When people talk about totalitarianism, they think of gulags, George Orwell, secret police knocking on the door at night, and coercion, usually under threat of pain or death, to surrender one’s liberty.
But that’s not the only way to think about totalitarianism. When Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, he imagined a totalitarian dystopia based not on cruelty and pain, but on providing the masses with so much safety, comfort, and pleasure that they contentedly exist as slaves.
Huxley’s novel begins when one Mustapha Mond, who controls Western Europe for the global government, hears of one John the Savage, a white man raised on an Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Brought back to London, the Savage, whose mind was formed on the collected works of William Shakespeare, inexplicably refuses to join the joyful collective, which is like an endless Carnival Cruise, without the mass brawls.
The Controller, Mond, summons the Savage to an audience, not to abuse him, but to find out what on earth is wrong with the man. Who wouldn’t want peace, sex, entertainment, safety, equality, and all the benefits of a perfectly managed hedonistic society?
“Our civilization has chosen machinery, medicine, and happiness,” boasts Mond, in explaining why the authorities have to keep the Bible and other books offering a contrasting worldview locked away from view. Had there been social media, it too would have been banned, for the greater good of all in this technocratic, therapeutic, totalitarian order.
