![]() ![]() The World State biologically engineers dozens of Bokanovsky twins who characterize its inhabitants and reinforce its collective identity. We make them hate solitude and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it” ( Brave New World 235). For example, Mustapha Mond explains, “people never are alone now. To realize this ideological emphasis on collective identity, the World State translates its ideology into social structures and institutions that facilitate self-annihilation. The World State motto, “Community, Identity, Stability,” juxtaposes “community” and “identity” and thus negates man’s individual identity by placing it firmly in relation to his fellow man (Huxley, Brave New World 3). Using the World State ideology, Huxley conflates this collective identity with a seemingly-transcendent “oneness that is the ground and principle of all multiplicity” ( The Perennial Philosophy 5). In Brave New World, the dystopian World State appears to embody these Perennial themes by fostering the renunciation of individual self in favor of a collective identity. “As all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted,” Huxley writes, “man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God” ( The Perennial Philosophy 36). To realize this unitive knowledge, practitioners must transcend their “selfness” and recognize their unity with the divine Ground. In the introduction to The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley defines the titular philosophy as “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, Divine Reality the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being” (Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy vii). Though Huxley appears to imbue the World State ideology with self-naughtings and oneness redolent of the Perennial Philosophy, Huxley’s World State actually idolatrizes selfness, which is spiritually and psychologically detrimental to its inhabitants. The purported self-transcendence of the World State is a lie, one of the many instruments used by the World Controllers to subdue its population into willing subservience. The World State “self writ large” is very much intact. Its citizens appear blissfully happy, their apparent peace reflected repeatedly across the pages of Brave New World.Ĭan the Perennial question be answered by circumventing Perennialism altogether? Unsurprisingly, Aldous Huxley’s answer is a resounding “no” God is not mocked. Its rituals and ceremonies are embedded with religious veneration and succeed in facilitating interconnectedness among its practitioners. The beliefs and mantras recited by the World State are staggeringly similar to those of the Perennial Philosophy. The World State incorporates self-transcendence in all aspects of its social fabric. ![]() Indeed, the Brave New World appears spiritually promising. In the latter, he replaces this metaphysical Ground with decidedly man-made institutions, declaring that union is possible through social order alone. In the former, he stresses the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground as the final end of man. In his science fiction satire, Brave New World, Huxley provides a very different answer by discarding mysticism altogether. The fundamental question of the Perennial Philosophy is as follows: How does one transcend the separative self and realize its unity with everything? In his nonfiction work, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley provides an answer by anthologizing numerous mystical writings across various religions. As a consequence of preventing its citizens from achieving genuine mystical unity, the World State’s population is spiritually and psychologically damaged-far from happy and stable, despite the lie they have been conditioned to believe. This Perennial Perversion is spiritually bankrupt, systematically misleading World State inhabitants with false promises of unitive liberation. However, the Brave New World does not eclipse self at all it cultivates a “selfness writ large” that idolatrizes instant gratification, consumerism, technology and progress, and social order as ersatz for genuine liberation. These themes are highly suggestive of the Perennial Philosophy, a framework championed by Huxley through which individuals can eclipse their separate selves and spiritually actualize. It embeds self-transcendence and interconnectedness into its social order, minimizing the individual self in favor of a collective identity. In Brave New World, Huxley’s World State appears spiritually promising. This literary analysis compares the spiritual landscape of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World against his nonfiction work, The Perennial Philosophy. ![]()
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