> Brave New World -> You can either spend time creating or you can spend it consuming.
Interesting conclusion. In my interpretation, the lesson is more open ended: "You can be happy if you've found your niche but what if your ambitions don't match your abilities?"
Most of the people in the society of Brave New World are fabricated to fit in and are happy and even for those few that don't fit in, the Controllers send them to small communities were they can be.
Helmholtz is likely to be happy on his island and Mond himself is somewhat envious that Bernard will "meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world".
Bernard himself OTOH doesn't quite share this view. For good reasons as we know he feels superior to most people but actually isn't. And on the island it will be even more glaring.
The world in BNW does not like (innovative) creation, it is aimed at stability. You should do your job and enjoy mindlessly afterwards, either doing games or using somma. I.e.: "Ending is better than mending.", "...they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave" -> Nowadays we have commercials to do that, the conditioning. Al least that is how I see it, many things we have nowadays can be extrapolated quite nicely into BNW. We do it to ourselves, by catering to our primal, short-term rewards systems we get less time to "create", instead we watch sitcoms. (I'm overreacting I bit, I know it's not so black and white.)
I agree that BNW's society is trying hard to be stable, like suppressing inventions that would give the lower castes to much free time.
Our world has still problems that need to be solved and we are far from achieving a stable state. But in BNW, humanity has done that and now they (meaning most of humanity) want to keep that as they are happy with the status quo.
In our world, just "consuming" instead of "creating" might be frowned upon but in BNW, is there really a need to create? Those who want, are allowed to, outside of the main society.
It's not the kind of future society I would want to live in (no space travel, booo!) but if I'd have to choose a dystopia, BNW would probably be it.
Interesting conclusion. In my interpretation, the lesson is more open ended: "You can be happy if you've found your niche but what if your ambitions don't match your abilities?"
Most of the people in the society of Brave New World are fabricated to fit in and are happy and even for those few that don't fit in, the Controllers send them to small communities were they can be.
Helmholtz is likely to be happy on his island and Mond himself is somewhat envious that Bernard will "meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world".
Bernard himself OTOH doesn't quite share this view. For good reasons as we know he feels superior to most people but actually isn't. And on the island it will be even more glaring.