Huxley admits that he is shocked at how fast his predictions are becoming real. Brave New World was written in 1931, two years after the Wall Street Crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, which would last until the outbreak of World War II. Huxley says that “ours was a nightmare of too little order”, of what he calls “the disorderly world of liberalism”. Here he is referring to classical liberalism, which opposed economic interventionism by the state in favour of a free market. The biggest flaw of this philosophy were its recurrent depressions that grew bigger each time and that culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The immediate reaction to the social misery established after the economic collapse was the rise of nationalistic feelings and an inclination towards a stricter government control that maintained stability with the administration of the most productive areas of economy. “In the West,” Huxley says, “individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane”. With more than a quarter of the population being unemployed, many families who had become impoverished were forced to migrate to the West Coast to find seasonal jobs, and many more people in the same situation were more than ready to let the government step in and take control. This, for Huxley, was the first step towards a “[nightmare] of too much [order]”.

And that was the line of events that followed the Nine Years’ War in Brave New World. The economic crisis that resulted after the war culminated in extreme poverty and violent episodes of social unrest all over the world that were put to a halt only when the world leaders reunited and proclaimed The World State. “People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since” (BNW, Chapter 16).

Huxley goes on to explain why a world similar to Brave New World seems now more possible to achieve than a world like Orwell’s 1984. He bases his thesis on the latest behavioural experiments which show that conditioning through rewards is more successful than conditioning through fear. Orwell’s novel was written when the two biggest enemies of freedom, Fascism and Communism, based their loyalty on fear and punishment, a system destined to fail because “tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change”. But in the late 1950s Russia underwent a process of de-Stalinization that not only attacked the dictator’s cult of personality, but also his excessive repressions, introducing “a more up-to-date form of tyranny.”

Even though Huxley recognizes that it is still too soon for decanting babies and that “for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random”, he states that post-natal control is taking a turn from Orwell’s punishment towards his own rewarding system. He puts Soviet Russia as an example of how increasing the salaries and lowering the taxes of the intellectual elite constitutes an incentive for a better performance. The rest of the population is still controlled by violent manipulation, which is not as effective.

Another example of the lower efficiency of control through punishment appears in Ape and Essence: disobedience results in public whipping, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to escape to other colonies.

Tackling the problem of overpopulation, it is clear that the problem lies in the increasing disparity between birth and death rates. But, why can’t they be levelled? Huxley points to economic and religious reasons: the instruments for lowering death rates are cheap and depend only on their purchasing and supplying by a few technicians, whereas birth control is more expensive and must be used by people who either don’t have enough “intelligence and will power than most of the world’s teeming illiterate possess” or are influenced by religious ideas that see the use of contraceptives as a sin. Up until now, no ideology has been able to come up with a solution to the world’s central problem, overpopulation.

“In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this figure (a little under two billions, if I remember rightly) generation after generation.”

For Huxley, the colonization of space is an utopia as well. He compares migrating to the Moon or Mars to the migration to America. It has been done, and it hasn’t solved anything. It would only be of “military advantage to the nation that does the settling”, he says. Meanwhile, world population would continue doubling as resources become more and more limited, which will result in more hunger, wars and deaths. This would be profitable to governments because “it will create conditions in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible,almost unthinkable”.

“Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes precarious, the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a critical situation; it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects; and if, as is very likely, worsening economic conditions result in political unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must intervene to preserve public order and its own authority.”

Huxley suggests that governments create their own crisis to reinforce their power. This idea is developed on Island as well:

“We don’t want the Communists; but neither do we want the capitalists. Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us—for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our labor costs are low and investors’ dividends will be correspondingly high. And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People’s Democracy.” (Island, 131)

This paragraph also conveys the idea that all ideologies, however fair their principles, degenerate into corruption and totalitarianism. Huxley includes this vision in Ape and Essence as well:

“There is another yelp of command from the Marshalissimos. Among the booted apes in charge of either army’s supply of Genius there is a violent cracking of whips, a tugging of leashes.

Close shot of the Einsteins as they try to resist.

“No, no. . . I can’t.”

“I tell you I can’t.”

“Disloyal!”

“Unpatriotic!”

“Filthy Communist!”

“Stinking bourgeois-Fascist!”

“Red Imperialist!”

“Capitalist-Monopolist!”

“Take that!”

“Take that!”

Kicked, whipped, half throttled, each of the Ein­steins is finally dragged toward a kind of sentry box. Inside these boxes are instrument boards with dials, knobs and switches.” (AaE, Part II, The Script)

The chapter on overpopulation ends with a prediction that has not become true. Huxley feared that when overpopulation hit underdeveloped countries they would grow totalitarian and become allies with the totalitarian half of the Cold War, Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union only four Communist states are left: China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam and, for some people, North Korea (Juche) and Tibet.