Manufactured Minds

Read-list series on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Sep 14, 2025

Dear Reader,

With all my heart, I welcome you to my little digital garden. Truly grateful that you have chosen to follow my thoughts here. Thank you for making this space feel alive, and I hope my reflections offer something worth your time and attention. ♥️

For those who are new, my name is Saiyana Ramisetty. I am a reader, writer, and thinker who loves exploring literature, philosophy, and ideas that shape how we live and understand the world. This blog has been my way of thinking aloud — sharing pieces of what I notice, think, and feel, in hopes of connecting with others who enjoy reflection and inquiry.

Currently, I am working my way through Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. As I read, I am exploring its ideas in relation to our own society, our desires, and the compromises we make for comfort and stability. While I enjoy this extraordinary novel, I plan to write to you a series of essays, which will be inspired by groups of chapters in the book.

This first piece in the series "Manufactured Minds" is about the inspiration behind my picking this book; consider it the preface of the essay series. Instead of a YouTube playlist, this is my curated "read-list" for you.

Preface

Why return to Brave New World nearly a century after its publication? Because Aldous Huxley's vision is no longer confined to the future, but is ripping and bleeding into our present.

We live in an age of optimization and branding. If we look around us, our bodies and desires are commodified, and our attention is nothing but engineered. If we look even deeper, our freedoms are carefully managed not by force, but by a subtle promise of comfort and stability which this Brave New World offers.

Huxley imagined this with great clarity. His so-called utopia of manufactured people and conditioned contentment is no longer a disturbing fantasy, but to me, it reads almost like social commentary.

It feels like reading a prophecy in real time!

I ask:

Note: These are my guiding questions while I read the novel. The questions are subject to change as I progress through the novel. So consider these guiding questions as "for now."

What does it mean to be human when our choices are shaped and decided before we even make them?
What becomes of freedom when we learn to love our chains?
And does stability taste sweet when it is purchased at the cost of our spirit, history, and individuality?

This series is not a scholarly guide, nor an attempt to replace the novel. These reflections are written as a companion to Huxley's Brave New World. While they can be read on their own, they will be best understood and fully appreciated when read in parallel with the novel itself. Each essay engages with the ideas, characters, and scenes of Huxley's work. Reading both together allows the reader to experience not only the story Huxley tells but also the questions and insights it inspires.

My purpose here is not to lecture, but to think aloud. To place Huxley's dystopia beside our present reality, and see what it teaches us. The collection of essays is fragments of my own reading written chapter by chapter which enables me to look into literature and see something of ourselves staring back at us.

So, if Brave New World warns us of anything, it is that the true revolutions of history are not only political or technological, but biological, psychological, and even spiritual. They occur not just in machines and markets, but in the very essence of our being. Which is why I feel literature like this is so important to be talked about.