When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, he imagined a civilisation that had traded its soul for comfort.

The “World State” he described had no war, no poverty, and no individuality. People lived without pain or purpose, surrendering freedom for pleasure. Nearly a century later, the same bargain defines our own culture wars. Pleasure has replaced purpose, slogans have replaced thought, and citizens police themselves in the name of progress. Huxley’s world of engineered happiness and moral conformity is no longer fiction; it is the mirror of a civilisation that fears discomfort more than it fears its loss of liberty and autonomy.

The first major idea in Huxley’s vision is manufactured happiness. The World State has perfected the art of keeping its citizens content. Every hint of sadness is erased by the drug soma, every doubt drowned in entertainment, every question softened by distraction. People are told that happiness is the highest virtue. “Christianity without tears, that’s what soma is,” says one of the rulers. The citizens are calm, cheerful, and empty. They no longer suffer, and so they no longer think.

Huxley understood that pleasure could control people more effectively than fear. A society need not oppress its citizens if it can seduce them. Today, that vision feels uncomfortably familiar. We too live in a world that equates comfort with goodness and happiness with consumption. The modern citizen is surrounded by screens that promise connection yet deliver distraction, and by media that offer constant affirmation but little meaning. Like soma, these comforts soothe us into silence.

The second idea is the loss of individuality. In Huxley’s world, people are not born; they are manufactured. Embryos are conditioned to fit their social roles, from intelligent Alphas to obedient Epsilons. “Every one belongs to every one else,” they repeat, turning belonging into obedience. In this system, freedom is dangerous because it threatens the smooth order of conformity.

That idea has returned in modern culture under a new name. Today’s ideological movements divide society into fixed identities of victim and oppressor, echoing the rigid castes of Huxley’s novel. Critical Race Theory and similar frameworks teach people to see the world through collective guilt and inherited virtue rather than individual responsibility. The logic is the same: people are judged not for who they are, but for the category they belong to. Debate gives way to moral sorting, and individuality is replaced by identity.

The new conformity does not come from a dictator but from the crowd. Social media has become a vast conditioning system, rewarding outrage and punishing wrongthink. To disagree is to risk exile; to conform is to be praised. In this climate, the slogans of inclusion and belonging often conceal a demand for sameness. What Huxley called “conditioning” we now call virtue-signalling.

Huxley warned that people would come to “love their servitude.” In the culture wars of our time, that servitude feels comforting rather than cruel. It feels safe to belong to a tribe, to speak in approved language, to be seen as virtuous. Yet every act of self-censorship, every fear of giving offence, brings us closer to the world Huxley foresaw, a society of smiling and tame obedience.

The power of Brave New World lies in how quietly its nightmare unfolds. There is no tyranny, only pleasure. There is no violence, only conformity. Huxley’s warning was that freedom dies not in fire, but in comfort. His two great fears, pleasure without purpose and equality without individuality, now define the age of digital distraction and ideological thought control. The future he imagined did not arrive with soldiers or prisons, but with smartphones, hashtags, and curated identities.

A civilisation that fears discomfort more than it values individualism cannot remain free. Huxley’s warning endures because it was never about technology or science; it was about us.