This Side Isn’t Paradise

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, people live for Henry Ford’s assembly-lines mass production. They are classified by castes, and each caste serves different functions to society. And, so that they can manufacture with greatest efficiency, they are conditioned to be happy. This happiness is gained by gratifying human’s want for pleasure. Everyone just works, and then have sex and Soma - a drug that makes them rapturous, and makes them forget all problems.

It may sound like a good idea to live in that world, so do you want to try it? Since the system is bent on happiness for the sake of a stable society, you’re not allowed to feel anything contrary to that externally stimulated joy: no sadness, no pensiveness, and no pity; all your miseries are flushed by a gramme of Soma. When you mull on art, religion, and science, you are ostracized. You cannot be bothered with any emotional bond to anyone, since you’re only allowed to be happy, and emotional bond does not always make you happy. Parenthood are shunned, fidelity laughed at, and unconditional love despised. Once again, all your miseries are flushed by a gramme of Soma.

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I’ve been outside of Philippines and I see that, generally, our people are happier than anywhere else’s. I’m just unsure of if our kind of happiness is still conducive to progress. See, I don’t believe that Pinoys are as incapable of independent thought as those Brave New World’s zombified people are, but what exactly have we done with our woes? Filipino novels published 50 years ago, such as those by F Sionil Jose, have presented problems that still prevail today. Have we even tried to deal with them? Have we bridged the separation of classes? Have we indicted our corrupt leaders, who have been corrupting us in the same way as they have been since we’ve become an independent country? Have our working class gained more privilege, and did we fight to ensure that this is so? Have our rags-to-riches brothers bothered to help lift those who are left behind? Have the rich among us done anything but squander in an aristocrat’s hedonistic world?

Even the bums in our streets can enumerate our errors. However, we try so hard to live while ignoring our errors. Instead of rebuilding our society, we turn to escapism. We direct our attention to whatever the media give us, be it the blitz of Pacquiao boxing matches, or the frivolity of the latest showbiz scandals (which we never seem to run out of). We waste away our lives by jumping from one hopelessly-Americanized fad to another. We call ourselves liberal by only adapting its unrestricted promiscuity, as though liberalism were merely standing for freewheeling sex and drugs. All these make us cheer. All these make us suppress our discontent with our system. All these make us happy. All these become our blissful ignorance; our Soma. We do nothing that compels us to understand our sufferings, and to take a more active role in righting our society.

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Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World as a response to America’s hedonism during the Roaring Twenties. Roaring Twenties, by the way, has nothing to do with your age; it’s about the years from 1920-1929 when America’s economy had an unprecedented boom. During then, Americans were too confident (quoting 20’s president Herbert Hoover, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”), thinking that nothing bad can ever happen to them. They mass consumed, just for the sake of pleasure. They didn’t know that, as a result of their recklessness, what was to come was The Great Depression.

Right now, Philippines are depressing. Our stocks are crashing, and prices of all our necessities are inflating very steeply. Sadly, we have yet to wake up from our Soma. Despite all our government’s PR talks, we’re at our most destructive age. If we don’t do anything soon, our place will be as bleak as that dystopia from Brave New World.