You know it's a popular dystopian novel, up there with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. You may have skimmed it in high school, but have you actually read and digested Huxley's Brave New World? Huxley wrote it in response to H. G. Wells's absurdly utopian Men Like Gods, and shows the emptiness of entertainment and the "perfect" life. It's a fairly quick read, and definitely worth it:
"I like the
inconveniences."
"We don't," said the
Controller. "We prefer to do things
comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want
goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said
Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said
the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right
to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the
right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in
constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid;
the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his
shoulders. "You're welcome,"
he said.
So how much actual difference is there between the vision of today's statists and Huxley's society?