Enjoying the view from Limbo
The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...
If all the simpletons and halfwits magically disappeared from the Earth, society would be infinitely more rational; but then who would do the menial jobs, such as practicing modern medicine, banking, leading our largest churches, and inventing the internet? Plato’s great political insight, the founding wisdom of political philosophy itself: The only men intellectually and temperamentally suited to rule are precisely the ones...
Every society, without exception, tends to harden its founding presuppositions and hopes into a set of stated and unstated rules for living. Gradually, the great character and thought needed to bring a society into being give way to the forced teaching and rote learning of the simplified and simplifying rules deemed necessary to preserve that society. And this in turn reduces maturation to...
In Utopia, the presumed goal in confronting a new virus would be to prevent a single death, a single illness, even a single infection. With an imaginary social purity, defined in the narrowest physical terms, as the overriding purpose, there would be absolutely nothing — no folly, no delusion, no atrocity — Utopia would not commit (or submit to) in the name of...
An ideal to be approached as closely as possible, in as many ways as possible, and with as much self-examining honesty as possible: Attach yourself only to people who make you better. Completely avoid those who make you worse. Those who make you neither better nor worse become the latter with frequent association, due to wasted time; therefore, avoid this third group too,...
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