Philosopher Aldous Huxley warned that pleasure would enslave mankind

He said, “most men and women will grow up to love their servitude”

Here’s his advice on how to avoid getting trapped into a life of cheap pleasure:

Writing in the 1960s, Huxley believed that:

“there will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and [submit to] dictatorship”

His novel Brave New World explains how our love of pleasure is already enslaving us

Brave New World details a dystopian future

It’s a technologically advanced society that worships science and pleasure, and has one golden rule:

You MUST conform and you MUST be happy

The fatal flaw of the state in Brave New World is that they believe happiness is the meaning to life:

Pleasure is good, pain is evil

The goal is to keep people pacified, even at the cost of freedom

This morality will prove disastrous

If pleasure is the ultimate good then human rights can be oppressed for the “greater good” of pleasure for the masses

In other words - anything is permitted so long as it induces pleasure in people

This leads to atrocity:

Social conditioning is the great evil in Brave New World

Per Mustapha Mond, the state’s tyrant:

happiness [is] liking what you've got to do... All conditioning aims at making people like their unescapable social destiny

Enslave man to pleasure, and he'll tolerate anything

This conditioning is done through science and hedonism:

- Man is birthed in incubation chambers, organized into a caste system, and sent to work in factories

- Free time is devoted to orgies and pleasure inducing drugs

Life is thus reduced to menial labor and cheap pleasure

The state believes pleasure must be worshiped, and freedom oppressed:

“[man cannot] lose their faith in happiness as the sovereign good”

Free thought might allow others to love things more than happiness (virtue, justice)

Thus man must be pacified into comfortable ignorance

Because happiness requires conformity, the individual must be destroyed:

“Everyone belongs to everyone else”

This is enforced through orgies and soma (a happiness inducing drug)

In other words - use sex and drugs to destroy families and personal love

Mond concludes by justifying "happy" slavery:

People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get… they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to

If life is about pleasure, then man was made to be a happy slave

So what gives?

Are we doomed to be happy slaves?

Or free but miserable?

Neither

Huxley says there’s a better way:

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities”

Huxley says first, stop “forcing” happiness:

“We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters”

Dystopia is about changing human nature to “force,” happiness

Wisdom is about embracing human nature and the pains of freedom

Huxley continues by stressing the need for pain

“I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin”

Suffering leads to fulfillment

Only a broken heart’s agony can teach you the bliss of genuine love

Once you’ve rejected pleasure Huxley says get your life in order:

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self”

The world is filled with problems, but so are you

Fix yourself up, and you’ve begun fixing the world

Thus Huxley says that courage is needed above all else:

The courage to suffer

If you’re willing to suffer but improve yourself, you’ll know yourself

Self-knowledge rejects the pleasure trap of New World

It affirms love for your own humanity, and helps others discover theirs