Toronto: Random House, 2011.How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, Don’t forget to keep Brave New World in mind as you read them. If you need inspiration, click here and here to see lists of recent advertising slogans. My attempts so far? “My body, your GIF” & “I’d love you to ‘like’ me” & “I’m only as smart as I feel” & “Let’s talk phones!” What slogans might you come up with to indoctrinate our future citizens? These slogans can’t simply state the orthodox position: they must also be catchy and pithy. In the meantime, imagine you had Helmholtz Watson’s job, but here and now. My favourite from that novel is the slogan of the “American Restoration Authority” (the government of the US in its final decline): “Together We’ll Surprise the World!” (43). Gary Shteyngart offers some alternatives, geared for the age of IM, in Super Sad True Love Story–usually slogans packed with typo–as we’ll see in a few weeks. Slogans like “Everybody’s happy nowadays” (79) and “Everyone belongs to everyone else” (40) sound somewhat silly to 21st-century ears. But all these suggestions are our suggestions. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. The sum of suggestions is the child’s mind. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is clear on this point: In Huxley’s novel, children grow up hearing endless repetitions of catchy slogans and jingles, which eventually become their opinions and represent much of their mental range. Whether totalitarian or consumerist (or, of course, both), governments in these novels strive to strip down their citizens’ linguistic resources. As in 1984, Super Sad True Love Story and so many other dystopian novels, Brave New World makes a lot of the power of language. Aldous Huxley draws a none too subtle parallel between the conditioning techniques of “social predestination” and “hypnopaedia” and the methods of political propaganda and advertising in our world.
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