of society or did he believe in individualism and the ability to pull yourself up out of the muck you created? I guess that's a question we all have to answer for ourselves in our own lives at some point.

Since Huxley wrote when the world was being crushed under spreading economic depression, the lighthouse is symbolic of the failure of America's economic and financial structures to provide safety and security. An analogous situation in modern society is quite similar: Our economic and financial structures have failed us (and failed, as in bank closures) once again and left us looking to a metaphorical lighthouse for safe traverse only to find it an illusion overshadowed by a foreclosure sign.

This question calls to mind Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse and a motif that joy cannot last as well as the subjective nature of reality with the difference that the New World controls reality and emotional feelings through the servitude of the masses. 

In modern times, there is a servitude of many, but it is one which they freely choose with the overpowering advancement of technology. Willingly, many allow propaganda disseminated throughout technical means to direct their thoughts and actions.  They do as Huxley himself feared:  They embrace their servitude with a smile, a joy that cannot last, for it is ersatz.

I don't think that money can be used as a modern day parallel, except if we take the line that we think having more money will make our lives easier and happier and allow us to live life the way we want it to. If we think about it, those people who have money because of a very demanding job find that their hopes of being able to live their lives as they want to are counfounded because of the demands of that job.

I agree that perhaps we need to turn to religion to find a modern day parallel. John deliberately goes to the lighthouse so that he can achieve isolation and find escape from the values of this "brave new world" compared to his own values. However, he finds that the values of the world follow him in and he cannot escape them. Perhaps those who seek to flee the values of our world today by going into an ashram or a monastery equally find that their flight is futile.

I suppose that you could say that the parallel to this is anything having to do with money.  You could argue that we look to money for our salvation but are not saved by it.  The one problem I see there is that money is not a refuge from the values of the majority of the society, which the lighthouse is for John.

So... would the parallel need to be something that we think is going to protect us from the values of our society but which fails to do so?  I can't think of anything like that unless you want to talk about religion and say that it is supposed to protect us from the competition and materialism of our society but that it fails to do so because most religions today don't like to emphasize poverty and humility and such.

Maybe that would do -- a place where we go and think we are withdrawing from society but society follows us in anyway.

Which makes me think -- maybe it's cell phones and such.  We think we are withdrawing from society into our homes and our families, but work follows us in via our cell phones?

What do you think?

Let us remember that the lighthouse represents something of a place of refuge for John as he desperately struggles to hold on to his values and sanity in a world where there is so much pressure to give in to pleasure. Note what John finds attractive about the lighthouse in Chapter 18:

But it was not alone the distance that had attracted the Savage to his lighthouse; the near was as seductive as the far. The woods, the open stretches of heather and yellow gorse, the clumps of Scotch firs, the shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their water lilies, their beds of rushes--these were beautiful and, to an eye accustomed ot the aridities of the American desert, astonishing. And then the solitude! Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being.

We can see therefore that it was a combination of the beauty of nature and the solitude that John gained that caused him to go to the lighthouse. However, of course, as we know, this solitude was only temporary and fleeting, and the crowds that come lead to John's final giving in to the principles of pleasure and then his suicide.

I wonder whether we can find modern parallels in our society to the lighthouse in religious cults which seem to promise so much but actually often involve manipulation and blackmail. You might want to research into famous examples such as Waco or Jonestown. On a slightly different angle, you might want to consider the popularity of ashrams that promise release and isolation.