Brave New World and Nietzsche

Brave New World is a dystopia probably never quite happening as a whole concept. It’s more of a warning courtesy of Huxley rather than everything. However, the question of the essay is: “How does the dystopian concept of Brave New World ends up when compared with the relevant ideas of Nietzsche’s - are they similar, different or in opposition?” Nietzsche also wrote about the need for Übermenschen, as well as weaker underlings for retaining the stability in the society and the radical removal of the old ethics and morality. And what is also important to note – some of the Nietzsche’s philosophy (centered around the idea that the highest moral virtue is the life itself) could be more positive than the whole of Christianity, as could be seen in a certain light (an original observation made by the author of the essay) and again, in Brave New World, Mustapha Pond claims that soma is “Christianity without tears” (Huxley 235); so there are some links between Brave New World and Nietzsche. Brave New World is cited in its original, of course, but Nietzsche’s works are translated from Czech, sometimes slightly coordinated with the German original, when the need arises.

Both Nietzsche and Huxley work with the idea of hierarchy in the society. Nietzsche defends the aristocratism, “the true kindness, nobility, grandness of soul” against the ideals of gregarious animals that “see an attempt to change them into cosmological or even metaphysical ideals” (Nietzsche, Intellectual 9). In the similar way the alpha and alpha+ individuals are given a ‘prominent’ place in the society of the World State. As Mustapha Pond discusses with the Savage in chapter 16, the society consisting only of alpha’s did not work, however, as it caused an instability: the alphas doing the lower grade work wanted to get higher, but the alphas doing the work they were qualified for by their conditioning wanted to keep it that way, so the optimum population “is modeled on the iceberg – eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above” (Huxley 222). It is not really dissimilar to Nietzsche – he observed that “not everyone is an ‘individual’ (…) the most of people is none at all. Everywhere, where mediocre qualities prevail for the type to keep going, it is a luxury and a profligacy to be one” and also that “the ‘individual’ is a relatively isolated fact in light of more important continuousness and mediocrity; it appears almost like something against the nature” (Nietzsche, Intellectual 90).