The Cage We Love

I “read” Brave New World in 2011. Truth is, I skimmed SparkNotes the night before the test, bullshit my way to a passing grade, and walked into class sounding smart enough that nobody asked questions. I was 17. I drove a car I didn’t pay for to a school full of other kids whose parents had also paid for their cars. I’d smoke weed before class, between class, and after class to numb whatever small amount of unease existed in my life at the time. In retrospect, I was the exact kind of person Huxley wrote the book about. I actually read it later, in my thirties, after life had handed me a few reasons to want to understand what he was warning us about. The book is set in the year 2540, in a society called the World State. Citizens consume soma, a state-distributed pleasure drug. No hangover. No side effects. Blissful detachment on demand. The chemical foundation of social control. The protagonist, Bernard Marx, brings back a young man named John from a Savage Reservation. John was born…