Exile, Dystopia, and the Will to Order: Huxley’s Brave New World

Abstract

If in Heart of Darkness and Darkness at Noon, Conrad and Koestler stage the empire-building phase of the will to power, whether in its colonialist or in its communist guise, in Brave New World Huxley stages its postcolonialist and postcommunist phase. Huxley’s dystopian empire has now encompassed the entire planet and is called the World-State, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the New World Order envisaged by the multinational global elites of the late 20th century, after the fall of Communism. Its watchword is no longer the will to conquest, but “stability” or the will to order. Likewise, the main instrument of the will to power is no longer the infliction of physical and psychological pain, as in Darkness at Noon and in Nineteen Eighty-Four; on the contrary, it is the “infliction of pleasure” (Huxley’s phrase). This does not mean, of course, that the New World Order will not resort to violence and massive pain-infliction whenever global “stability” (read: its hegemony) is threatened, as the current “war on terror,” oil proxy wars, and other local nationalist and/or religious conflagrations amply demonstrate.