You Don't Want Comfort
Cell phones, soma pills, and why Huxley's Brave New World is now
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
I say ‘dystopian nightmare’ – what comes to mind? Probably surveillance and force, militarized police and midnight disappearances, the reek of fear and restless paranoia.
Not so if you’re Aldous Huxley. Forget jackboots and torture chambers. Huxley saw a world enslaved through comfort, distraction, and entertainments so seductive people wouldn’t even realize they’re locked up.
Neil Postman described this process in his work “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He explained:
“In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”
In Brave New World, they pop soma pills like we pop Xanax. They've abolished Shakespeare for mindless entertainment called feelies. They've replaced the danger (and reward) of real human connection with on-demand pleasure and factory-stamped distraction.
Sound familiar?
Look at us. We’re addicted to impossibly flavorful lab-made foods that poison our bodies and algorithmically-perfected timelines that destroy our minds.
Why go outside and make real friends when you can stream for six hours? Why learn the lesson at the bottom of a difficult feeling when you can take a pill that obliterates it? Why choose history’s masterpieces as your slow, difficult, holy teachers when you can burn out your dopamine receptors with a different three-second TikTok for the rest of your sleepwalked life?
There’s a part of every human soul that recognizes its own erosion, that feels itself being muted, hacked, erased – and finds it intolerable, an insult to existence itself.
It is this part that knows you must be willing to experience the shame of sin if you want to feel the luminosity of goodness. You must face the vertigo of potential failure if you want the uplift of success. You must risk the annihilation of loss if you want the deliverance of love.
This is Huxley’s point in the quote. To take away what wounds us is to take away the qualities that give existence meaning, that both caress and slap us awake to life – this short, breakable, infinitely precious thing.
It is not uninterrupted comfort that makes us feel real. It is God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, sin, fear, suffering, grace, love, loss.