632 are still a part of nature, with all of nature’s contradiction, capacity for rebirth, and vulnerability. No matter how completely the government seeks to manage the population, the citizens are still human. Human attempts to re-make the world are, in Huxley’s view, a risky business. His vision of the future is of a fragile fabric of control holding down a world that has sacrificed a great deal but resists mightily. Elsewhere, Huxley communicates both his distaste for his contemporary world and the dangers of trying to improve it, in subtle, often humorous jibes.
His musings express Huxley’s skepticism of the effectiveness of global management. This quotation is Mustapha Mond’s response to a manuscript on the “mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose” (Huxley, 1965, p. He picked up his pen again, and under the words, “Not to be published” drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first then sighed, “What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!” (Huxley, 1965, p. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true? But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good 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. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn’t know what the result might be.
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