British life in 1932 was very different from American life. Almost an entire generation of men had been lost in World War I. Oxford University enrollment was only 491 in 1917, down from 3,181 in 1914. Among many of the upper-class poets and writers of the time—sometimes called the Auden Generation, after the poet W. H. Auden—there was a sense of disillusionment and futility. Britain’s foreign investments had been depleted by war debts and loans. Higher living standards, prices, wages, and taxes became the order of the day in post-war Britain. By 1922 overpopulation had caused passage of the Empire Settlement Act to encourage and finance settlement in the dominions.

The 1920s were also years of mass unemployment, and the Communist Soviet Union was making inroads into the labor movement. After many wars, those on the home front who had sacrificed for the war effort felt they deserved their just rewards.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, in “any color you choose so long as it’s black.” In 1914, he opened his Highland Park, Michigan, factory, equipped with the first electric conveyor belt assembly line. A Model T could now be assembled in ninety-three minutes. Consequently, Ford had forty-five percent of the new automobile market. He paid his workers the highest wages in the industry—a whopping five dollars a day. In return, he demanded that his workers live by his standards: wives were not to work or take in boarders, employees were not to drink in local bars, and families were to attend church each Sunday. He sent men out into the workers’ neighborhoods to make sure his rules were being followed. Ford was considered a bigot and was also paranoid; he feared for his family’s lives. By creating Greenfield Village near Detroit, he tried to recapture and reproduce what he viewed as a simple, happy past—the good old days.

Thus, science not only gave humanity a better knowledge of the world, and the technology to make living “easier,” but it also gave them new means of destroying themselves. The same gasoline engine used to propel automobiles and trains was reinvented for use in airplanes that could drop bombs—as early as World War I. Science and technology together began recreating industry, which for more people than Henry Ford meant bigger profits and anxieties.

Additionally, the advent of electrical lighting in both home and factory created shift work, which, of course, interferes with established biological rhythms. Electricity also created a brighter nightlife with more possibilities, and it gave the middle and upper classes new appliances to make living easier and more comfortable.

The assembly lines, with their shift work, forced workers to meet the demands of both human and machine. Workers could spend an entire shift in one place along the assembly line, repeating the same action again and again. Thus, a worker answered to two bosses—one human, one mechanical. Only one understood pain and fatigue, however, and only one could stop the other. Consequently, most workers were more likely to be driven by machines than to actually drive them.

This was the newly mechanized, scientific, controlled world which became the model for Huxley’s Brave New World, which one critic regarded as “an exercise in pessimistic prognostication, a terrifying Utopia.”

In 1958, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he discussed what he perceived as the threats to humanity that had developed since the publication of his novel in 1932. These threats were overpopulation, propaganda, scientific advancement, and his belief that humanity must not give up their freedom for the unthinking ease of a life organized by the power of a few over the masses. This was something that had happened in Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China since 1932.

Huxley saw scientific progress as a vain deceit which would produce a world with no joy—one in which endeavors are frustrated and sexual satisfaction becomes ashes. Brave New World is the utopian nightmare of scientific deceit, unlike the futuristic novels of H. G. Wells, whose optimism held that humanity falls to rise again.

When Huxley penned Brave New World in 1931, the world was at the onset of a global depression. The American stock market crash of 1929 had led to bank closures, wiped out countless savings, and caused unemployment rates to skyrocket. Additionally, American farmers were enduring some of the most severe droughts in history, resulting in widespread poverty and mass migration from the farming regions. People yearned for the economic stability that Huxley portrays for the citizens in his fictional universe.

The repercussions of the crash were being felt globally, including in England, where Huxley resided. While economic concerns were significant, Huxley was also acutely aware of the social and scientific transformations sweeping the world, particularly throughout the 1920s. Technology was swiftly replacing many workers, yet politicians assured that progress would resolve unemployment and economic issues. In reality, workers had to accept whatever jobs were available. Often, unskilled or semi-skilled laborers worked long hours without receiving overtime pay, under unsafe conditions, and without benefits such as health insurance or pensions. Unlike the inhabitants of the brave new world, they had no job security and no guarantees. Additionally, they frequently had limited time for leisure and little money to spend on entertainment or material luxuries.

To boost consumer demand for their products, manufacturers turned to advertising to persuade people to spend their money on goods and services. Henry Ford, who innovated the modern factory assembly line, was now capable of mass-producing cars efficiently. For the first time, car parts were interchangeable and easily accessible, and Ford intentionally kept the price of his Model T low enough for his workers to afford. To pay for these new automobiles, many people who lacked sufficient cash began to make installment payments, making buying on credit acceptable. Soon, people were purchasing other items on credit, stimulating the economy through overspending and accruing debt.

All these economic disruptions influenced Huxley’s vision of the future. He viewed Ford’s production and management techniques as revolutionary and chose to elevate Ford to a divine status in his novels. Huxley also foresaw that technology could eventually grant workers substantial leisure time. While this could lead to more time for creating art and addressing social issues, Huxley’s Controllers, seeing these activities as threats to their established order, decided to provide trivial distractions to occupy their workers. These future workers dutifully bought more and more material goods to keep the economy thriving, even to the extent of discarding clothes rather than repairing them.

During Huxley’s era, societal values and ideas were rapidly evolving. The youth of the 1920s distanced themselves from the strict Victorian principles upheld by their parents. They explored contemporary ideologies, such as communism, and began to challenge the rigid views on social hierarchy. Some adopted the notion of free love, as promoted by figures like author Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Conversations about sex became more public, and the use of contraceptives gained popularity, thanks to Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), a prominent advocate of the birth control movement in America. Women started smoking in public, cutting their hair into short, boyish styles, and wearing shorter, looser skirts. These progressive sexual attitudes are exaggerated in Brave New World.

At the same time, scientists were delving into human engineering possibilities. Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) demonstrated the creation of conditioned responses in animals. For instance, he rang a bell whenever he fed dogs, and eventually, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell alone, even without food. John B. Watson (1878–1958), a colleague of Pavlov, established the behaviorist school of psychology, proposing that humans could be understood as networks of stimuli and responses, controllable by those conducting experiments on them. In the 1930s, German Nobel laureate Hans Spemann (1869–1941) advanced experimental embryology, manipulating a human fetus's environment in the womb to influence its development. The eugenics movement, aimed at limiting the reproduction of lower-class people of color, also gained traction in the 1920s.

Concurrently, hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, became a trend in the 1920s and 1930s. People aimed to learn passively by listening to educational tapes while asleep. Although the invention of the electroencephalograph in 1929, which measures brain waves, showed that learning during sleep is limited, it also indicated that hypnopaedia can affect emotions and beliefs. Additionally, the theories of Viennese physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the pioneer of modern psychoanalysis, gained popularity. Freud believed that many psychological issues originate from early childhood experiences. Huxley integrated these technological and psychological advancements into his novel, portraying the Controllers as misusing this knowledge to dominate their citizens.

Brave New World was penned just before the rise of totalitarian leaders such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao Tse-tung in China, who established authoritarian regimes in nations plagued by economic and political instability. These dictators employed extreme measures to control their populations, including propaganda, censorship, and mass murder. Though Huxley could not foresee these developments, the bleak totalitarian states that emerged heavily influenced George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (1948) and were significantly shaped by Huxley’s Brave New World.

Aldous Huxley is often compared to H. G. Wells as a popularizer of science. However, unlike Wells, who envisioned science as a path to a utopian future, Huxley viewed it as a potential threat to humanity and personal freedom. In contrast to Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933), Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a society where humans have been reduced to obedient robots by an authoritarian government employing various scientific methods, from eugenics and postnatal conditioning to mental torture and sedative drugs. It is a dystopian world characterized by unthinking compliance to authority, where acts of rebellion are met with seductive coercion that reforms as it entices. Huxley was more concerned with the use of technology for control rather than liberation.

The release of Brave New World coincided with the rise of totalitarian regimes around the globe, a timing that was not accidental. The novel reflects many fears prevalent in Western Europe at the time. Although less warlike in tone than George Orwell’s later novel 1984 (1948), Huxley’s work still offers a serious critique of authoritarian governments. It not only questions oligarchical power but also scrutinizes the dubious role of science in achieving and maintaining that power. Scientists are depicted not as saviors of humanity but as its oppressors. This critique was powerful and contributed to the post-war climate of scientific skepticism, especially in the debate sparked by the use of the atomic bomb.

Huxley was also troubled by a growing trend in Western societies towards social and political uniformity, which led to a homogenized mass culture reduced to the lowest common denominator. The result of such uniformity was a widespread experience of unrelieved dullness and mindlessness, turning both democratic and socialist societies into groups of easily manipulated and controlled individuals, pacified by a constant supply of entertainment and basic needs.

Like Orwell’s 1984, Brave New World has become a symbol of one of the primary dystopian visions of the future in the popular imagination. The title of Huxley’s book is now shorthand for the potential fate of society if science is not properly regulated. References to both books often mistakenly assume they depict similar future visions, overlooking the differences between the coercive restrictions in Orwell’s world and the more insidious and alluring reward system in Huxley’s. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, it seems that Huxley’s fictional world offers a more plausible blueprint for future restrictive societies in industrialized nations.

• 1920s: Scientist Ivan Pavlov conducts behavioral experiments, demonstrating that animals can develop a conditioned response. John B. Watson establishes the behaviorist school of thought, asserting that human behavior can be reduced to a series of stimuli and responses, which can be manipulated by the experimenter.

  1930s: German Nobel Prize winner Hans Spemann pioneers the controversial field of experimental embryology, manipulating the experiences of a human fetus in the womb to influence its development.

  Huxley’s London, 731 A.D.: All humans are cloned from a limited number of fertilized eggs, incubated in artificial wombs (bottles), and conditioned as embryos and fetuses for their predetermined roles in society.

  Today: In 1978, the first human baby conceived in vitro (in a test tube) is born. In 1997, the first sheep is cloned, opening the door to the possibility of human cloning.

• 1920s: Totalitarian leaders Joseph Stalin in Russia and Benito Mussolini in Italy rise to power.

  1931: Totalitarian figures Francisco Franco (Spain) and Adolf Hitler (Germany) are on the verge of seizing power. In China, communist leader Mao Tse-tung is vying for control, though he will not achieve it until the late 1940s.

  Huxley’s London, 731 A.D.: The world is governed by Controllers in a totalitarian state, where technology, brainwashing, and pre-birth conditioning are used to control citizens, rather than violence and intimidation.