Guest Blogger: Bryan Kotschevar

It occurred to me this evening one of our “hypnopaedic” sayings of 2011 directly contradicts one of the main ideas of Brave New World. After a particularly horrible separation, one might be consoled and made happier by the saying “It is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all”. The majority of people in Brave New World would immediately mark you as a heretic if you said this; the concept of subduing emotions and no delayed gratification means love doesn’t have a place. However, if everyone belongs to everybody, and if love means happiness and everyone is happy, then they are loved. Or are they loved none of the time? Their lifestyle ensures that they feel no strong emotions, neither good nor bad, and this means that there is no loving, no heartbreaking, and no feeling, only being. My general conception of love is being with someone whose company one really enjoys, and being faithful to that person. In Brave New World, their promiscuity does not fit this definition, and so I would say they are neither loved nor loving. In their world, it is better to have never loved at all (partly because it’s impossible due to conditioning, and partly because it would be socially unacceptable), but which do you so suppose is better in our society? Have we begun to track towards their normal, or are we breaking away?