where the demand for their labor is already tanking.

How this helps with a seismic shift in inequality since Huxley's time is also missed.

The future looks more likely to be a chaotic, frenetic place where elites take the primacy they once held under feudalism while states atrophy. Boomers are still obsessed with "muh totalitarian state," especially on the right, and they run everything, which is why we are wholly unable to mobilize against the atrophy of the state and a new neoliberal order when the tech captain CEO becomes the philosopher king of their own fiefdom (the sort of thing people like Land actually argue for lol).

Everyone thinks they would be an alpha, but 99% of 4chan would be epsilon

Why look into the future? The old Germanics already had an utopia.
Men and women were equal, decisions were met democratically, in case of foreign aggression, the losses were small because all there riches lied underneath the earth.
Their slaves had a lot of rights. They lived in their own house, owned their own lot and merely had to pay a certain amount to their masters much like a tenant pays his rent.
Their society truly knew no suffering.

>>23091374
right lol. I mean if we can guarantee we get to be alpha or beta tier then yeah, Brave New World has it's perks