Brave New World: How Goodly and Beauteous We Are

All stories are about us, who we are and who we are not. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s message is that if we stopped to consider our lives and our civilization, we would hang ourselves now in shame and sorrow. 

Harry Lloyd as Bernard Marx and 
Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenina Crowne
In the book, Lenina appears once in a sailor suit
with bellbottoms and a cap, in mulberry for Betas.

This is who we were 1932 and who we were becoming. Collectivism was the norm; individualism was dead. Mustapha, Benito, Trotsky, and Hoover were to be the names of the future, the creators of central control and coordination, social stability and individual happiness. Henry Ford was the most successful of the planners. Ford enterprises were vertically integrated. Ford even built communities in the wilderness of Northern Michigan to mill lumber for the floorboards of the automobiles streaming from  his factories for everyone to enjoy. Seeing sawdust piled up, Ford ordered it pressed into bricks for fuel: Kingsford Charcoal. Ours is the year 642 AF and we are Fanny Crowne and Lenina Crowne no less than we are Bernard Marx and John Savage.

World Cup Soccer and Formula 1 

and every person carrying a gaming machine — 

“Real happiness looks squalid 

compared to the overcompensations for misery.” 

(page 221 Harper Collins edition 2017.)

Compelling though Huxley’s warning be, close reading reveals a lack of rigor. Despite the deification of Henry Ford, automation has stopped. Elevators have human operators. Farms with animals produce internal and external secretion even though fetuses are grown with blood surrogate. There is no attempt at colonizing the Antarctic or the seabeds or space exploration or a Lunar colony, even though such efforts would consume resources, which is the prime mover of that society. 

At Eton, an Alpha-double-plus learns Relativity. What is the motivation to learn a theory that was only good for astrophysics? 

Within the castes, individuals are further differentiated: Beta Plus and Alpha Minus, etc.. But they all dress alike and treat each equally according to that caste system. There seems to be no social advantage or deprivation for plusness and minusness. 

Reflecting Huxley’s society and his view of it, Alphas are males and Betas are females. And contrary to one of the basic lessons of hypnopaedia, they mingle. More aligned to the premise of social organization, we never see Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons associating outside of their castes.

Huxley asserts a basic human need for religion. Civilized people have the Solidarity Service and the Arch Community Songster of Canterbury and savages have ceremonies with Jesus and Pookong. Huxley is direct: “It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing,” she told Bernard. 

After 600 years of genetic and social conditioning of what use is a Ford Chief Justice? How deep is crime beyond what we saw with Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, settled as Marx says like a coffee klatch? Why is there a Young Women’s Fordian Association, in a society where all women are young? 

A society created for consumption and production must have an accounting system but Huxley delivered almost nothing about economics. There is one reference to the Bank of Europe. Bernard Marx worries that the open tap of eau de cologne will “cost me a fortune.” Marx is given six packets of sex hormone chewing gum as a noticeable politeness. John Savage pays a helicopter pilot but how much and with what the author does not say.  

In the brave new world 70% of females are fertile in order that there be a steady supply of different eggs for the factories that breed humans. We never see their eggs harvested. And how many different males would actually be needed? 

Leonard Nimoy
as Mustapha Mond (1998)

That a society entirely of Alphas would be unstable is an English point of view, an excuse for a class-based society rather than a meritocracy. It could be argued that 600 years after Ford, a totally automated world would be nicely enjoyed by all one million of Alphas. And they could apply Relativity to the problem of space travel. 

I found imperfections in the writing that an editor should have caught. Explaining that the horridly aged Linda was revulsive to all, Huxley says that she “cut no ice” an anachronistic phrase even in 1932. Viewing the native village, they observe “… smoke rising perpendicularly…” How else could it? Did he mean that it was undisturbed by wind? The reservation landscape presents “table topped mesas.” They are called that because “mesa” means “table” in Spanish. 

The characterization of Bernard Marx is the deepest. Marx is actually troubled, which no one else is, except John, of course, and as the theme of the book repeats for our conditioning: automatic happiness is the sine qua non of civilization. 

“… in spite of the fact that his friend's support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to mediate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. …One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Universal Television NBC 1980
Alphas wear gray, Betas mulberry, Gammas green
Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black, and styles are
fashionable not stark. Also, to the point here: 
no Alpha females, apparently.

“… Bernard's other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity–a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz's character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday.”

Huxley admits to individual differences of character among a population that has been carefully conditioned by heredity and environment to be homogenous. That, like religion, may be a fundamental fact of humanity which Huxley announces but does not explore.

"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable.” Biohackers on NecessaryFacts https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/10/biohackers.html

The book has been adapted to screen with. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1980_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1998_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(American_TV_series)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

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Psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation to Big Data

Psychohistory had no academic definition before Isaac Asimov penned his Foundation Trilogy 1942-1953. In the 1970s the academic pursuit of psychohistory began as the application of psychoanalysis (Freud) to explain of the events of history. Alternate meaning came from attempting to explain individual psychology in terms of historical context. Eventually, in our time of big data and artificial intelligence, Asimov’s intention of a mathematical treatment of large scale historical events is a real though still putative pursuit. It is an easy claim (1 below) that no doctoral research program in history includes “psychohistory” in the title. 

Nevertheless, Asimov's intention has been understood. See for example, "Towards Asimov's Psychohistory: Harnessing Topological Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Data to Forecast Societal Trends" by Isabela Rocha, Institute of Political Science of the University of Brasilia. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03446 and as edited arXiv:2407.03446v1 ) Rocha wrote: "In the age of big data and advanced computational methods, the prediction of large-scale social behaviors, reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, is becoming increasingly feasible." 

In addition, biologist and systems researcher Salva Duran-Nebreda also found Asimov's suggestion compelling: "Recent advances in complex systems research, computer-based simulations, and large-scale databases, are paving the way towards fully developing a mathematical theory of human history." ("Rashevsky’s dream: A physico-mathematical foundation of history and culture," Metode Science Studies Journal, Issue 13.)

Before the Renaissance, the depiction of a better world was always a previous golden age. This is in the Old Testament and it is in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Only with the Renaissance did there come a new idea: that we could create a better society. At root, the idea was a resurrection of Plato’s Republic but it soon became more than that because different philosophers had other ideas of what constituted a good society. Moreover, a causal vector in the rise of capitalism came from predictive mathematics. The exploration of gambling outcomes by Fermat and Pascal led quickly to the monetization and fungibility of risk. The statistical likelihood of future events was predictable — and therefore (theoretically) controllable. 

Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was a child of its own time. Personal criticism of Asimov comes from his actions toward women at science fiction conventions and other gatherings. He, too, was a child of his time. First, science fiction of the Golden Age was a medium for boys. Girls were interested in science, of course, and political leaders with foresight encouraged an influx of young women into university science classes. (See “The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 3)” published here June 1, 2025.) The primary actors in the Foundation Trilogy are men. Deeper than that, in  Foundation and Empire (1952; originally, book two in the series) when Bayta Darrell attempts to outline her analysis of Foundation politics to her husband, his father, and uncle, Toran Darrell leans over and  puts his hand over her mouth.

The Industrial Revolution was the cultural shift that created and allowed science fiction itself as apart from fable. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were preceded by John Leonard Riddell, inventor of the binocular microscope, professor of chemistry, working geologist and botanist, and author and publisher of Orrin Lindsay’s Plan of Aerial Navigation, with a Narrative of His Explorations in the Higher Regions of the Atmosphere, and His Wonderful Voyage Round the Moon! (Rea's Power Press, New Orleans, 1847) (Cited on NecessaryFacts here.) Orrin Lindsay and his companion, an instrument maker, are both men, of course. A hundred years later, the world was changing. Many women science fiction authors hid their sex with pseudonyms, but others did not. 

Of course, previous science fiction placed its conflicts in worlds with troubles: no troubles; no story. Nonetheless, foundational to that was a general optimism that the future would evolve and be ever-better. H. G. Wells warned twice that the coming World War Two would bring an end to civilization. But it was ultimately only a temporary pause. He knew that some people would follow a would-be tyrant and rally against a rocket into outer space, but into the cosmos do go the rocket and the young couple. 

Two years ago (almost to date), I was having my stem cells harvested and ahead of that to pass the time while the tubes were in, I bought an armload of science fiction books at ArmadilloCon 45. Ecological disaster is the new normal. And unlike the science fiction of the Golden Age solving the problem does not create a better world—because the problem does not get solved. They just all go down the drain together. 

Hari Seldon was right: the intellectual leaders of our empire of science fiction cannot imagine a world other than the one they know. To even label the years 1941 to 1965, the “Golden Age of science fiction” is to admit the poverty of the present. And yet, I was, indeed, having my stem cells harvested.

Contrary to that Asimov’s own creation of the word “psychohistory” launched the academic studies that also use that name. 

The Journal of Psychohistory has been publishing quarterly since 1973, originally as The History of Childhood Quarterly and since 1976 as The Journal of Psychohistory. It is somewhat unique in the world of academic publishing in being one of very few journals not published by a large publishing house or by a University Press, subsidized by university funds. It has been independently published by Lloyd deMause for more than 40 years.

    The JOP has been a place where many authors have been able to see their work published in more than 800 articles, as well a several hundred book reviews and review essays. We welcome contributions to a new section that will run from time to time, Psychohistorical Perspective on Current Events.

    Recent issues include articles such as: A “Backward Engineering” view into how atrocities can be performed mechanistically and without feeling or guilt, how Politics Can Be Seen as Reflecting Borderline Polarization, The Spanish and Portuquese Inquisition’s methods to uncover hidden beliefs and motivations, The Tea Party and the Recent Rise of Right-Wing racism, Mass Incarceration and American Racism, Slavery’s Transgenerational Impact on Southern Personality, and the Unconscious Wishes behind Nuclear Armaments and Wars. -- The Journal of Psychohistory https://psychohistory.com/the-journal-of-psychohistory/

I identify that as postmodernist with the attendant problems inherent in the academic culture of anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-reason. They dominate, but they do not control. Here at the University of Texas, I have my quibbles with the Salem Institute and the other fans of Ayn Rand at the McCombs School of Business but here they are, doing their best to keep the syllogisms and money flowing. 

Psychohistory

Psychohistory uses psychoanalytical theory and sociological research methods to examine the psychological origins and motivations for the social and political behavior of significant individuals, groups, and nations, both past and present, as well as psychological aspects of historical and current events. The goal of psychohistory is to understand the causes of human destructiveness and benevolence.

Psychohistory attempts to understand how historical and current events are shaped by individual and group psychologies, as well as how the past and the present influence the psychologies of individuals and groups. 

Early influential works of psychohistory include Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941), which examined psychological motivations behind political ideologies. Eric Erikson's biography of Martin Luther, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958), was one of the first psychobiographies of a famous historical figure, and many contemporary biographies now include aspects of psychobiography. Lloyd deMause (1931–2020) is widely viewed as the founder of psychohistory as a formal academic discipline, beginning in the 1970s. Psychohistory, however, remains controversial, and many traditional historians are reluctant to attribute major human events to the psychology of individuals or groups. -- “Psychohistory,” in The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, Editor Jacqueline L. Longe, Vol. 2. 4^th ed.

See also:

• (1) "The Dilemmas of Psychohistory," Fuchsman, Ken. The Journal of Psychohistory (Vol 47. Number 3, Winter 2020). 
• "Remembering the future: science and positivism from Isaac Asimov to Gregory Benford,"Extrapolation (Vol. 39, Issue 2), Kent State University Press.
• "The Origins of Inspiration: Winwood Reade's role in the foundation of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory," LaBounty, David. Extrapolation (Vol. 39. Issue 4), Kent State University Press.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(novel_series)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
• https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Foundation_series
• https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Seldon_Crisis
• "The Computational Power of a Human Society: a New Model of Social Evolution," Wolpert, David; Harper, Kyle. Cliodynamics, 2025-05, Vol.16 (1)

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No One Needs a Computer in Their Home

“No one needs a computer in their home.” -- Ken Olsen, 1977.

What is really funny about that is the way Snopes debunked it back in 2004.  

Quote: “What Olsen was addressing in 1977 was the concept of powerful central computers that controlled every aspect of home life: turning lights on and off, regulating temperature, choosing entertainments, monitoring food supplies and preparing meals, etc. The subject of his remark was not the personal use computer that is now so much a part of the American home, but the environment-regulating behemoth of science fiction. Digital historian Edgar H. Schein described it thusly:‘What Olsen [was focusing on was] that in the 1950s and 1960s there existed the notion that the computer not only could but would control all aspects of our lives. Images of the fully computerized home that automatically turned lights on and off and that prepared meals and controlled daily diets were popular. And the fear that computers might, as in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, even try to take charge altogether was widely experienced.’ ”  -- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ken-olsen/

 On the eve of the Hall Process, Napoleon III served his most important state guests on aluminum dinnerware while dignitaries of lesser status ate from gold or silver. Our best hobby telescopes today in the $10,000 range would have been the envy of an observatory. Our dobsonian "light buckets" ten to 16 inches costing between $500 and $1000 would have been unthinkable to amateurs whose 3-inch refractors would be considered toys ($50 to $100) today. 

Your kitchen has appliances that would have been found only in laboratories of 1950, among them the variable high speed blender, microwave, and coffee filters.

If no one needs a computer in their home, do they need one in their pocket, to stream video chats, play music and movies, bring the news, and (functions I actually use) be a map accurate to ten feet, a directional compass, and a carpenter's level? 

Pundits of science tell us that the universe is beyond our imagination. I find it more compelling that our own civilization challenges our easy assumptions about what is possible--and what is helpful, useful, and ultimately necessary in common daily life.

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The Future of Money

In the future, we will recognize money created by individuals, rather than by organizations. Individuals such as Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey are certainly in positions of visibility and trust to enable that. 

(This is based on “The Future of Money,” delivered for the Maynard Sundman/Littleton Coin Lecture Series, at the American Numismatic Association “World’s Fair of Money” in Chicago, on August 14, 2019.)  

Third-party trust services such as Paypal could enable everyone to issue their own personal money. We have had reporting mechanism such as Moody’s and Barron’s for over 100 years. And of course, we now have Equifax, TransUnion, Experian. But they are only the inheritors of the Bank Note Reporters of the early to mid 19^thcentury.

Money markets could be radically restructured by some new reporting mechanism. In a session on the future of law at the Armadillocon-41 science fiction convention in Austin last week, it was suggested that the blockchain mechanism could allow evolving contracts. So, too, would a blockchain identity manager allow you to always show the spendability of the money you issue.

The New Approach to Freedom by E.C. Riegel
and Flight from Inflation by E. C. Riegel

 The idea of personal money was explained in two books from the 1930s. A New Approach to Freedom and The Flight from Inflation by E. C. Riegel. They would have remained even more obscure than they are had they not been touted to the libertarian community by Harry Browne, the author of How to Profit from a Monetary Crisis and other books consumed by gold bugs. For that he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000.

Economists define money as being a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Those are already decoupled. The dollar is not a good store of value, but it is a unit of account for multinational corporations, even those headquartered outside the United States. In the future, and actually right now today, money will be defined by something you have, something you know, or something you are. 

I assert as my own theory that alone on an island, Robinson Crusoe would need money, just as he needed language and for the same purposes. We will see that money and language are tightly bound. Robinson Crusoe would need to know whether it was more efficient and effective to catch fish, gather cocoanuts, plant wheat, or hunt pigs. She would need a way to track his efforts and successes in order that he could survive and thrive. He needs mechanisms for accounting for his work and for storing his effort. Having an abundance of dried fish, the realities of supply and demand and of diminishing returns might induce her to seek wild fruits or edible tubers, both of which might become cultivated crops. But without money – even intuitively -she has no way to know. You might think that Robinson Crusoe has no need for exchange, but whether he eats a fish now, dries it for later, or buries it to condition the soil are exchanges.  

During the great fairs of the Middle Ages, bankers met to clear their books of assets and liabilities and they reconciled their accounts without ever touching a coin. We speak today of virtual currencies but the system of pounds-shillings-pence was invented by medieval bankers to come to grips with a huge array a plethora of local coinages whose weights and finenesses changed over time. This was facilitated by a new form of enumeration, so-called Arabic numbers conceptually different from Roman numerals. That system, incidentally, was at first declared unlawful by the very Italian cities whose successes depended on it.

Every civilization has had merchants. The Sumerians had a commercial colony among the Hittites. What made capitalism possible was the invention of the mathematics of risk. Chance became measurable. Predictable outcomes could be monetized and sold in the first stock exchanges. Modern banking and the insurance industry both began in the coffee houses of London. 

Something you are. Mattie Kuhn called herself Ma Kiley for 40 years. She was a boomer, telegrapher who moved from job to job. Much like computer programmers today, and especically considering those times, a large percentage of telegraphers were women who moved from job to job. 

Ma Kiley was a member of two unions, one for railroad telegraphers, the other for telegraphers at banks, hotels, and other businesses. The unions were not recognized by management and owners, of course. But the union members recognized each other, and maintained their solidarity. If a boomer could not afford a railroad ticket, a sympathetic railroad conductor might acknowledge the membership pin worn by union members and find seating for them.

In our time we have other media to carry the same workload of transferring values among people. It can begin with ritual gift exchange, especially for those times when cash would be so awkward.

When thinking about the future, I recommend the works of people who have been proven right over time. It so happens that the free market economists of the Austrian school shared many of the same misconceptions about money presented by Karl Marx. 

Instead, I recommend urbanist Jane Jacobs. She said that the first cities did not evolve from farming villages created when pastoralists settled down. She said that the first cities grew out of camps where hunter gathers met to exchange their surpluses. From those cities, farming expanded outward. The simple fact is that tractors are not manufactured on farms. When crops fail, farmers go hungry but the city just imports food from farther away. She made those and other predictions that were supported by later excavations of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey and other sites. She also said that contrary to Peter Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction” very little is actually destroyed by innovation.

Jacobs pointed out that when steam machinery began to supplant literal horsepower, the craftsmen who had been making brass fittings for horse tack put their lathes and hammers to work turning out fittings for industrial machinery. This was supported 40 years later by George Selgin’s book Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775–1821. So, I assert confidently that as much as the future will bring unpredictable novelties, many of the structures and functions that we have in our social institutions today -especially money- will continue to evolve. 

We will always have coins, notes, and cards. A hundred years from now, people will not be spending uranium coins on the streets of Chicago. But do not be surprised if an asteroid colony begins to issue advertising trinkets made from rhenium, osmium, iridium or whatever it is that they have a lot of and want to sell. Money may take different forms and formats. But we will always have an affinity for tangibles. We already have coins shaped like guitars and baseball gloves. This will only continue. 

Nothing teaches arithmetic like money. Would you rather have two shillings or 25 pence? And if I gave you a shilling five for a box of sweets at a farthing each could I get five dozen or maybe six? In the future, people will do blockchain calculations in their heads, perhaps with the aid of silicon, maybe with enhanced RNA. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 

Objectivism and the Gold Standard 

Mere Gold is Not Enough 

Gresham’s Conjecture 

Supplies and Demands 

Impossible Usually is Not

Oil at $100 a barrel is “impossible” the headlines said. But I remember Tom Peters in the early 1990s warning us that we would never again see oil at $35 a barrel. And today’s dollars are even smaller than they were in 1992. In terms of 1992 purchasing power, we are living with oil at about $15 a barrel right now.

 “If true, that could also eliminate the threat of $3 a gallon gas. In an interview with the Middle East Economic Survey, an oil industry newsletter, Ali al-Naimi responded "we may not" when asked if oil markets would ever lift prices to $100 a barrel again.”  (The Middle East Economic Survey website requires a login. The news was widely reported on CNN, Reuters, CNBC, etc.)

“Impossible” is an absolute claim. Physical absolutes are primaries. As Ayn Rand pointed out in Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged whether you have your cake or eat it – or whether your neighbor eats it – is an absolute. Either-or, the excluded middle of logic, is an absolute. Whether the price of crude oil can never again be below $35 or above $100 is not an absolute. 

Calculators at Walmart cost
a fifth or a tenth of their prices
in 1976 when the dollar was
three times as large as ours.

It is pretty easy and common to create a list of statements of impossible outcomes that are now integral to our lives. No steamship could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic. Heavier-than-air transport was a pipe dream. The world only needs five computers.

Most events and circumstances that are open to human action are objective. “Objective” means rational-empirical: at the same time both logically consistent and evidentiary to the senses. 

A better explanation, a better theory, is better logic. Cartesian geometry is an example. It does not contradict Euclidean geometry, but subsumes it under a wider set of truths. Epigenetics improved upon Darwinian evolution. Statistical mechanics completely replaced phlogiston as an explanation of “heat.” 

New discoveries  – the atom, the chromosome, distant planets, accelerating galaxies – lead to new inventions: stainless steel, Kevlar, rayon. Those are the new facts that require and validate new theories.

I forget where I read it, but it has been pointed out that physicists have no Journal of Phlogiston, but philosophers still have peer-reviewed periodicals for Aristotleanism, Platonism, and other archaic collections. Another expression is, "The news is always the same. It just happens to different people." Researching 19th century America from newspapers in order to write about numismatics, I found many stories that could be reprinted (almost) verbatim today. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Harriman’s Logical Leap 

Greg Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths 

Browne on Kuhn 

Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics