Auckland Deep Thinkers Sunday Lunch Book Club: "Brave New World"

A new venue and a new style for the new season. Let's get together once a month to discuss a book that has relevance in today's world.

This month's book is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which offers a chilling and prescient critique of modern society, technology, and the human condition. Though written in 1932, its themes remain strikingly relevant today.

Points for discussion:
🧠 1. The Danger of Comfort Without Meaning

• The World State prioritizes pleasure, stability, and consumption over truth, individuality, and emotional depth.
• Does excessive comfort and entertainment can numb critical thought and erode personal freedom?
• Will a society that avoids discomfort at all costs may lose its soul?

🧬 2. The Risks of Genetic and Social Engineering

• Citizens are biologically engineered and socially conditioned to accept their roles without question.
• When does technology become a threat to human dignity and autonomy?

📺 3. The Power of Propaganda and Conditioning

• From birth, individuals are indoctrinated through hypnopaedia (sleep-teaching) and psychological manipulation.
• Can media control shape beliefs and behaviors more effectively than force?
• Can critical thinking be cultivated?

🧪 4. The Loss of Art, Religion, and Philosophy

• The World State eliminates deep emotional experiences, spiritual inquiry, and intellectual challenge.
• Does a society that sacrifices depth for stability risk becoming shallow and spiritually bankrupt?

🧍 5. The Value of Individuality and Authentic Emotion

• Characters like John the Savage and Helmholtz Watson struggle to assert their individuality in a conformist world.
• Does true humanity lie in our capacity for love, grief, creativity, and rebellion—even when it’s painful?

🧨 6. Freedom vs. Happiness

• The novel poses a central question: Is it better to be free and suffer, or to be controlled and content?
• Is hardship essential for meaning, growth, and authenticity?

🔍 7. Technology Is Not Neutral

• Technological advancement in the World State serves control, not liberation.
• Should we ask not just what technology can do, but why we use it and who it serves?

Huxley’s warning wasn’t about technology itself—it was about how it’s used. Today’s AI debates echo his concerns:

• Will we use AI to enrich human experience, or to control and commodify it?
• Will we preserve individuality, or trade it for efficiency?

CUSTOMS:
You must register and be on the “Attendees - Going” list to attend.
Please bring $2 to cover Meetup costs.

RSVP POLICY:
RSVPs and cancellations will be accepted up until 6 hours before the start of the meetup so that people who feel unwell on the day have time to change their RSVP and allow someone else to attend.

Please only click 'attend' if you are going to come, and remember to change your RSVP if you need to change plans.

No-shows will be removed from the group; i.e. being registered to attend and not attending will be considered a 'No Show'.
This RSVP policy has become necessary due to the high number of last-minute withdrawals and non-attendance. This unfairly causes people on the Waiting List to miss out. Thanks for your cooperation.