In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds - the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative. Ours was a nightmare of too little order theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F.
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The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The chapters that follow should be read against a background of thoughts about the Hungarian uprising and its repression, about H-bombs, about the cost of what every nation refers to as "defense," and about those endless columns of uniformed boys, white, black, brown, yellow, marching obediently toward the common grave. Omitted from the picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for convenience and because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical and military enemies of freedom - the weapons and "hardware" which have so powerfully strengthened the hands of the world's rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars. Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in the exposition but these successive over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of the original.
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The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side issues. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing.
In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.īut life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
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