Brave New World
Substitute DEI for artificial wombs and addictions to pop culture and drugs for soma, and you can draw a nearly straight line from Huxley's imagined dystopia to our very real dystopia.
Every morning I get up early and go outside to check on the dogs, llamas, and goats before heading into town to my favorite coffee shop. Most of what you read here on Howlin’ takes shape in my noggin each morning over coffee, newspapers, periodicals, and occasional conversations with friends. During a recent conversation on modern life, one of my friends offered up the observation that the use of recreational drugs has, in some ways, the same effect on the brain as communism.
I’ve actually noticed, anecdotally anyway, the same thing myself. During my career in academia, I had the opportunity to work with many scientists from the former Soviet Union. While generally very bright, they often suffered from nearly debilitating levels of distrust and paranoia as a result of working in social and political systems where reality was rarely a consideration in decision-making.
They might as well have been self-medicating.
Epiphany! Queue up, Soma from Brave New World.
I suppose that one could construct an esoteric argument that Huxley’s dystopia was more totalitarian than communist, but even that distinction has clearly evident parallels in today’s world. Ordinary, reasonably rational people who just want to get by in life without the burdens of social and political extremism must now navigate between the clearly discernible but equally unfortunate power structures of the left and the right.
Huxley, at least in my view, was downright prescient. Dystopia R us.
It has been observed that success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. I maintain that in today’s world, that’s backward. There are many progenitors of our current political and social dysfunction, and worse, almost all of them are immune to self-reflection or shame.
Hell, most of them are proud of what they’ve wrought.
Prelude
Ladies and gentlemen, in the left corner I give you, courtesy of government, the media, higher education, and professional organizations too numerous to name, the tag-team duo of wokeness and DEI. In the right corner, courtesy of populism, religious tribalism, and xenophobia, I give you Jesus and MAGA. All here today for a star-filled 10-round slugfest where everybody pays but nobody wins.
Part I: Soma
Let’s start the discussion of our own Brave New World with Soma, a disturbingly accurate projection of Huxley’s imagined dystopia into our very real dystopia. Drugs, both legal and illegal, are rampant in our modern world. I live in a small western town as sleepy and safe as they come, yet even here, one may obtain virtually any drug they desire within 15 minutes. I have three children, and this terrifies me.
There is next to no evidence that shows much of any benefit to habitual use and certainly abuse of recreational drugs. Yet the practice is rampant. The question is, why?
I don’t know. This is an issue I’ve struggled with mightily through the years. By way of full disclosure, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a fan of recreational drugs. I’ve never smoked anything. I haven’t imbibed alcohol in years. None of this is for moralistic reasons. Mostly, it’s because I've been involved in sports, athletics, and other activities that I believed drugs and alcohol would hinder.
But there is another part to this. I’ve seen, up close and personal, what the abuse of drugs and alcohol can do. The juice, to me, never seemed worth the squeeze. When my kids asked me a few years ago why I drank alcohol, even in moderation, I struggled for a good answer to their heartfelt and innocent questions. When they asked me to stop, it made sense to set a good example for them.
My leftover collection of excellent bourbon will more than pay for my final expenses.
My struggle is that, though I do not condone drug or alcohol abuse, I’ve been reluctant to support prohibition. It’s the libertarian in me. What you do with your life is mostly your business. Vices have to be enough of a problem that personal regulation is untenable before I’m for government intervention.
But somewhere along the substance use continuum, from prohibition to liberation, we see the emergence of problems that society cannot ignore. We have a drug catastrophe in this country right now, and the trend seems to be in the direction of ignoring or minimizing the problems associated with recreational drug use in favor of increased legalization.
Again, I don’t know what the right answer is to any of this, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have it yet.
If you think that the “science” behind the COVID mandates was bad and that the mobs shouting up the junk science behind the gender vs. sex debate are problematic, I suggest that you take a gander at the “science” supporting the legalization of recreational drugs. It makes Bigfoot look like quantum mechanics.
Of course, science has almost nothing to do with any of this. Money does. And the unfettered pursuit of money in our modern dystopia has no greater champion than pop culture. I’ve long maintained that the road to hell is paved with entitlement, but the billboards and road signs along the way are all about pop culture.
I see pop culture as a mostly lazy, mostly talentless endeavor awash in unmerited money and influence. Yeah, I know; that makes me a curmudgeon. But it doesn’t make me wrong.
I can’t even watch a football game on television with my 7-year-old anymore without having an unwanted conversation about gambling and testosterone supplements. I’ve seen exactly two movies in 2023 that didn’t make me want to waterboard the producers and director. I recently went to my little girl’s kindergarten to perform and talk about jazz music and discovered that their previous music education consisted of something conspicuously absent of scales and notes: YouTube rap videos.
I can go on with this rant for a while, but you get my point.
Perhaps the worst part of pop culture has been it’s nearly complete assimilation of the news media. It used to be that news, op-eds, and entertainment were clearly delineated in the media. Those days are long gone. If not for the rise of high-quality independent journalism via Substack and other platforms, we’d be a lot more screwed than we are. But we’re still pretty screwed.
But the biggest problem with the media in this country isn’t the blurring of these lines or widespread political or social media biases. These are problems, to be sure, just not the biggest. The biggest problem in what currently passes for news media is the ubiquitous practice of catering to carefully cultivated audiences of sycophants for a positive feedback loop that amplifies BS.
These days, you can get your BS from the left, or you can get it from the right. It stinks either way.
This practice, a gift to the world from the media, has also enveloped academia and business. How else do you explain, to cite a recent example, that the now-infamous Harvard President Claudine Gay was once considered a “scholar’s scholar” in fawning praise that has not aged well?
In our Brave New World, we are besotted with Soma: that which we consume for recreation (or as the result of addiction), and that which we consume with our eyes and ears. None of it is good for us. And it’s going to be difficult to kick the habit.
Don’t even get me going on social media. My head might literally explode.
Part II: Social engineering
I’ve been on a bender lately about the manner in which the COVID pandemic exposed, as lacking, a number of contemporary social constructs, among them science. The curious and controversial paper, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 may, in the fullness of time, go down as that which broke science for decades.
For those of you who are unaware, our government and the media frequently cited this paper as the "science" supporting the zoonotic origin of COVID and used it as justification to silence debate and brand anyone who disagreed as a conspiracy theorist.
Interestingly, several of the authors had previously identified specific features of the virus that appear to have been engineered for gain of function. They changed their minds almost overnight after a discussion with our chief medical advisor to the president during the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, who was hardly a disinterested neutral party.
I’m no virologist, but I can’t remember a time when I or any of my colleagues ever turned on a dime over a problem in physics. Science generally takes a bit longer to deliberate. Impossible? No. Unlikely? I think so.
I’m even more sure now than I was at the beginning of the pandemic that there is at least an equal probability that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a lab leak rather than zoonotic spillover. The difference now is that what was initially labelled a conspiracy theory is now favored by several federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
What a coincidence that the pandemic allegedly originated in a wet market a few kilometers from an inadequately secure biological laboratory that just happened to be doing research on SARS coronaviruses. Correlation is not causation, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be.
The fact that no one in our government or legacy media seems in any hurry to get to the bottom of this, given the enormous costs of the pandemic, really winds me up. I don’t know what is worse—that a lot of this seems to be driven by a curious desire not to blame the Chinese or that it may be a cover-up for the fact that we sponsored and funded our own demise.
The COVID pandemic was an authoritarian’s dream: mandatory lockdowns, closures, social distancing, masking, and forced vaccinations. People who insisted they were the sole owners of "the science" (a claim that is prima facie absurd) encouraged all of this, but it has since emerged that much of our response was ineffective or a cure worse than the disease.
The groundwork for the massive social experiment that was our response to COVID was, in my opinion, established by the vast DEI bureaucracy that had spread like kudzu through government, academia, and business prior to 2020. There were several elements of DEI that served as classical conditioning for our responses to COVID.
For one thing, DEI is above questioning. In most organizations, if you are a DEI skeptic, you are a heretic and probably ought to be buffing out your LinkedIn profile. Shutting down DEI skeptics was the forerunner of countering “disinformation” through government-sponsored censorship.
DEI doesn’t really care about facts or data; it’s all about narratives. If you can aid in propelling a favored narrative forward, you’ll go far (just ask Claudine Gay). DEI is an authoritarian social construct that exists in an evidence-free environment where facts take a back seat to bogus social hierarchies, narratives, “lived experiences,” and other postmodern nonsense. It was the perfect setup for our authoritarian, evidence-scarce response to COVID. DEI was the perfect setup for marginalizing skeptics under the guise of combating “disinformation,” something that ought to scare the hell out of everyone.
In all of this, it probably seems as if I’m giving the right a pass. I’m not. DEI did not condense out of the ether along with bosons, fermions, and the four fundamental forces in nature after the Big Bang. DEI arose, initially anyway, as a response to real problems. Although those problems have been ameliorated over time, they’ve not gone completely away.
It’s not the left that thinks that we can pray away our social problems. It’s not just the left that believes in censoring ideas that are inconvenient to their narrative. It’s not just the left that only believes in “the science” that supports their favored narratives. And it’s definitely not just the left that want’s to force their view of the world down everyone’s throat through the power of government. It’s just that the left is currently much better at it than the right. And the parallel here is communism rather than totalitarianism. So I’m picking on the left.
Epilogue: Brave New World
I think that we’ve arrived. And it’s mostly my generation, the baby boomers, that greased the skids to get us here. It’s a bit difficult for me to be too hard on younger folks for just not having the sense to reject the nonsense that they’ve been taught in the schools that we designed the curriculum for.
I don’t know where we go from here, either. Many of us saw this coming, fought it, but failed. Personally, I’m about out of moves.
All I know is that the only thing more frightening than reading a dystopian novel is living one.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com