A Brave New World or no?

[Shinova]

An unrelated topic on a different forum sort of veered in this direction so I thought I'd pose that bit of thought here. The question, when distilled down to its simplest form, is do you prefer happiness or free thought.

However, the real world is never so black-and-white as to be either purely happiness or purely free thought. Both exist in a mix of some form, barring,

1. World leaders get the crazy idea to adopt a brave new world style of society and engineer and brainwash us all into semi-mindless drones blissfully content with where we are.

OR

2. The world suffers some enormous catastrophe so grievously bad that human civilization is irrevocably ruined to the point where people cannot even band together and start slowly recreating some form of a civilized existence, and life is a constant hell with no room whatsoever for thought dedicated to something other than the pursuit of basic survival.


But let's get back to the question. Which would you prefer? A society more dominated by free thought and individualism at the expense of an ideal standard of living, or one dominated by the pursuit of a state of blissful happiness as a semi-mindless drone?

[wolveraptor]

Are you saying that if we chose freedom of thought, we would, in this scenario, be barred from ever feeling happy? Then of course I'd choose happiness. A life with absolutely no joy would just lead to suicide anyways.

[Shinova]

Are you saying that if we chose freedom of thought, we would, in this scenario, be barred from ever feeling happy? Then of course I'd choose happiness. A life with absolutely no joy would just lead to suicide anyways.

No, I don't mean that, since even cave people way back with much more to worry about apparently had the luxury to make stuff like cave paintings.

Obviously happiness and free thought, barring some ludicrously extreme circumstance like I outlined in my OP, will exist together in some proportion or another, never exclusively.

So my question was, would you rather live in a world that was dominated with more of one or the other?

[Shinova]

Of course if we also go to the extremes like you mentioned, in how if you have free thought then you are barred from ever being happy, then likewise you could be happy but be incapable of any independent thought. Which would then be kinda hard, since the world leaders could bring you up in a third-world hell-like place and still condition you to somehow believe that you were perfectly happy. But I'm getting a bit too far.

[B5B7]

Neither option is appealing.
Option 1 is actually totally unrealistic, but assume it true for purpose of OP - no, I would not want to live in that society as the people have lost the essence of humanity.
Option 2 has a problem - such a catastrophe would tend to wipe out a lot of the world population, so any random one of us mightn't even be alive, but again assume that a survivor - bleak as it is one still is human, and have hope that one day situation may improve.

[K. A. Pital]

Number 2 is essentially the irreversible end of civilization, while in 1 civilization still continues, even if in a warped form, and future still comes. One. But "mindless drones"? It's a clear fact that even people who're "drones" regarding faith matters, etc. can be pretty intelligent in some areas, and there will still be a lot to think about. In Number 2, there's no future and most likely certain death, so it's a no-brainer from a rationalist position.

[Darth Wong]

1. World leaders get the crazy idea to adopt a brave new world style of society and engineer and brainwash us all into semi-mindless drones blissfully content with where we are.

There are plenty of sources of unhappiness apart from discontent with your station in life. How would you brainwash people to eliminate the possibility of marital strife, for example?

In a Brave New World society, dumb people get dumb jobs and they're happy that way. Smart people get smart jobs and they're happy that way. There are far, far worse things that I could imagine in life. If anything, the biggest problem is that it's so absurd, not that it would be so awful.

2. The world suffers some enormous catastrophe so grievously bad that human civilization is irrevocably ruined to the point where people cannot even band together and start slowly recreating some form of a civilized existence, and life is a constant hell with no room whatsoever for thought dedicated to something other than the pursuit of basic survival.

How can anyone possibly compare the Brave New World to a horrifying apocalyptic doomsday scenario where most of humanity is annihilated and the rest are plunged into the Dark Ages? Is this supposed to be a joke?

But let's get back to the question. Which would you prefer? A society more dominated by free thought and individualism at the expense of an ideal standard of living, or one dominated by the pursuit of a state of blissful happiness as a semi-mindless drone?

Brave New World did not portray everyone as mindless drones. It would be impossible to run a society that way. BNW depicted people being genetically engineered to be destined for their eventual occupations from birth. Oh yeah, and (horror of horrors) there was plenty of porn in BNW and blacks were allowed to fornicate with whites.

Honestly, as futurist dystopias go, Brave New World would be a pretty damned good place to end up.