Brave New World have ya read it?

[Proton Soup]

um, yes, persistent happiness is abnormal. and about children, the normal course of growth is that we afford them progressively more freedoms as they mature. the point of education is not to keep them enslaved, but to provide them with the tools for living free.

 

[OrbitalPower]

Presumably they do have bouts with unhappiness as well "A gramme is better than a damn."

When you send a child to get an education generally you want them to have more chances and opportunities in their life, and more of an ability to control certain situations that inevitably come up. In BNW, dysgenics is practiced for the purpose of stability; you do not get to participate in any kind of decision making in regards to society, you do not have many choices, and thus do not have much control of your life except in the sense that you will always have a job since population control is implemented to prevent too many people from sitting around. You do not have control of your destiniation, only a lucky elite get to have the freedom to participate in power.

If you define freedom as the ability to have a lot of control in your life and the freedom to participate in power (Cicero) then the people in BNW do not much have freedom, if you define freedom to mean that people are contented with their servitude and the amount of political and economic manipulation that is enforced on them, then the people in BNW are free.

I think the former is much more "common sense" but apparently this question has been asked before:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=68724

I had no idea so many people thought BNW was about a utopia rather than a dystopia.

At least we don't have to debate what huxley's intentions were as much as with 1984 as Huxley wrote BNW: Revisted to let us know what he was thinking when he wrote.

A better example of a true utopia is perhaps "Island" also by Huxley but unfortunately this society isn't large enough to be considered viable.

 

[Zantra]

um, yes, persistent happiness is abnormal. and about children, the normal course of growth is that we afford them progressively more freedoms as they mature. the point of education is not to keep them enslaved, but to provide them with the tools for living free.

I was using the childhood comparison to make a point about perspective. Kids rebel against the perceived injustice while in actuality the intentions are just. It's about getting the "big picture."

People percieve a world without choice (even if all the prederminates are "in their best interests") as a prison. That is because they are used to having those freedoms, but someone born into that society would know no other life, and thus accept it. perception is the reality. And while their perceived reality may seem like a prison to us, to them it might be bliss. If someone lives in a different state than ours, and they percieve it to be a happy one, I don't see that as a prison, because prison is a concept that those people wouldn't concieve of. Now, having never read the book, I don't know if it's similar to 1984, where there is rebellion, but you can't coerce the willing.

As far as happiness beingr "abnormal", it's a biochemical reaction not intended by the body to be sustained indefinitely, so it's hard to predict how the body would react to an indefinitely altered state.