“Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you are pierced.”— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Note: This is the third essay in the read-list series on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you feel disconnected, I suggest you read the first two essays. [Preface, Essay 1]
Dear Reader,
If pleasure can be manufactured, does it retain any meaning at all? In Brave New World, chapters 4-6 revolve around this one question. At this point, the society Huxley builds is no longer asking what is good, but only what feels good.
And for this, not just the people, but desire itself is conditioned, emotions are engineered, and if there is any discontent, they make it disappear with soma (a drug which apparently drowns one in happiness).
In these chapters, I meet Bernard, Lenina, and Helmholtz. In this essay, we will discuss soma’s conditioned pleasure, these three characters, and how Huxley’s world resembles ours with respect to pleasure. This brings me back to the starting two questions —
Is pleasure, when engineered, losing its meaning and becoming just a distraction?
In our modern times, is it enough to feel good, or must we still ask what is good?
Soma: The Illusion of Happiness
After all, the whole story is centered around “soma,” which is the state’s answer to every nuisance. Think of it as a tool for control, which creates happiness (correcting myself, phantom happiness). But what it is doing is to suppress discontent. I think escapism is its function, so the people in this brave new world are just anesthetized. If you think about it this way, it is a question of pleasure vs. distraction vs. freedom.
In the story, Bernard, however, resists this. That was very interesting, because even after taking soma at a social event, he does not feel connected to others. He still has his self-consciousness, as if there is a kernel within him that cannot be chemically dissolved. I am very curious to see what else can withstand soma’s effect.
I could not help but relate this to our phantom dopamine hits from doom-scrolling endlessly, feeling distracted but just not filling that void within us. Not just dopamine scrolling, but the broader commodification of pleasure in consumer capitalism. Huxley is selling soma as a pill, but dear, we already have soma in our hands right now — in the form of social media or AI.
Bernard: The Insecure Misfit
Reading Bernard was like looking at two faces of a coin. I was frustrated with him sometimes and felt so sorry for him for the rest. He is so pitifully trapped in this world because he feels too much and too little at once. His problem is that he is not rejecting the world entirely, but he is not able to surrender to it, and it felt so relevant.
He is small in stature (according to the standards of Alpha), insecure, and painfully aware of the injustice of the caste system. Unlike others of his class, he does not enjoy the privilege he gets. He sees the Epsilons and Deltas not simply as labor, but as fated sufferers of a destiny they did not choose.
But this pity is complicated: does he feel sorry for them, or does he feel sorry for himself for being unable to accept his own superiority with the same ease as his peers? It is like double-edged; he cannot bear the suffering beneath him, but he also cannot bear the unease within himself. And in that way, he feels lonely with this not-fitting into the world.
He wants independence, but also recognition. He seeks truth, but also the comfort of belonging. He is both critic and hypocrite — a man who despises the world but still craves its approval.
Helmholtz: The Hungry Soul
Reading Helmholtz, I felt a shock of recognition. This man is in contrast with Bernard. He is handsome, intelligent, confident, everything that Bernard thinks he is not. But wait, every good thing comes with some baggage. This man is plagued by an emptiness of another kind: the hunger for meaning he cannot articulate. (I have a hunch, he is going to be my favorite in the coming chapters, let’s see — he has a hungry soul.)
He is a lecturer and an emotional engineer, who manufactures hypnopaedic rhymes and “feely” scenarios which are used for conditioning as emotional fodder of the World State. But the crucial problem he sees is, he feels as though his words are wasted.
“Did you ever feel as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using?” he asks.
And that is the voice of a soul in exile. He is just not able to find it or, I should rather say, figure out how to find it. He feels the necessity of expression but is not finding any subject worthy of it, because everything is superficial and manufactured.
This man! In this man, I could feel my own restlessness, the sense of something inside waiting to be said, the power to say it but no clear way to bring it forth.
Did you ever feel that way? I do, when I immerse myself into literature and philosophy. It gives me the way to turn yearning into meaning.
Lenina: The Conditioned Believer
Reading Lenina, I wanted to shake her and say, wake up girl!” She embodies the perfect conditioning. So thoroughly conditioned that she cannot tell if she believes what she says. I think she just repeats what she has been taught.
There are a few scenes in these chapters where Bernard desires intimacy — time alone with her, to talk, and to know each other. And Lenina, she strongly prefers activity, noise, and drama. This kind of conditioning makes me think that even the simplest human instincts, the wish for connection, have been reframed as abnormal.
To her, monogamy is absurd, solitude is unbearable, and discomfort is a mistake to be swiftly corrected with soma. I cannot fault her for being wrong, because she is only incapable of imagining otherwise. Her tragedy is that she does not know she is tragic; and there is no way for her to know that.
I think some of us can relate to her too, those who mistake the absence of pain for the presence of joy!
She fears being in solitude (which is unnatural in this world) and is compelled toward noise and company. And I think this is what is exposing the system’s greatest fear:
To be alone is to think, and thinking is the gravest threat to order — a seed of rebellion.
The Wheel of Caste / Class
If you are not aware of the class/caste system in this world, I suggest you read it in the first two essays. Running beneath all these character studies is the wheel of caste. Each group is conditioned to love its lot, especially the lower ones, so there is no other possibility that can be imagined.
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are conditioned to love their lives, even how miserable they might feel to someone looking from the outside. Those at the top see the misery beneath but dismiss it as natural order. And yet, the great illusion in this world is that everyone is happy. It is selfish happiness, happiness purchased at the expense of awareness.
Generally, we seek happiness, but in this world, it is given as a default (although it is disguised as pleasure). That makes me question: is there a meaning to unhappiness then, to make this happiness even sweeter? The other saddest thing is, this conditioning is not just causing suffering, but it is completely erasing the imagination that things could be otherwise.
Can you imagine living in a world that does not let you imagine possibilities? That scares me!
Thoughts to Leave With
Between Bernard’s guilt (resist without confidence), Helmholtz’s yearning (resist with hunger), and Lenina’s conditioning (does not resist at all), Huxley presents three ways of living under a manufactured world.
Reading these three chapters brought an interesting thought to me: even in a world where every instinct is conditioned, there still is human restlessness. We cannot abolish the longing, but just suppress or silence it, with some distraction like soma, or whatever you relate to. Helmholtz is the proof of this: he has everything the World State deems desirable — intelligence, charm, professional success; yet he knows something is missing. A hunger for words that are not empty, for feelings that are not pre-decided.
Now, where are we presently? Are we not already living softer versions of this reality? We, too, drown silence in constant noise. We, too, consume pleasures that cost us nothing and thus mean nothing. We, too, sometimes mistake distraction for happiness.
I can leave you with the thought that, in this world of dolls, I insist that humanity cannot survive on engineered pleasure alone. To be human is to long, to hunger, to yearn, to fight with the discontent. And reading Helmholtz, who feels this most clearly, it is Huxley’s early warning that meaning cannot be manufactured. It must be sought and suffered for.
I would love to discuss with you! How do you see Huxley’s factory world in our own lives?
In the next post of this series, I will share my reflections on Chapters 7-10 of Brave New World, on how to measure progress and at what cost.
Will soon knock at your mind’s door with my thoughts! 💌
Until then,
Yours in thought,
Yana ♥️
Manufactured Minds: Read-list series on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Ch. 4-6: The Conditioned Pleasure House (Current)
Ch. 7-10: Coming soon…