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'We condition them to thrive on heat,' concluded Mr Foster. 'Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it..' 'And that,' put in the Director sententiously, 'that is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got  to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny'. [12] 'I am I, and I wish I wasn't' [55] A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. [59] Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. [60] When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them. [60] The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should su...

Brave New World (Vintage Books, 1932; 329) by Aldous Huxley - with introductions by Margaret Atwood and David Bradshaw - is a dystopian novel that uses scientific, social and economic developments of the time to describe, through extrapolation, the way life is likely to be if we stick to that developmental trajectory tenaciously. In this book, set in A.F. 632 (the year of Our Ford or 2540 AD), mass production techniques, as developed by Henry Ford when he first built his Ford T Model, and mass consumption are the economic development paradigms. Ford's role in the story or in the life of the inhabitants of this new world was akin to that of God in the AD; for instance people say 'Oh Ford!' and not 'Oh God'. Religion is an anathema and production and consumption are its replacements. Several years after the strategic war, the World State has been created. This World State, which is a highly-civilised and economically and scientifically developed society, is in ...