“History is bunk” sums up its Modernist attitude toward the past, one that views historical facts as unpleasant and seeks to minimize the influence of wisdom, tradition, and culture. “Never put off tomorrow the fun you can have today” captures its culture of hedonism and instant gratification. “Ending is better than mending” and “The more stitches, the less riches” ungrammatically reflect the World State’s self-indulgent consumerist mentality. Slogans like “When the individual feels, the community reels” and “Everyone belongs to everyone else” indicate the Marxist penchant to jettison individual human dignity in favor of an ersatz common good, including pervasive sexual promiscuity, from age five and up. Ironically, given the superficiality of Huxley’s society, these hypnopaedic proverbs are heavily laden with World State propaganda, and their use is intended primarily to diffuse anything but the most anodyne conversations.įor the reader, these proverbs provide an efficient means by which to apprehend the precepts that undergird Huxley’s imagined (but eerily familiar) futuristic dystopia, the citizens of which are manipulated not by force and tyranny but by constant amusement and pleasure. Once devised, these slogans are piped into the ears of sleeping children who invariably come to accept them as undeniable truths and repeat them to one another in place of authentic conversation. Helmholtz’s only creative task at the CEE is to compose pithy slogans that can be readily absorbed and regurgitated by the masses. But rather than pushing products for slick corporations, he’s a prime player in the World State’s ubiquitous social-conditioning program known as hypnopaedia, or “sleep teaching.”
He’s a sort of reductive, futuristic Madison Avenue man. Broad-shouldered, deep-chested, tall, attractive to the ladies, and respected by other well-endowed males in his elite caste, Helmholtz is a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (CEE). Helmholtz Watson is an alpha-plus male in Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel Brave New World (1932).
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