The World State: A Dystopian, Secular Theocracy

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents readers with a dystopian state, whose organization, though secular, seems predicated on a Freudian, pseudo-religious counterfeit of Eastern and Western religious traditions. By making use of soma (the “opiate of the masses”), pseudo-religious rituals, and desire-based conditioning, the state seeks to suppress religious yearnings and create a world devoid of human suffering. 

In an age of digital escapism, hook-up culture, and declining church attendance, where political ideology has dethroned religious faith, Huxley’s work cautions us on the danger of spiritual suicide and the important role played by suffering, relationships, and religious faith in achieving human fulfillment.

The World State: A Counterfeit Church?

The civilization of Brave New World claims to have rid itself of all traditional religion. But has it? From the earliest chapters of the novel, readers are introduced to a polity which artificially manufactures and conditions people to fit certain roles or castes in society. 

These castes just so happen to correspond perfectly to the Hindu caste system: 

“Alpha – Brahmans (priests and teachers) 

Beta – Kshastriyas (rulers and warriors) 

Delta – Vaishyas (merchants and traders) 

Gamma – Sudras (workers and peasants) 

Epsilon – Harijans (‘Untouchables’). ” (Tufts 33)

The state, likewise, mandates attendance of “Solidarity Services,” a distortion of the Catholic Mass. The President makes a sign of the T, a perversion of the Christian sign of the cross. Soma tablets and soma-laced ice cream are placed atop an altar as a counterfeit Eucharist. Ford’s coming is announced in mockery of Christian eschatology (Huxley 78-86). Most egregiously, congregants drink and consume soma as they sing hymns about becoming one with the Social River, the annihilation of their individuality: “For I am you and you are I.” Together, they “melt” and “dissolve” into Ford (Huxley 81-83).

“Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is” (Huxley 238). Soma is a substitute for religion, a counterfeit Eucharist. The state may be able to eliminate religious guilt, or struggle, but it cannot eradicate religion altogether. Everyone worships something (Matthew 6:24). In the story of the Exodus, when the Israelites grow impatient in the desert, awaiting the return of Moses, they ask Aaron to make them an idol of a golden calf which they can worship (Exodus 32:1-6). Isolated from God, man will always create one. 

The World State acknowledges that faith is something that everyone yearns for instinctively, but it needs to be replaced with something else to realize its utopic vision. But what if this is at the cost of true flourishing? In Brave New World, God has been replaced with Ford and a Freudian lack of restraint.

The World State’s Attack on Meaningful Relationships

The World State’s onslaught on meaning extends beyond religious faith, with the eradication of the nuclear family. Echoing the ideals of Buddhist Monasticism, which views the family structure as a source of attachment to the world and, as such, a source of suffering, the Controllers of the World State, have eliminated viviparous birth and forbidden romantic relationships. But even here, the religious ideal does not exist without corruption. “Don’t imagine,’ he said, ‘that I’d had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing longdrawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal” (Huxley 97). Instead of encouraging detachment from earthly desires through self-discipline, the World State promotes unrestrained indulgence and promiscuity (Tufts 33-37). 

The intention goes deeper than a mere elimination of suffering, however. This policy serves as a distraction from man’s telos: union with God. In the Christian view of marriage, marriage and the family serve as avenues for union with the divine, in reflection of God’s own relational nature—which brings forth creation out of love (West 147). Huxley’s World State recognizes the inseparability of romantic relationships from religious experience in the novel, but distorts the concept entirely. It replaces the sacrament of marriage with an “orgy-porgy” ritual in the Solidarity Service (Huxley 84-85). Devoid of true intimacy or connection, the ritual serves as a mere excitation of lust. It serves no higher purpose, leaving participants ever more “miserably isolated,” in a state of “unreplenished emptiness.” (Huxley 86)

With hookup culture on the rise on college campuses, studies universally attest to heightening rates of depression and anxiety. Does this not sound all too familiar to our present predicament?

The Ache for Eudaimonia and the Failure of Happiness

Ironically, the book testifies to how the World State’s utilitarian vision for the world—the elimination of suffering and the maximization of pleasure (so-called “happiness”)—is in reality a failed experiment. Man may have every pleasure, but at his core, the chasm formed between him and the ends for which he exists takes a spiritual and emotional toll, rendering true fulfillment, eudaimonia, impossible. 

Aldous Huxley’s answer to the question, “can pleasure satisfy?” is a resounding “NO.”

For one, the ache for meaningful relationships can be put off over and over again, but it cannot be wholly suppressed. Examples of this abound in the novel. For an example, take the words of Linda: “‘I am not your mother. I won’t be your mother…’ Suddenly she put her arms around him and kissed him again and again”  (Huxley 127). Characters find themselves consistently mortified by their predicament, surrounded by every pleasure and yet incapable of living out their deepest ingrained desires.

“But why?” one might ask. Ecclesiastes 3:11 and Romans 2:15 note that both “eternity” and “the law” have been written in our hearts. We are born with an internal desire to know and love God and others. This desire is not instilled, but rather is rooted in the ends for which we exist, coming into union with the divine. I am reminded of the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises: “I call desolation what is entirely the opposite of what is described in the third rule, as darkness of soul, turmoil of spirit, inclination to what is low and earthly, restlessness rising from many disturbances and temptations which lead to want of faith, want of hope, want of love. The soul is wholly slothful, tepid, sad, and separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord” (Ignatius 142).

There is something to be said, then, about the World State’s imposed culture of hedonism. It brings nothing but desolation. Like Bernard, who at the conclusion of the Solidarity Service outwardly claimed his experience was “wonderful,” and yet found himself “miserably isolated,” (Huxley 86)  we live in a world of deeply miserable people, often in ways we do not even realize. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared a “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, ” with about half of adults reporting feelings of loneliness, one in five reporting feelings of loneliness and social isolation every day and only 16% reporting feelings of connection to their local community.

Characters in Brave New World, however, are not just deprived of relationships, their conditioning has them recoiling at the very idea of what could heal their brokenness: 

“But I want to know what passion is,… I want to feel something strongly… When the individual feels, the community reels,” Lenina pronounced” (Huxley 94).

For many, the recoil means seeking a different crutch. Near the end of the novel, we are moved by Linda’s story. “Greedily, she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses… She took as much as twenty grammes a day,” which as her doctor notes “will finish her off in a month or two” (Huxley 154). Never satisfied, characters consume more and more soma, constituting a form of literal and metaphorical suicide. Unlike the Eucharist which is Bread of Life, soma brings nothing but spiritual death.

Our soma might take different forms, but in effect, the contemporary problem is the same: the endless reel scroll, the urge for another puff from a blunt, the slavery to pornographic content. Today’s youth are more depressed, more lonely, more addicted, and perhaps more spiritually angsty than ever in recorded history. That should come as no surprise. 

The most heartbreaking scene in the novel would probably be Linda’s death scene. In her final moments, Linda imagines a sexual encounter with Popé, as she consumes copious amounts of soma. Suddenly, her illusion is broken with the realization that her lungs have started to fail. She desperately claws at her throat trying to breathe, to cry, to escape from her terror. But there is no consolation to be had (Huxley 204-205). Linda’s time is up. She dies utterly unsatisfied, spiritually depleted, having been ever distracted from her telos and all that could have guided her to human flourishing.

The World State and Spiritual Emptiness

A focus on Huxley’s cautions regarding substance abuse and relationships risks distracting from the work’s deeper spiritual implications. The existential angst of characters in Brave New World finds its root in isolation from the divine. Bernard’s desolation after a spiritually bankrupt religious service, Linda’s death at the hands of a counterfeit Eucharist, Helmholtz’s yearning for religious literature, all point to the failure of the World State’s distractions at filling the God-sized void in the human heart. 

The text reaches its theological apex with the exchange between John the Savage and World Controller Mustapha Mond in chapter seventeen. Mond quotes Maine de Biran, saying “Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses” (Huxley 233). And yet, Mond seems nevertheless committed to his project and the dissolution of traditional religion: “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness” (Huxley 234). 

But what happiness?  Freud’s call for unrestrained hedonism and pleasure is one that brings nothing but despair. Saint Augustine’s famous words ring ever true, “You have made us for yourself [O Lord], and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Augustine 3). Like the Israelites in the exodus, our souls cry out for God (Exodus 15:25).

Our culture is suffering its own crisis of faith, and subsequently, a crisis of meaning. As one NIH study found, the phenomenon of Church pews emptying and the rise of religious “none’s,” has been tied with declined rates of life satisfaction and purpose, increased rates of suicide, depression and anxiety. The rise of secularism, the commodification of man, and the emergence of a culture of immediate gratification has only played into this mental health decline. As C.S. Lewis once put it, “In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get neither comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair” (Lewis 32).

John the Savage here plays the same role as John the Baptist, the prophetic “voice of one crying out in the wilderness” who pointed to faith in Christ for healing (John 1:23). “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin… I am claiming the right to be unhappy” (Huxley 240). 

Brave New World Today

Analyzed from a religious vantage point, Brave New World is a cautionary text to avoid a sensualist mode of existence. The desert of suffering shows us our ultimate need for God. It becomes a necessary thing for us to endure so that we can realize our telos and avoid unfulfillment (Exodus 17:3-7). 

Freud’s call for unrestrained hedonism and pleasure is one that brings nothing short of despair. With so many distractions, algorithms designed to keep us hooked, and political movements that seem to demand quasi-religious observance, it is often too easy to forget what really matters. Huxley’s prescription for the modern world is quite simple: faith and relationship. 

The question is will we accept it, or will we allow ourselves to be shackled by the errors of the age?

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Works Cited

Augustine, and Henry Chadwick. Confessions. Oxford University Press, 2011. 

God. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. Ignatius Press, 1994. 

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World with the Essay “Brave New World Revisited”. Harper Perennial, 2010. 

Ignatius, and Louis J. Puhl. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Loyola Press, a Jesuit Ministry, 2021. 

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. William Collins, 2017. 

Tufts, Carey. Siddhartha Savage: The Importance of Buddhism in Huxley’s Brave New World – Harvest. https://harvest.usask.ca/bitstream/handle/10388/etd-08042006-145303/c_tufts.pdf. 

West, Christopher. Theology of the Body for Beginners. North Palm Beach, Florida, Beacon Publishing, 2018.