(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
‘Brave New World’ the third most censored book in America, librarians say
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World placed third in the American Library Association’s (ALA) Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010.
The most common reason the futuristic novel, written by the British author in 1931 and published in 1932, was requested to be restricted or removed from libraries was because of its alleged insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit content.
Brave New World is set in the London of 2540 AD, where mass production has inundated nearly every aspect of society, free-love is mandatory and residents keep themselves in a happy stupor by self-medicating with an antidepressant-like drug called soma.
Unlike George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984, Huxley’s novel envisioned a totalitarian government than used distractions and pleasures to suppress the population rather than brute force and propaganda.
The novel ranks fifth on a Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 2
“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too-all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides-made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 2
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HOWL!!!
After all, it is pretty much a blueprint for how the society’s become so drugged-up on the happy pills (and, yes, I understand that they help lots of people, etc.), the importance we place on entertainment and the various distractions which are trumpeted as being worth our time. The difference is the iron fist of the state in the US and the World which is less and less hidden by the velvet glove of distraction. It’s why I like to call the current state of society a Brave New 1984.