Desire and Fate
Though it was genuinely prophetic in a way that, with the key exception of the idea of ‘Newspeak’, Orwell’s 1984 was not, what Huxley did not anticipate in Brave New World was that such radical homogenization could take place while garbed in the motley of individuality, or to put it another way, that conformity could be obtained just as successfully through the fetishization of authenticity as through its repression. When he wrote that, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude,” he seems to have imagined that, if people could not be conditioned to be “happy as they already are,” they would rebel. But he was thinking too much in binaries —- servitude or rebellion, desire or fate —- imagining the one excluded the other, and that rebellion could not be the way in which we now live our certitude and the sense of being able to fulfill all of our desires the way we experience the tragedy of our fate.
Ultimately, of course, they do indeed exclude each other, but not in the mechanical sense that Huxley imagined. Brave New World is, explicitly, a ‘Fordist’ book, so much so that in the society he imagines, historical time begins AF - After Ford - rather than CE - After Christ. We are all at least to some extent prisoners of our own eras, and Huxley cannot be fairly criticized for imagining the most successful model for a capitalist society that of the Fordist Assembly line whose success depending on standardization and the willingness to conform. But viewed from the perspective of 2024, Fordism was one stage among several in the history of capitalism, and most certainly not its culmination, anymore than, for all the wishful thinking among progressives about this being the ‘late capitalist era,’ than this stage is likely to be the culminating one. But what we know for certain about contemporary capitalism is that it owes more to Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction than to the steady state that was Fordism,. And this means that our conformity, our disciplining of society so that its members are reconciled to their fate, looks very different from the disciplining Huxley had in mind.
For our capitalism is that of almost infinite market segmentation, which, of course, is why the contemporary identitarian progressivism of the professional managerial class is the West, above all in the Anglosphere (whose political hegemony may not be what it used to be, but whose cultural supremacy is as hegemonic as ever), is a perfect fit for this economic system, given that an at least potentially infinite variety of new identities means a potentially infinite number of new products. Now that the manufacturing of desires has proven to be far more profitable than the manufacture of automobiles - and what is the tech revolution if not the manufacturing of desires? - the last thing 21st century capitalism needs is the any return of the world of the Fordist assembly line. Huxley imagined that in the future human beings would need to be discouraged from pursuing their own unique desires and interests in order to maintain social order. But in our world, maintaining it requires persuading to believe that these desires make them unique rather than emblems of the new conformity of the simulacrum.
This does not mean that contemporary capitalism is any less dependent on securing consent by conditioning people not only to accept, but to enjoy their fate. It is just that our conditioning rests on a different drug than Huxley’s soma and involves the cultivation of instability rather than stability. That instability may not seem pacifying (or enslaving) but that is in reality exactly what it is, for it mistaking one’s sense that one has the freedom to determine one’s own fate for the reality that one is actually doing so. The gap between the way users perceive social media and the way owners perceive it is the paradigmatic instance of this. For when one posts a Tik Tok video, or something on Instagram, or tweets on X, for the most part one has the impression of being entirely free to say whatever one wants. On a superficial level, this is not wrong. For despite all the talk of individuals’ views being censored, whether by X from the right or Google from the left, who censorship does exist affects a tiny percentage of social media users. But on a deeper level, all this self-expression serves to enrich the oligarchs who control social media and continually strengthen the economic system that serves their interests (again, this is why identitarian politics has been so easily assimilated in a way class politics could never have been).
The old joke that the Devil’s greatest accomplishment was persuading people he did not exist is relevant here. For it seems unlikely that our contemporary tech overlords would exercise the crushing degree of hegemony that they do were it not for the fact that their platforms offer its users the simulacrum of emancipation, of a supposedly unparalleled context for individual self-expression, and, in the identitarian context, of self-definition. Huxley thought that people would need to be provided with the pharmacological equivalent of bread and circuses. But social media is a far more addictive compound for through it we have succeeded in accomplishing the seemingly impossible in the annals of enslavement is concerned: becoming our own bread and circuses.