Ep. 215: Brave New World: PEL Live 10th Anniversary Show

0:00 Mark: Welcome to our 10th anniversary show. I want to thank you supporters so much for making it possible for us to do this. What you're about to hear was recorded live on April 6th in New York City. We had a wonderful time meeting the fans there and definitely plan to do more of these live shows. It was videotaped so you can check out our YouTube channel for the video version of this. And I want to invite you all in celebration to send us an email@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com sharing your partially Examined Life Related Stories Insofar as listening to the show has had some interesting positive effect on your life.

Also, even if you weren't at the show, as citizens, we want to offer you $10 off the brave New World Partially Examined Life commemorative T shirt so you can find that on our store page and just enter the coupon code BNW and it'll take off the $10. So I hope you like the show and the song that I recorded yesterday specifically for this show in celebration of 10 years podcasting with these dudes and being available for your consumption and pleasure. Here we go. Good morning.

1:15 Dylan: It's usually night.

1:17 Mark: You are witnessing the Partially Examined Life podcast live. Thank you so much for coming out.

1:26 Dylan: Wow.

1:29 Mark: Our question for episode 215 on our 10th year anniversary is something like what's the difference between happiness and flourishing? Or perhaps will technology inevitably screw us and we read Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World? For more information you can visit partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, your SOMA substitute broadcasting live from the Caveat in Manhattan.

2:03 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, anxiously awaiting the subsequent orgy Porgy in New York City.

2:11 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, centrifugal bumble puppy champion of North America.

2:19 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, bottled in Fordly in Manhattan.

2:24 Mark: Oh, all right. So how many people read the book? I can see only the front row, so I'll assume that's a representative sampling. All right.

2:33 Wes: How many people haven't read it since high school?

2:37 Mark: We were in that position as well. Yeah, it was pretty good.

2:42 Wes: As good as you remembered from high school?

2:43 Mark: It was better than I remember from high school. I actually used this as the prototype of the book that should have just been written as a treatise that it was like had so little narrative value that they should have just had a pamphlet that says here's my philosophy. And I completely don't think that after this read.

2:58 Dylan: Yeah, I was wondering how you came

2:59 Mark: to that conclusion, because I was a 15 year old punk, that's all. So the way this is going to go, we're going to have some opening statements here and then about 5 o', clock, after only an hour or so in, we are going to not open it up for like a Q and A. Like get in line and we'll rapid fire. But like, we want to pretend you are the guests. We have an extra person here often discussing the entire book with us. So those of you, whether you've read the book or not, if you have something substantial to add, don't just ask us about the podcast in general.

Like, try to respond as if you were participating. And so we'll have one person do something like that. We'll have Anne, our tech person, running around doing the mic, holding our host from Caveat. Our host from Caveat. I didn't mean to reduce a person of technology. Sorry, that's the politically correct way. And one person might make a substantial comment, then we will take the mic from you. However, you won't get to follow up, but we might Talk for another 10 minutes based on that. We will, you know, incorporate you. Rather than treat you as mere peons out there feeding us small bits, we'll

4:05 Seth: treat you like alphas, even if you're not.

4:08 Mark: That's good, that's good. Maybe right toward the end we'll have kind of a rapid fire, more traditional Q and A, but we'll see how things feel at that point. So let's start off with Clarence Wesley Alwan.

4:25 Wes: It's a lot of pressure. I hadn't read this since high school, and one thing I didn't really remember was the part that Henry Ford and the Model T and all that stuff played in this novel. It's a really weird dystopia because of that. Right? So they date their calendar year from the introduction of the Model T. And they instead of making the sign of the cross, they make the sign of the T. And they essentially worship Ford as a kind of God. And Huxley was actually influenced by Ford's My Life and Work, where he sort of, to him, he calls the assembly line a sort of universal code that's going to bring all kinds of progress and help happiness to the world.

So that's sort of the genesis of the idea that the novel begins with an assembly line, basically where human beings are the things being assembled. And because it's an assembly line, you get to do exquisite quality control. Right? So they're grown in bottles and they're conditioned in such a way as to belong to certain castes and ultimately they're going to be socially conditioned to be happy with their cast and to be happy with the kind of work that they have to do. And it's nominally a utopia for the people who think that the world ought to be that way because it does away with a lot of displeasure and unhappiness.

So the unhappiness of not liking your status in society. But there are other factors as well. So the members of the society are inundated with pleasure, free love, a really good drug called soma that has no hangover, and it's a hallucinogenic, but only good trips and euphoric. And they're also conditioned in such a way that they don't have strong attachments, whether it's to books or art, culture or other human beings. In fact, there are no familial attachments. To be born is to be decanted from the bottle. And the incest taboo has been translated into just a horror.

This is one of the things I find funnier in the novel. People's horror at the very idea of what's called viviparity or having parents. Mother and father are bad words, but erotic play between children is perfectly okay. So we'll get a rationale for all this, which is that societal stability of society is not to self destruct. And people need to be happy in this kind of shallow way that the deeper stuff, the attachments to people and the meaningful stuff, that that actually is just not worth it. And the plot heightens that conflict that's addressed by the novel.

One of the main characters of the novel, Bernard, ends up bringing back the person who's arguably the actual protagonist, John the Savage from an Indian reservation in New Mexico. And so John the Savage hasn't been conditioned in the same way. And he, of course, like Bernard and another character, Helmholtz, they don't like this trade off that's been made in the brave new world. They would rather have freedom and individuality and. And other stuff, even if it means being unhappy. In fact, John the Savage says I have the right to be unhappy. So that's the question.

What's wrong with this? What's wrong with just having a world in which there's a bunch of instant gratification? What do we lose? And I thought that the novel brings out all of that really, really well.

7:41 Mark: All right, Mr. Dylan Patrick Casey.

7:44 Dylan: I haven't heard my middle name in a while. You know, there are a whole bunch of things that are really interesting in the book. To me, one of the most interesting Parts was late in the book. There is a riot that's instigated by John the Savage. It's really instigated by him trying to force everyone to be free, at least the Deltas to be free. And he's throwing out, removing their soma. And he gets picked up and gets into this conversation with Mustapha Mond, who is the Controller. And he has this very interesting conversation at the end of chapter 17 where he says, we prefer to do things comfortably.

And John says, 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, the Savage said 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 tomorrow, 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 that exchange makes me think a lot about the question of how external constraints fit with the internal forces that make us. And that's in some ways one of the big themes of the book, that balance between the constraints of our lives, whether they be put there on purpose or whether they're part of our environment and the internal motion that we have. How is that balance sorted? And in the book there's an emphasis on stability in the Controller's world.

And then, you know, you have people like Helmholtz and Savage that want liberty. And then there's this question of what is the manifestation of happiness? Is it contentment or is it flourishing? So along the way today, I want to discuss what that distinction is between conditioning and mechanization. That's in Brave New World and in training yourself. This has something to do with autonomy and liberty and the question of whether there's a kind of crossing function there, whether at what point are we enslaving ourselves by establishing constraints?

Certainly someone like John Savage thinks that that's happening. At what point are we enabling our own flourishing by constraint or training or discipline and cultivation? What is in what ways? Maybe from Mustafa Mann's point of view, not only are we making ourselves a more stable society, but arguably we are both happy and flourishing in our own way at that point.

10:22 Mark: All right, Seth. Fidel Paskin.

10:26 Seth: Okay. So probably like most of you, it's impossible for me to even talk or think about this book without also simultaneously thinking about 1984, because they're often contrasted as two different first part of the 20th century Dystopian visions of our future. And Neil Postman, who wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I recommend, wrote what Orwell feared was those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. As Huxley remarked in Brave New Worlds Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Both of those books were concerned with freedom and Huxley's concern. In Brave New World, he equates loss of freedom with loss of individuality, which is the absorbing of the individual into the social and the entire structure of the mechanism of the hatcheries and the conditioning, all that is designed to make you a perfect social being. But there's another element to it, which is consumerism, which is where the Ford connection brings in, that it's a perfect society of consumers and producers, as well as being socially conditioned. And I think when I reflect upon that as a vision of the future and we think about the ways in which we ourselves are socially conditioned and all the technologies that are helping to socially condition us, whether we know it or not, and how they're leveraged by corporations and people, that's a topic that's of interest to me.

And I'll end with this other quote also from the discussion between Mustapha Mond and John the Savage. John the Savage, by the way, the only book that he's ever read that he knows how to read and that he's memorized is the complete works of Shakespeare. So that's how he speaks. He uses Shakespearean phrases to respond. So they're having a discussion about Othello and whether it's good art or bad art and how it's better than the current art. He says Othello's good. Othello's better than those feelies. Of course it is, says the controller. But that's the price we have to pay for stability.

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed for high art. And I wanted to thank all of you coming today and sacrificing high art for our sake as well,

12:42 Mark: all right, folks, my primary interest in this. This is Mark again. Hi. I'm less worried about totalitarianism. Of course, you know, it's something to worry about, but that's already kind of top of mind for folks. We have books like this, we have books like 1984. We have lots of civil discourse going around to try to prevent totalitarianism. Maybe it won't be enough, but you know, it's out there. The more philosophically live issue for me is just about what constitutes human flourishing. And we've had quite a lot of philosophical history of people worrying about this.

And so if you go back to the early utilitarians and it's, it's happiness, it's even back to Epicurus. It seems obvious that people pursue pleasure, they avoid pain. Therefore, it seems like the starting point of an ethics should be that pleasure is good and pain is bad. And, and so if you just follow that forward a little bit, it becomes, well, if there's more than one of us, then the maximum pleasure for the maximum of people is the good and maximum pain for the maximum most people is the bad. Now we had within the history of utilitarianism, we go from Bentham to Mill, we have the idea of we can't allow that because that would make the pleasures of the swine reign supreme.

And that's what we should aim for. And that's essentially what's going on in this book. So we had the idea that, well, no, there are higher pleasures, there are lower pleasures, or maybe there are some people that are qualified to judge which are higher pleasures as opposed to other people that have less experience. And in this book we have purposefully stunting some people so that they cannot make those distinctions. So I'm worried about just in general, this relationship between pleasure and happiness more generally. And then you might think, well, even happiness, the difference between pleasure and happiness is often mapped out as well.

Pleasure is immediate, but you know, you drink some more, you do the pleasurable thing and then you find looking back on your week, your wasted week, you're maybe not so happy with what you chose. Well, these folks in this book, they are happy according to that retrospective self reflective analysis. So if we want to say that there's something wrong with that, then we have to go. So Nietzsche expresses mostly as flourishing. So even back to periscope, Aristotle. Yes, exactly that guy that it might be that there are, you know, Nietzsche

14:53 Wes: plays with that idea a little.

14:54 Mark: Yes, yes, Nietzsche goes crazy with it in that for Aristotle it is a empirically investigable thing. What is the good for human beings? You know, it turns out it's not what Brave New World is suggesting, but it is also something definite. Whereas for Nietzsche, it's maybe everybody is different. Maybe everybody's good is different. Maybe there is no way to maximize the good for people because what's good for me is not good for Wes, and we're good. Well, that's pretty true. I want to leave you with a quote from Nietzsche from Thus Spake Zarathustra about the last man, which I think is a very.

Maybe Nietzsche presaged what Huxley is talking about in this book. So here Nietzsche has just been talking about the overman, which is very complicated. What we think we're shooting for when we talk about values. What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? So asks the last man and. And blinks. We have discovered happiness, say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it is hard to live, for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. People still quarrel but are soon reconciled.

Otherwise it upsets their stomachs. A little poison now and then that makes for pleasant dreams and much poison at the end for a pleasant death. Everyone wants the same. Everyone is the same. He who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse. Formerly all the world was insane, say the subtlest of them, and they blink. So the training wheels are off.

16:16 Wes: Well, I like the way you framed it, because nominally, the way John the Savage frames it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Right? I claim the right to be unhappy. Who's going to claim the right to be unhappy, really? And, Mark, you made this clear. We're talking about different kinds of happiness. So we're trying to define a kind of flourishing or the state of being that we're aspiring to. And for Mustapha Mond, his argument is that stability requires this particular sort of happiness, which involves a lot of immediate gratification, which involves no deep attachments to people or to books and art and religion and all that stuff. I think it's a very live question. Well, why do we need all of that stuff anyway? Why do we need the deeper. What we call deeper?

17:03 Dylan: To me, it's kind of funny because it isn't really John the Savage that I would point to as the representative of that, even though, as you said, he's kind of the protagonist. It's Bernard and Helmholtz. They are disconcerted in the brave new world, and they're pushing against its constraints. And they aspire to a kind of liberty. Right.

17:21 Wes: The word individuality comes up a lot, too. Liberty and individuality.

17:25 Dylan: Yeah.

17:25 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

17:25 Dylan: And so they want to be themselves. Bernard is, at the beginning of the book, his big problem with his girlfriend is a. That he sort of has a girlfriend, that they are monogamous with each other, and then the other is that he wants to do private things. Right. That's one of the themes in there, that individuality. But John has a kind of corrupted view to me of what that relationship of flourishing would be like.

17:49 Wes: You don't like the self flagellation, do you?

17:52 Dylan: No, I don't like that because it's in the sense of only self punishing. It's not in the sense of suffering for doing something hard. It's because he's punishing himself as a sinner and he wants to suffer. His view is in order to do something noble, what he wants to aspire to, he has to suffer for it. And so, you know, he pushes away. And Lenina, even though he's, you know, lustfully. He says he's in love with her, right. But when she wants to have sex with him, he goes into a rage because she hasn't provided him the opportunity to suffer some ordeal.

That's the way he talks about it. An ordeal in order to prove himself worthy. And this continues on through the whole book, where I feel like his relationship with. I wanted. I was talking to Mark. I wanted to hesitate to even call him a protagonist in the sense of thinking he's admirable or I'd want to be like him. I identify with Helmholtz. Right. And not with Savage, with the smart guy.

18:46 Mark: We should do a quick character rundown just to. For the people that have not read the book at all, there's sort of a rotating cast of who's the protagonist. At the very beginning, when they're introducing the world, it's this guy, Henry Foster, who's leading you around. And it really sets it up like this is going to be the protagonist, but he's thrown away almost immediately.

19:04 Dylan: Half the book is that there's the

19:06 Wes: director, then there's Foster, then there's Bernard, right?

19:09 Mark: So Bernard Marx is the misfit. He's also an Alpha. They all have these Alpha through Epsilon, the Epsilon, semi morons, this caste system. And they all wear clothing to identify themselves. Bernard is also an Alpha, but people think maybe he had some alcohol put in his test tube or something because he's not quite right, that he has these antisocial desires.

19:31 Dylan: He likes to Sleep with only one woman at a time.

19:32 Wes: Well, also, he's not as good looking.

19:35 Dylan: He isn't as good looking?

19:36 Wes: Yeah.

19:36 Seth: He's shorter and he doesn't. He's not as good looking.

19:38 Wes: Yeah. That's the critical thing.

19:40 Unknown speaker: Right.

19:40 Mark: So being not measuring up to the societal norm is. Gives him the freedom to think outside the box. And it turns out that he doesn't stick with this. We really think this is the guy who's gonna be the protagonist. But he ends up being tested later in the book where he actually. When he finds John the Savage and sort of shows him off as kind of a pet at parties, then he's on the top of the social chain and he ends up like, I like this society just fine as long as I'm doing pretty well in it.

20:07 Wes: Well, not quite. So he does. He acts that way, but he also reserves the right to be a curmudgeon and to be hypercritical of society. So he invites people to these parties and then he berates them with his, you know, his version of a countercultural disgruntlement. It's all kind of superficial in the end. He doesn't have the, you know, he doesn't have the guts in the end, in the way that Helmholtz does.

20:28 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

20:28 Seth: Well, Bernard's job is to work on the hypno conditioning. So he is the one who says, okay, between the ages of 13 and 15, we're gonna. Every night you're gonna hear the same phrase over and over and over again. Like, more stitches means less riches. More stitches means less riches. Right. One gram is equal to 10. What is it, sentiments or something like that?

20:47 Wes: Yeah, dams.

20:48 Seth: Ten dams. Right. So that's his job. So he knows how the conditioning process takes place. So he has a certain perspective for discontent. And actually, yes, he wants monogamy, but he wants monogamy because he doesn't want to be seen in competition with the other alphas, who are better looking and taller than him. But what he really wants is solitude. So in this society, you're never alone. You're not allowed to be alone. It's orchestrated so that you're constantly with somebody else and all of your activities are coordinated. And he just wants to go on a walk in the park.

And everybody thinks he's a freak because he wants to do that. Helmholtz is somebody who creates content for the feelies, the movies and Helmholtz's complaint. I think if you were looking for your Nietzsche archetype, he's a better candidate. He doesn't experience anything so he can't write anything. How do you write great art? How does he make a movie when there's nothing to talk about? Right. It's just helicopter stories and golf and whatever else happens.

21:41 Dylan: So he wants to write piercingly.

21:44 Seth: He wants to write piercingly, those two. I think I agree with you. I don't think John is the protagonist. Weird. I think Helmholtz is. I think in some respect, even though it's a much smaller part, very small part. But he's the one who's actually satisfied with his punishment at the end as well.

21:58 Wes: Just one thing about Bernard, though. He is more of a complex character. So he's not just, you know, I called him superficial and you're pointing out some other things, Seth. There is some complexity. So his desire for solitude is actually related to his desire for deeper relationships. So for instance, he takes. Is it Lenina or Lenina? We never discussed Lenina. Lenina. We'll call it Lenina.

22:18 Mark: But it's like for Vladimir Illich Lenin, like all these names. Bernard Marx. Yes. Fidel Paskin.

22:25 Wes: Yeah. So he takes her out. I think this is the scene when he takes her out in the helicopter and then brings it just above the waves. And it's a. I think there's a storm or something. It's kind of a sublime moment, which she hates. Like she wants to listen to the elevator music that's coming out of the radio. That's what's pleasurable for her. And he says something like, I thought we could be more together here, away from other people. So the solitude that he wants, it's solitude from the superficial relationships to members of the community and something that's deeper with just her.

And I think the same thing with sexual exclusivity. Everyone belongs to everyone is the motto. And people have each other. Hey, did you have that person? Great. I'm going to have her as well. I'm going to have him. They basically just objectify each other with abandon. And he wants something predicated on arresting his impulses, on not just objectifying, not just acting on an immediate impulse to use someone else's sexual gratification. And I think he thinks that mate exclusivity has something to do with that. So he complains a lot about her being thought of as a piece of meat by the other men.

And then he complains about her thinking of herself that way. So I think that that's the role that plays.

23:41 Mark: One of the literary tools used here is to spell out in a way that I think actual participants in this society would not that there's something wrong. So they don't just talk about. They use the word surrogate. It's a beer surrogate. Like you would just call it beer if they came up with a new beer that was better than beer. So they have this VPS treatment, which is violent passion surrogate. So, you know, they recognize that people have the need. They can't just be ataraxic, calm all the time. You need to have some so that you can actually just chemically induce this to have.

Oh, did you have your violent passion? Did you have your pregnancy substitute? All women are recommended to have these things. Just the fact they call it pregnancy substitute, they don't just call it, you know, make up a new word that might even be like a nice catchy marketing word. Like that's how it would actually be done in a society like this. It's a pregnancy substitute, which itself connotes something that is forbidden to talk about. So that's kind of weird in this context. I want to bring that up, that they make the point that your behavior is required to be adult, like when you're on the job, but infantile when you're in emotional relationships.

So this is why you can't have deep connections with other people. So they're even acknowledging in their own language. It's not like there's a newspeak that is created, you know, so this is the norm. They're saying, we recognize the difference between you performing at your full adult capacity in your work life, but now it is your duty to be infantile, to admit only the lowest forms, most immediate forms of pleasure in your regular life. So I don't know. I think it's a mistake that the controllers would put clues like that, that there's some higher way.

25:14 Dylan: But you don't think that that transparency is part of the success of it, because that transparency means that everybody. It's transparency down to the values. You change the values so that you don't value personal relationships in the same way. You make it so that mothers and terms like mother and father are kind of smutty terms. Right. People are embarrassed by use the force of social convention to rescale those things.

25:39 Seth: Yeah. It's important to Huxley that people are aware that there's an alternative, but they actively choose the life they have. They want their servitude, they want to be the way they are and they're horrified. Of course, this is all through conditioning, right? Everybody except the Alphas even never even gets the chance to question this. But the idea is that it's actually more powerful method of control. If you voluntarily. Or at least believe you're voluntarily choosing it. Versus having the boot on your neck.

26:06 Dylan: But how different is that really? I mean, this is one of the things that was really interesting to me. Is that it's conditioning. And it seems undeniable that you have conditioning of this sort. Maybe not this extreme. Right. And the caste system. Not as extreme as it is here. But you have people in the whole world. There are people of different kinds of abilities. And different ranges of them. And you have conditioning of different sorts in different communities. That put rails on our lives. And we're bumping up against them all the time. And there's a kind of extreme form here that leads that.

The argument is that that leads to stability. Without that, we're going to have chaos. That's part of it, but part of the fact that. Of the conditioning being integral to making you who you are is true. And what's jarring and offensive about it for us is the Fordism of it. Right. Putting that conditioning on an assembly line. And generating a product out of a human soul. It offends us because of. Because while we're partisans of liberty. That's what it comes down to. We're partisans of freedom.

27:06 Wes: It has to do with the nature of the conditioning.

27:07 Unknown speaker: Right.

27:08 Wes: There's a great quotation at the end of chapter two. From the director talking about hatcheries. That's right. And conditioning. And so he's talking about hypnopedia. And the use of suggestions to create a person, essentially, so he says, till at last the child's mind is these suggestions. This is page 26, by the way. And the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind, only the adult's mind, too. All his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides. Made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions. The director almost shouted in his triumph. Suggestions from the state. Part of it is just all of us are products of various types of conditioning. You know, growing up in a certain time and place. Cultural conditioning, conditioning from parents and from peers and all these things.

28:02 Unknown speaker: And.

28:02 Wes: And the question is, though, whether some of our education actually helps us become freer. We talked a lot about this in our liberal arts episode. If there isn't some room for human freedom. And if conditioning can't paradoxically create the circumstances. Where we become more than the product of conditions. So this sort of conditioning, though, just reduces everything to itself.

28:27 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

28:27 Dylan: And isn't that what we would mean by flourishing, that's one thing I would mean by flourishing is that you're able to become more than your conditioning.

28:33 Unknown speaker: Right?

28:33 Dylan: But what about John the Savage's conditioning? We hear this proclamation of the state of the conditioning. But I always found myself it's not spoken about that way because of course it's not centralized in the same way. But he's conditioned himself, right? He's conditioned by all this Shakespeare where all he remembers are the quotes about horrors and beating people up. Right? You know.

28:57 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

28:57 Wes: So you should. I knew you wouldn't like Johnson.

28:59 Mark: Ask the question how this conditioning that is conscious by the state is related to the kind of things that we do intentionally to ourselves. And we've had discussions about Stoicism and Buddhism and all these other things where the idea is, you know, we are conditioned by evolution. We have a built in programming and it was not really to make us flourish, it was just made to make us have kids, you know, to maximize our survival potential long enough to have kids. But it is not a foolproof system that there's something fatally flawed in sort of our innate conditioning.

So on that grounds, you might say you should use philosophy to rewrite the operating system of your mind. You can live more healthily, you can have better habits. Certainly I know from experience that if you simply eat whenever you feel like, if you simply obey your every whim, perhaps that's not the most conscientious way. Perhaps some self programming should be in order. And you know, of course there's a difference between self programming and the state doing it to you. But we also feel like if we figured out what is the good for people to some extent, then, well, your kids are going to be influenced by something.

You could let it just be the bad apples at school who are telling them what's what, or you could make some conscientious, you know, raise them in religion or raise them with a philosophy. Raise them with an ethical code. Raise them in some way you're essentially doing, hopefully not by whispering in their. In their ears as they sleep. Be a good boy. Be a good boy. Be a good. It is simply irresponsible to let nature take its random course. To go with what the long journey of evolution has pounded into us, that maybe you should do something intentional.

And in the story, the reason the society came about is because they had such bad wars. They had the Seven Years War, the Nine Years War, the Nine Years War,. That after that people, you know, this was on the table. We can create a society, we can condition, but most of the populace did not want anything to do with this, not surprisingly, but after enough war, they were willing to assent to it. So essentially, there is a social contract in place. It's not that these citizens right now agreed, but past citizens agreed. We as a species would be better off under this conditioning, just like we might think it's safer to make.

Okay, I'm gonna program myself to eat better. Like that's pretty harmless, hopefully. But where is the cutoff in terms of then doing it for your kids, doing it for posterity here, because you've determined scientifically that this actually is what brings happiness.

31:24 Seth: This is what I was trying to get at in my opening remarks is I think this is a brilliant and horrifying extended meditation on if you wanted to have a peaceful world, if you wanted to have a peaceful society, what would that cost you? If you want to live without war, what's that going to cost? Well, you think it's going to cost fine art. It's going to cost individuality, it's going to cost parents. It's going to cost monogamy or individual relationships. It's going to cost nature. And this is Huxley telling us human nature inevitably leads to war. And later on he'd say fascism, totalitarianism. It's just that it's our nature. So you want flourishing? Well, you're going to flourish your way, all the way into servitude that you don't love. I honestly believe that that's the warning of the book.

32:09 Wes: Yeah. There are certain good and evil things that are structurally connected to each other. You need strife. You need unhappiness to have happiness in this deeper, larger sense. You need strife. You need suffering in order to get these other things.

32:26 Dylan: You think that Huxley is warning us that we better become Fordists?

32:32 Seth: No, no, no, no.

32:33 Dylan: Okay.

32:34 Seth: No, no, no. I think he's warning us as saying that what we are as human beings lends itself not only to the creation of art. Right. You could say that the protagonist of this book is actually Shakespeare. If you wanted to. You could look at it that way, because he's describing all the things that we think of as essentially human. And he's the architect of drama in our. In our modern world, tragedy and so forth. But what I think he's trying to say is the things that make us human, the things that drive us, that make us upset, that allow us to create ourselves as individuals, to self realize, are also the things that can be manipulated by others to create.

And as we encounter more and more people and we have More and more stresses on our society. We're more susceptible to manipulation by powers that be to take advantage of that. And so his escape from that is to say you can actually escape. You can't take away human nature and create a society that is human anymore. This isn't really a human society.

33:30 Wes: And we've seen this before, right? So in our discussion of Rousseau, for instance, the thing that makes us human, self consciousness through the eyes of others, means we're sensitive to the consciousness of others and we have a desire to control it, we have a desire to influence it. And so we become interested in status and interested in power. So the very thing that makes us human and leads to us, leads to the good things we do to the higher things also leads us in the other direction. You get rid of one and means you get rid of the other. You could be an animal.

You could go back to the Rousseauian noble savage, right? But that is pre linguistic. You don't even have language at that point. And arguably the frustration and suffering, they're necessary even to having a mind. They're certainly necessary to sublimation, which we associate with the higher forms of pleasure that Mark was mentioning in the beginning. And arguably our relationships are kinds of sublimation. So we have to control, restrain our impulses in a variety of ways to not just write books, but to have real relationships with people and to use language to have fantasies.

All sorts of things are predicated on the concept of frustration and suffering.

34:47 Mark: Talking about the sublimation relationships of a form of sublimation, I want to throw in a quote that he gives, page 152. The context is Bernard has John the Savage that he brought back from the savage land from the New Mexican reservation and is showing him off. And they have a little bit of a tumultuous relationship. And Huxley says one of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer in a milder and symbolic form the punishments that we should like but are unable to inflict upon our enemies. So the fact that, you know, Bernard is really mad at the whole society, he wants to, but he can't.

The people in power are not even going to understand if he curses at him, they're just going to say, you're a loon. But John Savage at least has the human understanding that it's effective to insult him. So having some pain in that, it just seemed interesting that that was a remainder in a society where thumos the spiritedness is they systematically attempt to drive it out. Maybe it's just that in the Alphas, in leaving them the ability to think rationally, to actually do high level jobs. You can't, as you were saying, like having the rational stuff, being a really smart computer of a person, you actually still get the thumos, the spirited part, the status seeking, that those are somehow inseparable.

And so that's one place where we see Bernard, you know, exerting his will to power in his little petty way.

36:08 Wes: This is important because you might accuse Huxley of forgetting about the fact that more motivates people than pleasure and even stability and calm, right? This status seeking spiritedness and status seeking part of people is really important. And that's why there's a caste system, right? Huxley has to solve that problem. And all this conditioning in the bottle. If you want to set up this sort of dystopia, you have to figure out the problem of status, which of course it doesn't really work in the end, but.

36:37 Dylan: Well, it doesn't work because, I mean, that's in fact where the conflict in the whole book comes from, right? Is you have Bernard, who's seeking the status from individual relationships. That's sort of what's happening with him. His individuality is articulated by him having his own privacy, but also a commitment from one woman, right? And he gets some status out of it. Helmholtz wants to write piercingly, right? He wants, wants to distinguish himself from that. He wants some status out of that. Mond is an alpha, Alpha plus. Maybe he's an alpha plus plus.

He's Apple double plus. He makes the decision rather than being exiled because of his interest in being free to become a controller. And that is his way of distinguishing himself. It's almost like within his own little community of Alphas and John the Savage, he wants the status, right? He wants status of being noble in his particular way. I mean, this is where the conflicts for all of them come from. To me, like an obvious next question, which I was glad Huxley wrote about, is, well, why do you have to have the caste system at all? Why can't you just have a world of alpha pluses?

He addresses this. Because they make a world of alpha pluses. This is an early experiment and there's just all this fighting and they decide in order to have a stable society that can be flourishing in stability, you have to have the iceberg principle. You have to, you have to have. Is 1/9 of it is above the water, 8/9 of it is below. And the 8/9 are the ones who are cast. And in some funny way, the alphas aren't cast in the same way as even the Betas. Lenina is a Beta, but particularly the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons.

38:10 Seth: Right. So the experiment that Dylan refers to Is they put 22,000 alphas on Cyprus, the island, and some of them got assigned to be laborers on the land and some got to work in factories and some were in charge and they were allowed to like, just go on their own way. And of course, there was civil war because the people working the land were like, why don't I have the good job? And 19,000 people die during the Civil War. And the remaining 6,000 or however many are left, petition the government to come back in. Love your servitude.

38:39 Mark: This reminds me so much of the debates now about how well socialism or communism might work.

38:43 Seth: Well, I think that's why he needs the caste system and why you need the conditioning is that he's looking. I mean, Soviet Union hadn't really gotten off even by. No, but this is 1932, right?

38:52 Mark: No, no, it's that you see this, this now that like if you even mention, you know, we should have nationalized health care, well, it's going to be like Stalin's Russia, because we tried it. We already tried communism. Like, okay, well, they did one thing with the Alphas, but maybe they shouldn't have made some of them full time laborers. Maybe they should, as Marx recommended, have have them rotate so each person has a little bit of the crap.

39:14 Dylan: Everybody has to do the shitty job.

39:15 Seth: Welcome to your job rotation.

39:19 Mark: I mean, to be fair, he did say so in the preface to the second edition, I think, 1948, something like that. He says, look, I wasn't actually fair in presenting in a black and white. Either you're gonna have the brave new world society or you're gonna have typhoid and savagery. You know what he shows on the reservation that really in the book? They send Helmholtz and Bernard Marx to an island, to Iceland or somewhere like that, to live with all. Everybody who's anybody. Is the way Mustapha man puts it that, you know, if your thoughts are too out of line with the society that you're detrimental to have around, you're gonna cause social unrest. They don't kill you, they just send you to an island and you get to live together and have a society. So how that is gonna be different than the 22,000, you know, is never spelled out. There's no details about.

40:05 Wes: Well, they're not self sufficient. They're not. I'm sure none of them are farmers, you know.

40:09 Seth: Yeah, I'm sure they have a support system. It actually is the Republic.

40:12 Wes: It's parachuted in. The supplies are just dropped.

40:15 Mark: So he said if he wrote the book again, he would include the third option of, like, what? The Brave New World of. It almost sounds like the Atlas Shrugged. All the actual producers go off on their own and get away.

40:27 Seth: But I don't think. I don't think it's like that. I think it's more like if you guys were parachuted into an island with the four of us and had to spend the rest of your life listening to us talk about things.

40:36 Wes: Be like a Lord of the Flies type situation.

40:39 Seth: I have the conch.

40:42 Mark: Mustapha Mond is the world controller, and he kind of pulls back the curtain at the end and talks to John Savage, talks to Helmholtz, talks to Bernard about the rationale behind the society and about this experiment. And he's taken to be someone that is wise that he maybe was going to get sent to an island like that. But he actually chose to embrace the system, but he's allowed to break the rules at will. He can read Shakespeare, he can read the Bible. He has all of the world's intellectual history at his fingertips, but he still goes with the system.

Which, you know, when you think about in ethics, about, you know, I would know what the good for you is. If I imagine a person who has all the relevant information, whatever that person decides the good is, that is the good, or. Or whatever scientists would eventually, in an infinite amount of time agree on. Let's call that scientific truth, or at least abstractions like that. Well, Mustapha Mond is portrayed as that person that. What he's saying, this is at least the way I interpreted it as I read it initially, is truth that he is putting forward what Huxley's ideas are.

And this is why we say this is not purely a dystopia. Huxley himself was in favor of central planning about quite a lot of things, you know, and this is why this whole thing just might be tragic that it inevitably leads to stuff like this. However, I think maybe this is not a truly a good thought experiment of what if we knew what was good for human beings and nationalized it, universalized it, forced it on people through ways that got at them before they're even conscious enough to make decisions. In this book, Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote in 1958, where he reflects at length, chapter by chapter, on the different technologies and the different.

He actually points to a philosophical mistake that Mustapha Mond is making that you're assuming that as Wes was pointing out in reading that quote about with the Hypnopedia, your mind, the child's mind becomes nothing but the suggestions that assumes a Lockean tabula rasa. There is nothing in your mind. Everybody is at least at the same starting point. We're all brought into being by the same evolutionary chain. And so we, we're all basically the same. And that's why it's okay to have a one size fits all happiness machine that will push us up.

And Huxley says he actually thinks that is wrong, that he follows Nietzsche instead of Aristotle, that if there is something biologically different about each of us, then our individual teleologies are necessarily going to push us in different ways. And so any society wide attempt to universalize, to make uniform the treatment of people to reaching their fullest potential. I'm using air quotes for people that are listening is going to necessarily be a crime against human nature because human nature is not unitary in this way. We are not a tabula rasa.

We are biologically different.

43:24 Seth: All right, well he may very well have said that, but in that same essay, the series of Revisited, he talks about all the things he can't remember about what he wrote about. Like he can't remember this, he can't remember that. And I think in Brave New World he introduces this notion of what he calls Bokanovsky groups. So they're taking one embryo and they're dividing it over and over and over again to make twins. It's actually the thing that horrifies John the Savage when he throws the soma out the window is there's all of these Delta workers and it's all the same person, all the same face of the damned.

43:53 Mark: Like everybody the same white eyes staring at you.

43:56 Seth: Yeah, it's like the Matrix. So the, you know, I think he accounted for that to some extent. Is that. Again, this is why I think it's the most terrifying description of like a dystopian future. What is part of what you would have to do is not just sublimate or destroy human nature, but you would essentially have to get rid of human diversity. There's only a few strains of genetic material left that make up these huge classes of people. Scare quotes. Whose job it is, is to keep society moving. And we're at 5. I just wanted to say, because I could go on about consumerism and all that stuff I really want to talk about.

44:29 Mark: So we're not going to shut down our ever voyaging mines here, but we are going to Invite folks there to join us to make a comment, to pretend that you are sitting next to Dylan there on that uncomfortable little table and that you have your own microphone. And Ann, our wonderful host here, is going to. Folks want to raise hands or anybody that wants to chime in, who wants to be first? Come on, somebody, be first. And if anybody wants to even just turn around at the camera and wave to the world, it's right up there, just like, hello, world.

45:01 Unknown speaker: So some.

Hello.

45:04 Mark: I'm bravely saying hello to the world. What is your name? I'm Jesse. Hi, Jesse.

45:09 Unknown speaker: Hi.

45:10 Mark: So sorry.

45:12 Unknown speaker: Go ahead.

45:13 Mark: I was hoping we would talk about Soma a little bit more. If this drug were invented tomorrow, how do you think it would work in our society? Like, should it be controlled in a certain way? I just kind of want to throw that hand grenade in the room and walk away.

45:28 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

45:28 Wes: And we should remember Soma isn't just any drug. Right?

45:31 Dylan: It's a perfect drug.

45:32 Mark: Let me say Soma Gram. That's a great idea.

45:35 Wes: There's no hangover. And, you know, even though Linda, John the Savage's mother, takes too much of it when she gets back, that's the thing she misses the most, I think about.

45:46 Dylan: She goes on a Soma holiday.

45:47 Wes: She does. On a binge. I don't think there's any indication that you could actually be addicted to it. He's trying to depict something that's completely cost free in any of the typical senses now, that there are going to be costs ultimately. But it's more subtle than that.

46:01 Seth: He frequently mentions Soma in connection with Christianity. Right. So it's like, well, they had God and they had souls and they had all this, but they still got drunk, right? And they still.

46:11 Wes: He calls it Christianity without the tears.

46:13 Seth: It's Christianity without the tears. It's all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol with none of their defects. So it's not just numbing you to the pains of the world, because there are no pains in the world. It's the way to put transcendence, or your connection to something bigger than yourself, that's not social into a pill so you can escape yourself into someplace where you connect to some bigger idea.

46:35 Dylan: It is about regulating the pains of the world, though it's not that all the pains have gone. Soma is integral to regulating it. So when you are beginning to suffer, one of the things you do is you take. Take Soma to moderate that experience.

46:48 Seth: Right.

46:48 Dylan: And so you blunt it. It's another dimension of regulating the. Well, okay, the suffering and the Pain outside of your own conditioning. So you have your conditioning that's happened to you and then the residual parts of it, like you feel bad about, you know, you're feeling some attachment and you're kind of feeling bad about the fact that the woman that you've been sleeping with or the man that you've been sleeping with is going off with somebody else. You take some soma and you deal with that pain.

47:13 Unknown speaker: Right?

47:14 Wes: Yeah. What you said about it, working together with conditioning is really important. So, for example, Bernard, who resists Soma through much of the novel, but after he comes back to London with John the Savage and everything falls apart and he's miserable. He takes like 4 grams, which is a good amount, and half a gram through his disappointment for a while, but then he wakes up not with a hangover, but miserable. So. But Bernard is an exception. Right. If you've been socially conditioned properly, then soma should get you through the troubles. And then you wake up and it's like everything's wiped clean and you just begin again. But for him, he's an unusual person and so it doesn't work because he's already a person who's capable of envy, capable of wanting something more. His conditioning has failed and so Soma can't succeed fully either.

48:02 Dylan: The other person that it fails for is John the Savage. Right at the end of the book, they have another riot and then it becomes a violent orgy porgy and he wakes from a Soma stupor and then he wakes and realizes what had happened and in shame kills himself.

48:19 Mark: Yeah. What did you think about that? He's set himself in opposition to society. His friends have been sent off to the island and he's by himself in a lighthouse. Yep, living on his own. And he's discovered by the paparazzi basically that he likes to go out. And as the folks in his reservation did flagellate himself. And he is filmed doing this and it becomes a.

48:41 Wes: By a big game photographer.

48:43 Mark: Yes. Yo. So more people come back. Somebody disguises as.

48:47 Wes: You can't just walk up to John the Savage. You gotta know what you're doing.

48:49 Mark: Somebody disguises as a tree or something. He's out there for four days and the paparazzi, the most dedicated paparazzi, actually makes this new film of the flagellation into a. A full on feely that is distributed everywhere. So becomes world famous. He is swarmed and they're yelling him, use the whip. Use the whip. Like, you know, say your catchphrase, just like they used to say to Gary Coleman. Say what you talk about Willis. Say what you talk about Willis. And he would whip himself. You know, there was. There was similar stuff going on. And then it's only when Lenina shows up with her new boyfriend at the time, Henry.

With Henry, okay. Then he's thrown into a frenzy and he's not going to, you know, dance like a monkey for their amusement. But he's put over the top, this person he's put so much of his emotional energy into, perhaps wrongly, according to Mustapha Mond. And we see Mustafa Mand's theory in action that if you dam up something for too long, it's going to burst into passion. And so he is not able to control himself and ends up whipping her, some whipping himself. And then everybody's whipping each other and it becomes this giant orgy and he ends up taking a lot of Soma.

And I mean, did you feel like that was in character for him that he'd be so out of control that he could not just whip her, whip himself, run in, slam the door, but that he could actually join in an orgy porgy and take a lot of Soma? I call bullshit on that.

50:08 Seth: Well, I also call bullshit on it because I'm a little confused about. And we're a little off the Soma topic, guys.

50:14 Wes: We'll get back to it.

50:16 Seth: Is that guy who captures him on film creates a feely out of this. So that means people went to the theater and they actually experienced the sensation of being flagellated.

50:26 Dylan: And they liked it.

50:26 Seth: And they liked it, they craved it. So it's actually. I don't know if it was intended this way, but it seems like it's a huge disruptive act. It's a. It's a violent, revolutionary act where people are literally coming together in a giant group to have a massive sex orgy about being flagellated.

50:42 Dylan: It's like a magnetic Dionysian, I mean, bacchanalia.

50:46 Mark: But isn't that how all the Feelies are like that they're watching like sperm whales fuck. Like that's like, seriously, they're not watching

50:52 Seth: sperm whales flagellate themselves. There's no mention of the Feelies that are like, hey, here's the crash version of Feelies. Or what's that Cronenberg film where the guy's fetish about cutting off limbs or something like that? Like, hey, let's go to the limb severance feely. I just, I don't get it. The whole ending, that part confused me. Him committing suicide made perfect sense.

51:18 Wes: So does that answer your question? About someone. Did you have more to Jesse was

51:23 Mark: asking about what if it was legalized now?

51:26 Wes: Yeah. Would we take it?

51:27 Mark: Well, I think he didn't understand the difference between physical addiction and psychological addiction. Right. So even if you say that some drugs or some activities, clicking on the thing on your phone is not physically addicting, it's. It still could be psychologically addicting. And clearly this would be psychologically addicting. And it is shown as psychologically addicting there. You can't just say, I'm not gonna take soma anymore.

51:48 Wes: But even. But it's not that bad to be psychologically addicted to something if it's good for you. It's like being psychologically addicted to spinach. You know, the question is whether it does the trick. Is it good for you? That's up for argument. The effects of soma, right, Are to make us shallow. Ultimately, that's the argument. They prevent. They prevent the pain, but they also prevent deeper attachments.

52:11 Mark: I think you're being insensitive to people that have papitis.

52:14 Dylan: Part of the deal is to learn how to crave the right things. Right. That's part of what we would think of as good conditioning. And that's what you're referring to is you made it about spinach. Right. But we wouldn't think it'd be a bad thing to crave the right things at the right amount. That's what we would talk about.

52:29 Wes: Be a virtue.

52:30 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

52:31 Mark: I'm addicted to moderation.

52:33 Seth: Well, but in this case serves a very critical part in the society itself. Because like you say, if you're an alpha, maybe a beta plus, and some doubts creep in or you're feeling a little uncomfortable, the SOMA can take you away from that. But he mentions at another point about how they experimented with a three hour work day for the Deltas and the Epsilons or whatever. And like giving people more free time actually made them just take soma. They just like got drugged because they couldn't handle the reality of having more free time. So SOMA is a way to basically, if you're not working, you're not fucking, you're not playing electromagnetic golf, you're not doing any of these things and you have any free time left over. Well, you can always get away from your own individuality and your thoughts by taking soma.

53:19 Mark: That was another thing to sort of call bullshit on. I think that the idea of we could reduce the workday. But he only talks about it in terms of the Deltas, the people who had radiation applied to their embryos before they were born. So they would be stunted and not have the capacity for self reflection or anything like that. But it seems like Bernard, people like him, maybe giving them more free time might be healthy. It's not even addressed.

53:42 Dylan: That's why you go to an island.

53:44 Seth: Yeah, it is addressed. We orchestrate society so that you are never alone. There should be no solitude. That's why everybody belongs to everybody and why there's so many. It's the same thing day in and day out.

53:55 Mark: I guess it's just that even for the Alphas, all the jobs are constructed so that they will be very low impact. They will be very comfortable. Maybe they encourage on the job flirtation. As long as you're spouting the things you were conditioned to spout then, like slacking off a little. Like there's definitely, as you said, they could introduce labor saving devices. They could lower the work week, but that would lower production. But they pump up consumer demand to require production.

54:20 Seth: Like there's no. He says we could make everything much cheaper and easier with machines. Yeah, but people need to work.

54:26 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

54:27 Seth: Couldn't we just do with less people? Like, why would we do that? Well, then how do people make money? How do the corporations and all that make money? We need consumers. He goes through this whole thing where he's talking about how we need growth.

54:40 Wes: There needs to be a constant rate of growth. This is something that Ford talked about, that Huxley has picked up on.

54:44 Seth: Yeah, exactly. And that's one of the things he talks about how at one point they condition the lower class workers to love nature. And the problem is they go and they hang around in nature instead of buying things. They don't stay in the cities and buy things. They just go wander around the trees. But the reason they did that was to encourage them to consume transport. So they did take the train, but they ended up just wandering around looking at the swans and whacking.

55:08 Mark: And they did nothing but take the train.

55:10 Seth: And they did nothing but take the train. So he says, well, here's what we did. We solved that problem by encouraging them and training them to love country sports. So if you're thinking about England, just think about the soccer stadiums, right? So it's like. And we won because not only did they consume transportation, but then when they got there, they consumed, you know, jerseys and food and beer and whatever else

55:31 Wes: created an aversion to nature. There's that great scene with the babies crawling towards the flowers and then they give them an electric shock. So they train everyone not to, like Flowers and books.

55:44 Mark: Let's get another question or comment one over here.

55:48 Unknown speaker: Hey, everyone, I'm Scott.

55:50 Dylan: Hi, Scott.

55:51 Unknown speaker: First off, thanks for your work. It's been so delightful to listen to y' all for so long.

Thanks.

55:59 Mark: May it be Soma for your soul.

56:03 Unknown speaker: I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit more about Linda, because she kind of holds the bridge between the individual and the collective, like in the dualism and non dualism, and holds the mother archetype. So I was just kind of curious if you could speak a little bit more about Linda.

56:21 Mark: Before you give the mic back, could you say a little more about what you mean by dualism and non dualism?

56:25 Unknown speaker: Dualism and non dualism in relation to the saying everybody is there for everybody else, that it kind of assumes that how is there a someone there there if everybody else belongs to somebody else? There's like a breakdown of the individual in that saying. So I'm curious if you could speak about how Linda participates in being able so that we can even understand to be able to talk about the individual and the collective. Because seemingly in this book there is an individual, but there's a cell.

56:54 Seth: Right?

56:55 Unknown speaker: Exactly. Thanks.

56:56 Mark: I really like pointing that out that, you know, thinking of this in Hegelian terms, Hegel's idea that in order to be recognized as a person, you have to have, you know, somebody looking in your eyes, somebody who is a full person that you can bounce off of and acknowledge your personhood. And hopefully your parents and your other formative influences are not just spouting the company line and they can serve in that way. But it seems like unless you're hanging around with Mustapha Mond or John the Savage, that you're not getting that feedback that you are, you never gain full personhood.

And yeah, that seems to exactly to describe the way that he's describing the society. That's one of the reasons that even if you're an alpha plus, you know, unless you're having these alone time with another person and kind of reflecting on wise things together and reflecting on each other's how well you know each other as individuals, nobody cares about knowing each other as an individual here. It's not that important because individuality is not valued.

57:45 Wes: Well, you're reminding me of a really important scene where Linda is dying and John has gone to her side. And so this goes towards both Soma and this idea of being seen by the other other people and the importance of that. So. So she's dying and there's a comic element to the scene because you have all these 8 year olds being deconditioned to death, right? They're being given chocolate eclairs and you know, death is no big deal.

58:13 Dylan: And it's like an institute for the dying. So there's lots of people. She's there and you can.

58:19 Wes: It's a hospice, basically.

58:20 Unknown speaker: Yes.

58:20 Dylan: But you can imagine a nursery school led by a teacher wandering around and children are just going around and they

58:28 Wes: already think it's no big deal. And they don't understand why he's grieving for her. Death is supposed to be no big deal. And he's realizing that through the haze of Soma, she doesn't really know him anymore. She doesn't know John. He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories back into the present, back into reality, the appalling present, the awful reality, but sublime, but significant, but desperately important. But precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.

Don't you know me, Linda? So this is one of the things we lose when you surfeit people with pleasures. This is one of the things I thought about reading this book is you compromise people's ability to know each other, to see and be seen. And that's just another way in which you compromise humanity.

59:23 Seth: I'm glad you mentioned Linda too. She might actually be the real tragic figure in some respect. So Linda's from the society, the official society, and she goes on a tour of the reservation, goes on vacation at the New Mexican reservation and falls down a ravine or something like that, and this is 20 years ago or whatever it is, and they go looking for her, but they can't find her. And she gets found by the Indians and then they gave it like 30

59:48 Wes: minutes and then they take off pretty

59:49 Seth: much something like that they didn't like

59:51 Mark: to sell in the social body.

59:53 Seth: It's true, it's true. So she ends up living in the pueblo with the Indians on the reservation. But she has this morality of the world society. So she doesn't understand monogamy and marriage and all this. And so she just sleeps with any of the men in the tribe, which of course makes her extremely popular with the men and unpopular with the women. But then she gives birth.

1:00:16 Dylan: I mean, but as importantly, it's to her boyfriend from the civilization.

1:00:22 Seth: Yeah, the kid is 100%. 100% from. You know, it's not like he's got Indian genetics. But imagine having the experience of not having Any idea what birth was? And it not having actually been a thing in the world for 400 years and then you gave birth. I mean, that would freak you out. And then she somehow manages to raise this kid and survive long enough to keep him from being killed because they're both outcasts and she has one book to teach him how to read because they're speaking a different language and it's the complete works of Shakespeare.

1:00:57 Dylan: Two books.

1:00:58 Seth: Two books. Oh, and her manual for whatever job she had back then.

1:01:01 Dylan: Yes, that's what he starts with.

1:01:03 Seth: Yeah. And so, you know, and then when they get discovered by Bernard, she's all too happy to escape and come back and just go on the Soma holiday until she dies. Because she's been in hell, at least from her perspective, misunderstood and misunderstanding and just tortured. And she's physically decrepit too. That's another thing we didn't talk about was the way they've done the genetics. You live until you're about 60, that's as long as you get. But you look pretty much like a live 16 or 17 year old or something like that for the entire time. Like they maintain your youthful good looks and all that stuff. So she's a horrifying spectacle because she's lost teeth and she has flabby arms and stretch marks and all that kind of thing. So it's very sad. I don't know that she plays a role. There's a morality play here that she plays a role, but she's certainly a tragic figure.

1:01:51 Wes: Hi.

1:01:52 Seth: Thank you. And pardon me, because I have not read the book, so it may be like a fake. It misguided question, but I'm curious if Aldous Huxley is depicting like a communist or a capitalist dystopia or neither or both.

1:02:06 Mark: That is interesting because all the stuff about consumerism, the way this gets brought to the modern ages, of course the. The corporations want to pump you up and make you a good consumer, but there are no corporations that are independent of the state here. And so it's not like Mustapha Mond is enriching himself like he is a selfless servant. There's not a secret cabal behind that is we need to make consumers so they all the wealth trickles up. Like that's not it. It really is more because this is what makes for a stable state.

1:02:33 Dylan: Statecraft has learned from Fordism.

1:02:35 Mark: It's not a critique of capitalism. There's no competition for products, but it has the consumers part of it. Without the capital structure and the Illuminati

1:02:45 Wes: Yeah, it's hard to fit this into any, just a critique of capitalism or a critique of communism. And then we talked about the sense in which we didn't think there's really a protagonist of the various main characters or partial protagonists or not entirely protagonists. And Huxley himself says he's basically ambivalent in that preface to the 1946 edition. You know, he doesn't have hard and fast views on the trade offs. He's actually genuinely exploring an idea here. Which reminds me, like there's something Mustapha Mond says when John the Savage, during this final meeting after they've, they're getting ready to be exiled, when Mons first walks in, he says something like, he'd make it like a great Bond villain because he, he says, so you don't like civilization much, do you, Mr. Savage? Which would be a great line in a Bond movie.

1:03:29 Mark: He doesn't even have a full.

1:03:30 Wes: John the Savage goes, actually there are some nice things about it.

1:03:35 Mark: I like the music, I like the tunes.

1:03:37 Wes: So even John the Savage is willing to admit there are some positives to the way they do things. It's unclear, I think some of these trade offs that Huxley is describing, this isn't simply about a totalitarian state, and I don't think 1984 by the way, is simply about a totalitarian state either. It's honestly about trade offs that you make in any political system and also trade offs that we have to make.

1:03:59 Mark: Personally, I think if this is supposed to be a critique of communism, it's not a very good critique of communism because it takes the, oh, if you're going to be communist, that means you're going to make everybody the same. Whereas I think, you know, if you actually read Marx trying to figure out what actually makes us flourishing as individuals, it's not just having your daily ration of bread. Maybe that's how it got interpreted by some communists who are actually, you know, trying to implement this in a practical way. But certainly Marx himself had a very elaborate, you know, Hegel influenced, Kant influenced idea of the complexity that surrounds, you know, by freeing us from drudgery, by freeing us from the tyranny of having to make a living in this way, you know, that we can teach according to his needs, you know, that this actually is supposed to be a society that serves individuals, whereas this is explicitly individuals are merely cells in the social body.

They do not matter.

1:04:49 Wes: Communism and Stalinism are two very different things. And this is the difference that Orwell himself exploits, right? Orwell is the defender of socialism and 1984, for instance, is not a critique of communism or socialism. It's a critique of totalitarianism, specifically Stalinism, as a betrayal of socialism or as a betrayal of communism, which he thinks is still the right thing, but. Sorry, go ahead.

1:05:12 Dylan: Well, no, I mean, I think that for Huxley, it's neither Stalin, socialism or communism, but it's kind of mechanization and a certain kind of fetishism of perfection and the assembly line. And in that way, Ford, it's anti Fordism. Right. In the sense of we're going to make things one after the other. We're going to line people up and things up and create the perfect mechanized world. And if anything, it's a kind of praise of the messiness of things.

1:05:42 Seth: Yeah, I think when he wrote it originally, I don't know that our modern notion of industrial capitalism, the turn of the century notion of industrial capitalism was there, but I think the Soviet experiment was still happening at that time and we hadn't had, of course, the Second World War. But what I think specifically he's criticizing is Ford's famous for inventing the assembly line or at least bringing it to the automobile industry. And it's the idea that an individual. It's Marxist in that sense of like where the individual is tied to the product of their labor. Instead you just become a wage slave that does one thing over and over and over again. And he's kind of taken that to the logical extreme. So it's more about industrialization and how human beings function in that rather than capitalism per se.

1:06:22 Dylan: I think it's also in the shadow of World War I. Right. And this sort of great maw of destruction that that whole war was.

1:06:30 Wes: The foundational idea, I think, is the idea that you could apply industrialization to the way you condition and create human beings. So his idea is, wow, wow. What if human beings themselves were a product of an assembly line? And he got that from reading Ford's My Life and Work. So this is one thing that Ford says near the beginning of that book. The ideas we have put into practice are capable of the largest application, that they have nothing particularly to do with motor cars or tractors, but form something in the nature of a universal code. So this is something, I think, that really impressed Huxley and thought, yeah, Ford really does believe this. He thinks that you could do anything with an assembly line. And there are even indications Ford did. You know, he tried to start this sort of utopian workers colony in, what

1:07:21 Mark: is it, Brazil to Ford housing and Ford education.

1:07:25 Wes: But he really thinks you could use this idea in application to human beings themselves. And that's where I think this all takes off from.

1:07:33 Seth: Now is the time in the factory when we dance.

1:07:36 Mark: I mean, to sort of defend Ford a little bit. He actually did see in his assembly line. He didn't think by creating assembly line jobs, he was creating something that would deaden the human spirit. He would say, we'll put you on a job where you're just pushing the button. Pushing the button, Pushing the button. But then after you do that for a little while, if you are the type of person who's going to get bored with that, we're going to graduate you to more complicated work. He really thought that there was room in his system for even the best and the brightest to then get promoted out, which is of course subverted in here that you actually create people that will like pushing the button because their brains were radiated such that they cannot. They're not even fully human. Let's have another. Actually, what was your name before we.

1:08:18 Seth: Oh, Zoe.

1:08:19 Mark: Zoe. All right. Oh, wow. Hi. Laura's daughter, Zoe. Do you want to pick somebody else, Ann for us?

1:08:26 Unknown speaker: Sure do.

1:08:26 Mark: Yes. Yes.

1:08:27 Unknown speaker: Laura from.

1:08:27 Seth: I think.

1:08:28 Unknown speaker: Yes.

My name is Avi. I'm a huge fan of the show.

Thank you.

1:08:33 Mark: You don't look huge.

1:08:34 Unknown speaker: Thank you.

1:08:37 Mark: I love you.

1:08:42 Wes: Despite those jokes, not because of them.

1:08:45 Unknown speaker: A very common counter, a very common argument against happy machine, brave New world type hypotheticals, which I think I've heard from you guys today, is basically, you can't go off this pleasure principle thing. If you do that, you end up with society crumbles. Relationships are shallow. Humans are shallow. The counter arguments often to me seem to follow actually the pleasure principle. They say that if you try to maximize happiness, you'll actually end up being sad. Therefore, don't try to maximize, or rather live the life with risks and with possibilities of mistakes and with unhappiness.

Those arguments seem like applications of a pleasure principle. They don't seem like fundamental disagreements with the point, which is that happiness or, you know, positive experience, something vague like that is good is goodness. I don't know if you were arguing against the pleasure principle when you mentioned things like the soma makes you shallow. You can't have these kinds of relationships. But it seems to me like a argument that is made with the pleasure principle as its foundation, but ostensibly against the pleasure principle. And I'm curious if you guys could comment on that.

I'm not going to figure out first principle, obviously, but I want to hear you guys talk about that and also to hear if that was the argument that you were making, that we can't follow the pleasure principle, but kind of

1:10:03 Wes: are relying on it, you've asked a very complicated question because Freud, right, is the one who's most famous for developing the idea that there is something beyond the pleasure principle, which is what he calls death drive. We see that in other philosophers. So when we talk about Nietzsche, for instance, and Will to Power, I think Nietzsche thought of that as something that's supposed to be beyond and prior to the pleasure principle. And correlately, when we talk about things like status or when we talk about the ability of people to see each other, to recognize each other in Hegel, those things arguably are beyond the pleasure principle.

Now, the trick is, as you said, we might just think of it even when we're making these distinctions between higher and lower pleasures. There's the pleasure of having a genuine connected relationship with another person. And that comes with a lot of pain and drawbacks. But we might say, but the calculus just works out. We could assign a certain quantity of pleasure to intimate, deep relationships and then compare that to more shallow sorts of pleasure and say, okay, in the end, we choose the deep stuff because it just. We get more pleasure overall from that.

Or we might want to say, well, actually, there's these fundamentally different kinds of pleasure that aren't really. They can't ever belong to the same sort of calculus. They're not commensurate. Let's say they're just different types of things that we might choose. Maybe we're wired so that it isn't just pleasure that we seek, but that when we seek status, it's not exactly. Well, it's because status is pleasurable. We use pleasure in this very broad, almost anemic sense at that point, almost to mean just the sorts of things that we would choose.

That I think is actually a very complicated question. Do we want to call that. Do you want to say everything that we would choose, we would want is pleasurable? Or we might use a more Aristotelian word choice, worthy to be kind of neutral on the question of whether that it's just pleasure that we seek. But for me, it's something I've given a lot of thought to, and I just don't know.

1:12:06 Dylan: Well, I just wanted to emphasize the point that if you end up saying that everything that one would choose all of a sudden becomes a kind of universe of pleasure, you've basically nullified the term pleasure and you've just made it. It becomes like energy in other contexts.

1:12:21 Wes: Right.

1:12:21 Dylan: You know, you just add in the stuff that would balance out the equation. And so if you really want to have pleasure meeting something, you have to constrain it and have it have distinctions between other kinds of things that one might want and have it be different than that. So that you would want pleasure. But maybe you want status, maybe you want love. And if you conflate all of them as pleasure, then you sort of haven't made the distinction you're trying to make to evaluate those.

1:12:46 Seth: I think that's why I disagreed a little bit with the characterization in the beginning about this being a book about flourishing or happiness or what have you, that it's a book about individuation or self reflection, recognition, self awareness. It is the Hegelian. They're trying to create a society where you can never have a Hegelian moment. You can't, you're never going to encounter an equal individual and come to self realization and self consciousness. And that that's the dangerous thing. Whether it manifests as a choice for pleasure or a choice for self flagellation or what have you. They're trying to just eliminate the possibility that you would ever be alone with your thoughts and actually say is there something other than what I'm being said?

1:13:21 Mark: I certainly thought about Epicurus a lot when we were doing this book and, and Epicurus makes a conscious choice to reduce apparently other kinds of pleasure, that they really in fact boil down to physical pleasures that when you're worried about you have existential angst. Well, it's just anxiety. And anxiety is ultimately comes down to worrying that there's physical pain coming up that you know you're going to eventually die. And so it's deflationary and you can feel like it's an attitude you can try on at least temporarily and like oh, those pretentious bastards that think they want God or something, they're just expressing their basic animal desires that they've spiritualized, they've sublimated, they're denying their own animal nature.

And really, come on, get real. Ultimately it does come down to some form of pleasure, something maybe even physical. I think when we actually talked about Epicurus, we found that very hard to stomach in a concrete way that to imagine your existential angst, even if it's confused, even if somehow you know, we're diseased because, you know, as Nietzsche thinks, because we have self consciousness, we have all these extra neuroses that we would not have otherwise, it still doesn't mean that those neuroses can be somehow boiled down to that Actually, it's just the fear of physical pain.

Like there's got to be some fundamental new type of pleasure, as you were saying, or new type of need that comes out of the greater complexity.

1:14:41 Dylan: We have lots of things that we would want. Right. And if you want to talk about the distinctions between them, there are things that we want that we would normally associate with our physical beings, but they're things that you would, in a big term way, say that are needs or wants of your soul. Right. This is where the thematic desires both for status or for. Or individuation to be recognized as an individual and have an identity. What our wants are complicated and not just about pleasure, but still taking that,

1:15:09 Mark: Francis Fukuyama Take that. What's missing is thumos is that in human nature is not just a desire for. For pleasure, but it's something, you know, in the. In the neighborhood of will to power that comes out as status. And you can look at, you know, evolutionarily why we might have come into this. That is still a matter of reducing as trying to say, you know, John the savage says, isn't it natural to, especially when you're alone, to believe in God, to think about, you know, to have these spiritual yearnings and to say, well, it's just ultimately thumos. And we can give an explanation in evolutionary biology for why that be. I mean, that's still like saying it's not all just purely the pleasure principle, but it's still bringing it down to a fairly animalistic level.

1:15:48 Dylan: If you think thumos is animal, I

1:15:51 Mark: guess that's the question. You know, dogs seem to fight for status. You don't necessarily. But that was one of the things we discussed.

1:15:56 Seth: I'm pretty sure I have a dog that gets anxious, existentially anxious.

1:16:02 Wes: Well, as the.

1:16:03 Unknown speaker: Go ahead.

1:16:05 Wes: As the bumble puppy champion, I think the mention of dogs means I get to say that worry. We're moving on to a different question.

1:16:11 Seth: I actually was going to ask if certainly people have been around with us long enough to remember that we used to have rules for our discussion which we talked about if we were to take a vote. Who's the name drop champion of this session of this one?

1:16:25 Mark: Yeah, that's why we got rid of the rules, is because if you hear something you don't recognize, just go look at our back catalog. You can find more about it. We'll discuss it at grace length.

1:16:36 Wes: All right.

1:16:37 Unknown speaker: Any more questions, Brenda? So I'm very interested because of the characters. Mustafa is the one who arguably has the most information And I think it's interesting that he actually, he's chosen this controllership over science. But he has some second thoughts. He actually says, I rather regret this science. Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness, a much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly than truth. And so I'm sort of interested in the burden of benevolence that falls to those who are at the highest levels of intellectualism.

And also somewhere else in the book, it talks about, you know, a big part of this book is that you're going to be conditioned, you're going to be propagandized. And at one point in the book, they mention that silence is the most eloquent propaganda, even more so than any of their propagandists can make. And so is the intellectual's burden to hide the truth and replace it with silence?

1:17:43 Mark: Or is it the Bodhisattva's responsibility to return through compassion and lead the populace? There's something parallel, but obviously a little more deceptive. I don't know.

1:17:53 Seth: You raise a really interesting point. The sacrifice he makes. He sacrifices truth for happiness. So his specific way of being, prior to becoming a controller was that he was a physicist and he wants to do pure science. He just wants to take his studies and do pure science in whatever direction it takes him. But in this society, even science is controlled. It's only useful. We don't need any pure theoretical physicists because it doesn't help us achieve our goals of stability. So when he goes outside the bounds, they come to him and they say, okay, you have a choice.

You can go to the island, but you're obviously a bright, you know, one of the sharper knives in the drawer. And we have this position open to become a controller, or at least train, I think train to become a controller at some point. So he characterizes his decision as a decision between truth and happiness. It's sacrificing an ideal, one ideal for another ideal. And then it's in a form, it's self sacrifice, because he could go to an island and do pure science theoretically and hang around with all these interesting people, but instead he's chosen to serve the state or serve the common good, whatever that is.

It's characteristic of his particular background as a physicist that that's the way that he does it. I'm sure there are other controllers that weren't necessarily like, I don't know, maybe there was the great novelist, right, who wrote the original screenplay that wasn't about a helicopter or A bumble puppy or whatever. And this is what ultimately I think bugs me most about this book is the idea that there still has to be some centralized group of decision makers that orchestrate the whole society. And this is what I was trying to get at in my opening remarks was the danger is not that we're centralizing power and that somehow there's one person or one cabal group that's going to do it, but that there are structures in place that basically have power congeal in certain groups that follow certain rules, and there's just mechanisms, especially with technology, that start to perpetuate those things and they take on a life of their own.

There's a sense in which he has to have this character in the book to be able to explain how these things happen, and that he doesn't. And in some of his later comments, he suggests that, oh, maybe I was wrong about that, but there's 10 controllers in the world out of the 2 billion, 2,000 million. There's 2 billion people in the world. They keep it at a flat number so that we don't overextend consumption of the resources and all that. So there's 10 people that make all the rules for 2 billion. It's got to be a heavy burden regardless of how you were conditioned.

1:20:20 Wes: Yeah, Just to read in support of what you said. So a little bit after the passage that you read, he says maybe you read this as well. I'm interested in truth. I like science, but truth's a menace. Science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the stable equilibrium in history, but we can't basically says we can't allow it to undo its own good, the good it's done. So the book, if we accept all its premises, puts us in a very difficult position because you know what? If it were the case, we could get rid of all war and this were the cost. Right. That's an agonizing question, Mustapha Mond made a certain decision there. It's kind of hard to say that he's wrong. I mean, I want to say he's wrong, but you can also see why he made that decision.

1:21:07 Mark: Is it like the Buddha returning? Because the Buddha returns out of compassion to help the rest of society, but also filled into that is to sort of tell you the truth. Well, does Mustapha Mond think that he's running. Yes, he explicitly is running a propaganda agency, but he also thinks that there is a truth in that. I mean, it's a half truth, at least the Half truth is the lie part is that there are things like Shakespeare that are beyond what they're being exposed to. But they don't think that they're being exposed to everything. They don't want to be exposed to everything. They've already been conditioned to, to enjoy their lot. So insofar as truth is relevant to them, it seems like he actually is appropriate to their stations. Revealing truth to them.

1:21:49 Dylan: And the whole question. He buys into stability, right? And he has the advantage of being able to be a controller and buying into stability. And having that thumotic desire to do something greater than himself in that activity. He is making the world happen and making it safe for everybody else. And he also has the privilege of being able to read all these books and do all this other stuff. He has that experience that is outside of that whole community.

1:22:20 Seth: Right.

1:22:21 Dylan: And so in some ways he's an example of someone who's able to be fully human.

1:22:27 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:22:28 Wes: There's a great scene where he's censoring a science paper. He's saying this shall not be published. But he clearly appreciates it and enjoys reading those things. So in a way he's reserved this. If there's any hypocrisy there. He's basically reserved these sorts of pleasures to himself.

1:22:47 Dylan: So he's reading this paper, it's called A New Theory of Biology and has a mathematical treatment of purpose in it. And he ends up censoring this because he says, but once you begin admitting explanations in terms of purpose, well, you don't know what the result might be. It was some sort of idea that might easily recondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes. Make them lose their faith and happiness as the sovereign good and take to believing instead. That goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere. That the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well being, but in some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

I mean, at some level. I mean, it seems a conventional way to talk about human good. That you would get people who were sort of a bent that was as close to normally cultivated human being as we can think of. Those are the Betas and the Alphas, Right? Everybody else is in this sort of very, very sub human kind of category below the water. Yes. So the real people that are being conditioned by society in some way. The real, you know, are the Alphas and the Betas. Because the Deltas and the Gammas and

1:23:57 Mark: the Epsilons, Epsilon semi morons, why they can't be full morons.

1:24:01 Seth: I don't know

1:24:03 Dylan: they could have the ambition to be so. Right. But they're the ones that are sort of making society work in the sense of just providing the. They're like the enslaved. The enslaved ones. Right. But the Alphas and the Betas are the ones that you. We would recognize as being like part of our normal society. And that is what is being, let's call it cultivated and constrained the most. And that's where the lid for war and pestilence would come out of. Right. Just like in the Cyprus experiment. And so he recognizes these last lines about having a purpose. That is the great danger having, you know, the unsettled minds like Bernard and Helmholtz start wanting to have purpose. That's going to be the problem that

1:24:48 Wes: subvert stability, send purpose to an island.

1:24:50 Mark: Yeah, I want to do an announcement. So we're in the last 15 minutes here. We're going to enter sudden death mode. We're going to have. Still have questions, but it's going to be a little more like a normal Q and A. Somebody asks a quick question, we'll try to spit it out. But it doesn't even have to be about this book. You could ask about anything you want.

1:25:03 Seth: Feed the bartender by a last round.

1:25:05 Mark: There also are some partially examined Life Music CDs. It is the best in electric cello syntho. No, it is. It's very pleasing. It's things that have played on the episodes and that will upcoming. So if you want to take something home with you, we have a T shirt that is designed. It is on the store. You can order if you want a souvenir of your being here so you can be just like everybody else.

1:25:31 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:25:31 Mark: So let's have a few more questions before we get out of here.

1:25:33 Unknown speaker: Hi, I'm Dan.

1:25:35 Seth: I'm also Dofeik.

1:25:38 Mark: Nice to meet you finally.

1:25:40 Unknown speaker: Do you think that there's any sense

1:25:42 Mark: in which the world is, has or is getting more or less like the society and brave new world?

1:25:50 Seth: That was a rapid fire question.

1:25:51 Unknown speaker: Yes,

1:25:54 Seth: short answer. Yes.

1:25:57 Mark: I think we pointed out some of the ways in which I think that some of these concerns, some of the comparisons that are made are too literal. You know, the consumerism that they're fostering in here is not like the consumerism. You know, it has similarities to, but is not for the same purpose as the rampant consumerism that we have here. There are lots of things that you can point to in terms of, you know, I compared phones to what SOMA would be like.

1:26:16 Wes: Yeah.

1:26:17 Mark: Things that. Right. Augustine pointed out are our tendency to another name drop to distraction. You know, this is a fundamental sort of human flaw. And so of course, various forces, not a unified government force luckily, but various forces are always taking openings to exploit us. And we're only too ready to, you know, pave our own roads to hell.

1:26:36 Wes: So I know this is rapid fire. I just want to say quickly. Yeah, so cell phones and social media are the low hanging fruit, right? That's the obvious. I think there's something to that. Just walking down the street, observing the way people's faces are always in their phones, even when they're walking or when they're in a cafe. I think what's interesting is social media is very different than soma. I think it's a kind of drug and I say that as, you know, a recovering addiction. But it's a stimulant. And I think it's a stimulant because unlike Soma, it is actually it's stimulating a different.

It's sort of getting at one of these higher level pleasures. It's getting at the need for status, for instance, whether it's status by way of political disagreement or status by way of putting yourself pictures of your vacation online or whatever likes. That's the quick answer. I think it's something that bears a lot of thinking about because there's a lot of ways in which it's very, very different from what Huxley envisaged.

1:27:32 Mark: Let's keep it moving.

1:27:33 Unknown speaker: Hi, Toby here, big fan of the show also.

1:27:36 Wes: Thank you.

1:27:36 Unknown speaker: I have two very quick questions. Maybe not very quick, but anyways, the first one. So in a society that is conditioned, where people are conditioned in this way, is there room for individuals to experience the absurd? That's the first question. And the second question is, it seems like when you dial up happiness in different contexts or you say the purpose of life is happiness and you kind of just go full throttle in that direction, you lose other things. And I wonder if you see any parallels to Heraclitean notion of strife, of how you need kind of balance or things going in opposite directions to really have an entity or experience life.

1:28:23 Dylan: I think in some ways the whole book is a argument in part for that. Like that tension. The closest to a sublime experience in the book, I think, is Bernard, as we talked about before, hanging out over the ocean and just having that experience of being in nature and giant washing.

1:28:42 Mark: Sublimity.

1:28:43 Dylan: Yes.

1:28:43 Mark: Overwhelming.

1:28:44 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:28:44 Wes: Yeah.

1:28:44 Dylan: So that's the closest thing in there, but that is notably in this world, is by a character who is more or less rebelling against the constraints in the society and the constraints of the conditioning. So from, I guess you would say from Huxley's point of view, he's presented a character that is manifesting that quest for sublimity as a kind of inherent human attribute.

1:29:08 Mark: Let's keep going. So I'd love to ask you guys so many questions, but I'm going to

1:29:12 Wes: ask one relevant to tonight.

1:29:13 Mark: Why didn't you play the guitar intro? Wouldn't fit on the plane. It'll be there. It'll be magically fit after the fact. I did in fact. Right.

1:29:30 Unknown speaker: Hi.

1:29:31 Mark: So this is a 10th anniversary of when you guys had the first episode for Brave New World. So I guess I want to ask you what changed since then, when you reread it? Like any new insights since then?

1:29:44 Wes: Well, it's the 10th anniversary of when we started doing the show.

1:29:49 Mark: We've been discussing this book for 10 years. Every single episode.

1:29:52 Wes: I think it's. For me, it's like the 30th anniversary of the first time I read it. I think this is the first time I read it in 30 years actually. And I don't remember having any insights at the age of 17.

1:30:05 Mark: I thought he was just purely. This is bad. We need to avoid this. And that is a theme. But we've pointed out a lot of the things that, that it's. There's just so much more to it than that. This deep rumination about human nature and the maybe inherently tragic element in it that we want things that are not good for us and we kind of need to be allowed to want those things.

1:30:25 Dylan: But that wanting is not simple. Like it's not simply good. Like there's a recognition that, that wanting of things that are bad for us. Even if you acknowledge that that's something human and indispensable about it, it's not clearly a good thing.

1:30:39 Seth: This is one of those books you get assigned, at least if you go to high school in any sufficiently middle class neighborhood in the United States. And I'm torn between the idea that it's just idiotic to make 16 and 17 year olds read books like this versus that's the thing that helped form who I am. But everything we've done on this podcast that I had read before, I've read with just a completely new understanding and a maturity. I would say I'm tempted to go back and read the Scarlet Letter again. Right. Because I'm sure nobody in here has read that in the last 25 years.

But I bet it's a much better book than I Remember? Right. Or better. I'm not sure it's at least got more to it than I would have been capable of understanding at the time. And that's one of the great joys of doing this podcast, is that Mark Strong arms us and forces us to do this march and read these things, and then I get great joy.

1:31:36 Wes: You've called it the death march before.

1:31:37 Seth: I have. I have. I was trying to. I'm trying to moderate my language every two weeks. It's not just a function of doing it, because at this point, we've now all gotten the equivalent of several more bachelor degrees worth of content that we've read, but that I think as we age and as we get experienced more and of course, as the world gets much more complicated and challenging, I just feel like the books are so much richer and I just have a much better palette maybe to paint with.

1:32:06 Mark: So this may be the last question.

1:32:07 Wes: Make it a good one.

1:32:08 Mark: All right. Well, I mean, first of all, I want to thank you all for everything you're doing. My introduction to philosophy was from your podcast, and I'm not, I'm sure, not the only one who's been introduced to philosophy of things. To you guys, I didn't study in

1:32:20 Seth: undergrad or anything like that.

1:32:22 Mark: I just want to first say thank you so much for your contributions. You know, thank you.

1:32:27 Seth: Thank you.

1:32:28 Unknown speaker: Thanks.

1:32:30 Mark: There's no way we would have lasted 10 years if people didn't actually listen. Interact.

1:32:35 Dylan: That's exactly right.

1:32:36 Mark: So I'm just really grateful that we get to do.

1:32:39 Seth: Very grateful.

1:32:40 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:32:40 Mark: So just building off that, it's been 10 years. So what other books are you going to read? Like, what else would you like to explore and think about? So I should say, you know, my specialty as an under. As a grand grad school was philosophy of mind, and we've done almost nothing in that. So we scored an interview with Ned Block, who you should look up if you don't know who that is, during the summer, and are gonna have, like, three full episodes on other readings in the Philosophy of Mind just to prep for him being on. So we don't sound completely. You know, the last one we did was, like, episode 20 or something. It was a long freaking time ago.

1:33:13 Wes: So did we just do three Sartre episodes in a row? It was a Sartre piece reminding me of the fact that someone, like, just messaged us saying, no more Sartre, please.

1:33:23 Unknown speaker: That's it.

1:33:23 Wes: That's all they said. No more Sartre. All right.

1:33:27 Mark: Thank you for the caveat.

1:33:29 Dylan: Yes, thanks.

1:33:30 Wes: Thank you thanks for hosting.

1:33:32 Seth: This is a great venue.

1:33:37 Mark: Thank you, folks, for not quitting. To you guys on the stage, thanks

1:33:41 Wes: to all of you for coming and for listening. Like Mark said, we couldn't do without you. And it's.

1:33:46 Unknown speaker: It's really gratifying.

1:33:48 Dylan: It's really gratifying seeing so many people that like to listen to this,

1:33:55 Seth: as mystifying as it is gratifying.

1:34:00 Wes: All right.

1:34:01 Mark: Gotta fight for your right to typhoid.

1:34:05 Seth: Thank you.

1:34:13 Unknown speaker: Seth is the man People say he sounds sad and he's always pretty sleepy because he's a new dad and he's looking for the poetry, the heavy metal symmetry he will not be your Heidegger your Heidegger man Gilly is upright curiosity and fight and he doesn't bring up physics since we tried to set him right he's been grumpy, he's been dry and he'll always be the new guy but he added extra energy A doctor's credibility Brave new world that has such people in it A brave new world it's coming any minute. Wesley's to avoid us want to talk but if you can win your content he will be so overjoyed and will write a thousand words but he'll never finish never but his notes are very fertile his positions are developed on the mark he isn't through he's got himself something to do With a hundred songs and interviews that no one listens to now he lies around depressed and he envies your success and he found a thing that you should read and here's another here's another Brave new world that has such people in it A new world it's coming any minutes.

Just for white men White for white men Cuz that's just how it happened back before 2010 I we ran a lot of text we're still sticking out our necks Picking all the COVID length enough to have almost examined this brave new world that has such people in it A brave new world with all you listening in it this brave new world Thinking out improving break unpolished glass that may kick as if we can keep our subject.