Oh Brave New World: Happiness vs. Purpose

Aldous Huxley (Public domain)

"Once you begin admitting explanations in terms of purpose, well, you wouldn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher casts. They can lose their faith in happiness and take to believing instead that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge, which was, the controller reflected, quite possibly true but not in the present circumstances admissible." 

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The passage above is taken from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The novel takes place in a future World State, 600 A.F. (After Ford) In this story, the preeminent value is happiness. From the start, the people in this future world are genetically designed to do the work that they will be engaged in for their lifetimes. To ensure their permanent blissful existence is indeed blissful, everyone has a sufficient supply of Soma, a mood-altering drug that makes you happy. 

Another feature of this brave new world is the denunciation of alone-time. "Everyone belongs to everyone else." Pleasure is the priority. Who wouldn't want to be perpetually happy?

The passage in blue at the opening leapt from the page for me as the controller realizes that an alternate set of values could undo the whole structure of their brave new world. 

The book was published in 1931, and it certainly seems that people are clamoring more for Pleasure (Happiness) than for Purpose. 

In 2019 I wrote a blog post about how the meaning of the word "Happiness" has changed. It begins: 

I am proposing that what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is totally at odds with what it has come to mean today. 

Read more here: Eudaemonia vs. Hakuna Matata