with such people as these
I recently read, for the first time in my life (yes, I'm a bad scholar), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Frankly, it's one of the best written novels I've ever read. I've read Orwell. I certainly see the dangers of the world of which he warns us. I can certainly see the areas where it can, and probably is, creeping toward us in the sensuous guise of socialsim/communism. I've read Bradbury. I can see the impending dangers of the world he fears where reading is dangerous because we no longer understand it, and we fear the seditious properties of what we don't understand. Huxley seems to wrap it all into a package that ominously reflects social trends that creep toward us even now: the loss of the value of an individual, the constant business and consumer glut, the uselessness of monogamous love and family. It's book well worth the read if you haven't read it yet.
And now, for the purpose of intriguing you, some quotations:
Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks adn perhaps a bit of netting. Imaging the folloy of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. (31)
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consumation. (44)
Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along an offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn't have anything to do with them. (45)
It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too. (69)
...after all, what is an individual?....We can make a new one with the greatest ease--as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself. (148)
Have I piqued your interest? I hope so.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.