I recently finished reading Brave New World. It blew my mind. The book is about a futuristic dystopia, much like 1984. But I found it far more disturbing. Here I’d like to explain why.

If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend you close this tab and read the book first. I wouldn’t want to spoil such a wonderful read.

What makes the dystopia so disturbing is that it posits the possibility of creating a perfect illusion. From a Buddhist perspective, individual existence is an illusion. That illusion is pervaded by suffering which, in due course, wakes us up to the truth of nonexistence and not-separateness. But what Huxley’s dystopia shows is the possibility of a socially engineered, completely stable politico-social arrangement by which everyone is contented and shielded from almost all suffering, right until their death.

In other words, a society that has engineered a perfect sleep. To top it off, this society is stable because it has engineered inequality: the elite is about 10% of the population. The lower classes are genetically engineered to be stunted.

High art is locked up. Same goes for science. There’s no need to make things as economically efficient as possible, because if there’s too much leisure time, people grow unhappy.

From a social reformer’s perspective, if your goal is to minimize suffering, you could consider that the end goal could lead to a variant of this. More disturbingly, it could lead to a socially engineered near-perfect sleep, where the level of consciousness is dimmed. My Buddhist inclination tells me that this is not really possible. But the book nevertheless shakes the faith a fair bit.