Straight Dope on Medicine: Brave New World

Have these Christian millennials fixed the news?

It’s called The Pour Over, and it has two goals:

1. Keep its readers informed about world events

2. Keep its readers focused on Christ

That means providing politically neutral coverage of events and pairing it with brief Biblical reminders.

The question is… are they hitting the mark? See what you think. Subscribe in just one click. No seriously, one click.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

In the beginning, the very beginning, God gave humanity paradise. It was called Eden, and it lived up to its name. But it wasn’t good enough.

How do we know?

A snake oil salesman came along with a better offer.

And we took it.

God’s image-bearers thought God had shortchanged them, and they rebelled.

Pain and suffering, and death resulted.

Not a good bargain.

Every so often, some delusional human gets it in his head that he has the key to utopia. He can usher in a new age for humanity which will advance the race and embody the greatest ideal.

These invariably turn out to be dystopias, and only suckers buy into the snow job.

What is a dystopia?

A society that is a hellish nightmare, but embodies someone’s ideal. That’s my working definition. For example, a social engineer who thinks that eradication of crime gives you a “perfect world,” could keep every single person in a steel cage for the entirety of their lives. He would remove the possibility of one person hurting another.

Lifelong solitary confinement for all.

A better option would be to let everyone out of their prison cells. People need to cooperate in the not harming another imperative.

Aldous Huxley wrote a Brave New World. It’s a dystopia, but not a militaristic, totalitarian one like 1984. This warped future is defined by happiness. Cheap, throw-away visceral happiness. Happiness that is the opiate of the masses. A state sponsored drug called soma anesthetizes and mesmerizes the populace.

“Virtue can never bring anything but a fantastical happiness … there is no true felicity except in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.”

-Marquis de Sade

From cradle to grave, humans are reduced to their needs and urges. No one thinks of morality, family or something higher. As long as everyone’s biological pleasures and drives are attended to, no one becomes dissatisfied or unruly.

No one reads or contemplates. There is no familiarity with the Bible.

It operates by the Freudian “pleasure principle” – which suggests that primal drive of mankind is to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Whereas 1984 is tyrannical, this dysfunctional society does not operate the same way. In 1984, you will do as the government says or perish. That is communism mixed with fascism.

Yet, liberal democracy can morph or develop into tyranny. That is the hypothesis.

With communism, struggle drives society forward. This horrendous construct does not shy away from personal or communal distress and suffering. The government is not averse to inflicting pain upon people. The beatings will continue until moral improves. Brave New World seeks to end human suffering. It is taken away by drugs and sexual pleasure.

Sexual promiscuity is required.

Here, pleasure becomes a god.

Exodus 20:3 “You shall have no other gods before me.

Throw in some pain avoidance, and nirvana has been achieved.

Anything goes pharmaceutically and sexually. With the advanced technology, no one really has to age. You are as fit at 70 as you are at 20. Family has been destroyed. You don’t know your mother or father. Who your children are is just guesswork. Those connections or encumbrances have been removed.

This is a peaceful society. No war. No crime. Neither is there human achievement, but that is the price everyone gladly pays for what they get. Societal stability is the payoff.

Ben Shapiro claims that present day America is very much like this now, at least aspirationally.

However, this didn’t happen all at once. Not everyone would choose the extermination of the family and chronic drug addiction willingly. Those holdouts had to be “conditioned,” and indoctrinated when they were young. Saving that, electroshock therapy will do. This is more about brainwashing than coercion. Everyone must climb aboard this utopian bandwagon, even if they would rather not.

These citizens are slaves to their own desires and passions. Suckers for no strife and stability. Humanity has just been reduced to an appetite.

Identity politics is present here. That is part of the mind-control and fabric of society. The central principle is community-identity stability. In this caste system, you accept your lot and you neither rise nor fall. You don’t even want to. True equity. Not equality.

Everyone is born into their caste and they can’t escape it. Elites remain elite and bottom-dwellers stay bottom-dwellers. It’s all for the collective good. You will do what society needs you to do and like it. If unwanted emotions or sadness arise because of this, a pill will wash that all away.

Humans have become cattle.

Huxley’s description of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre is purely animalistic: laboratories and workers and “corpse-coloured rubber” gloves, “frozen, dead” light, work tables filled with the “butter” of human genetic material.[i]

Children are viewed as sexual objects. In our society, pedophilia is attempting to be normalized. Nothing wrong with that. These people are just “minor attracted.” In fact, trans the kids. Everything is fluid. Drag them to drag queen story hour for 3rd graders.

Genesis 5:2 Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man[a] when they were created.

In fact family is not only destroyed, but must be demonized. It’s pitched as being “oppressive, even stinky, undesirable and off-putting.” People are taught to hate freedom too.

The most effective totalitarian state is not one in which slavery is forced, but one in which the people love their slavery.

One reason to do away with individual liberty is that if people are left free to choose, they will choose family. Some, if left to their own devices, might not take drugs or engage in relentless sex. They might even choose God.

Mustapha Mond is in charge of this merry-go-round. Soma is a societal good. Dispense it as necessary. Eliminate interpersonal connections. No one really forms deep relationships. Everything is superficial.

Still, some people in society seek monogamy, like Lenina Crowne. They just know not to advertise it.

Intellectual life cannot survive. If you are going to have stability, people have too many thoughts, desires and dreams. They need distraction to numb them and keep them in their place.

John is an outsider. He lives in a place called the reservation. He is brought up outside of the social order. John knows poverty, and is self-educated by the works of Shakespeare. He has higher aspirations.

Bernard is emblematic of many people today. His is disaffected by the shallowness of the world in which he lives. Also, he isn’t up to the challenge of being an Alpha-Plus, the caste into which he was born. No one would describe him as pusillanimous. He doesn’t fit in and isn’t accepted. However, when he gets acceptance, he becomes an arch defender of the establishment.

Today’s woke say that the system doesn’t benefit them, so they oppose it. It must be destroyed. Then they gain power in the institutions, if not outright control them. Now, the systems and institutions must be preserved. Anything less is insurrection.

Helmholtz is a writer and wants to experience the full range of human emotions. Wants to know suffering and sadness as much as happiness. There is method to his madness, in that he wants to experience hardship in order to “write piercingly.”

How can you have heights of human trajectory if the trajectory of human life has been blunted? People no longer have any long-term view.

For John, the true outsider, time and death and God are important. For the Brave New World, time doesn’t exist, and everyone is in a constant stupor. You don’t consider your own death, and god is just pleasure.

John meets a pulchritudinous love interest from the Brave New World and thinks that he’s going to form a family and he’ll develop deep connection to her.

Wrong. So wrong.

All meaning has been ripped away from this society. Purpose is anathema.

There was a great leveling of society. No heights and no depths. Heights have been cut down and depths filled in.

Conflict erupts between John and Mustafa.

Mustafa sells his engineered existence to John: “People don’t want what they can’t get. Blissfully unaware of death. Don’t know who their family is. Don’t suffer loss.”

There are “make-work” programs to keep people busy. Mustafa maintains that you can have meaning or can have happiness, but you can’t have both. Books are kept locked up and Mustafa refers to them as “smut.”

John responds, “I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.”

Orwell says, in his book, the hedonistic principle if pushed to the utmost won’t last. The ruling class would lose their vitality, become dull. “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.” In our society, Biden wants power and uses the pleasure principle to control. For our part, people don’t want freedom, but they want free stuff.

Seemingly, they are willing to sell their souls to get it.

As with the first couple in Eden, they are being sold a bill of goods.

Conclusion.

What does God think of such shenanigans?

Answer: Not much.

Proverbs 11:20

The perverse in heart are an abomination to the Lord, But the blameless in their walk are His delight.

If we do not know God, we deny who created us and blesses us.

1 Timothy 6:17

Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy.

Psalm 119:16

I shall delight in Your statutes; I shall not forget Your word.

Isaiah 5:11

Woe to those who rise early in the morning that they may pursue strong drink,

Who stay up late in the evening that wine may inflame them!

Luke 8:14

The seed which fell among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to maturity.

Pursue God first, and not pleasure. Pleasure is secondary. It’s good, if it’s moral and aligned with God’s will. God is good. All the time.

References

[i] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harper & Brothers, 1946), 26