Summer Reading, Albert Lafarge: Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Writes Albert Lafarge:

I have just absorbed the following passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited in which Huxley quotes liberally from Erich Fromm:

The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without a fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. … Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (1958), p.20 .

And I recently finished George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, mainly via the audiobook edition, which is read by a cast of over 100 people. Saunders is one of my heroes and this novel, his first, is a weird masterpiece.