This week I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I had never actually read this book before, but my husband read it during his freshman year of college, and he has mentioned it a few times over the past month or two. His copy is filled with notes and annotations, which really says something because he rarely marks up anything he reads at all.

I think the sacrifice of individuality and freedom could never be worth an “easier” society to live in – one void of passion and depth. One of the most important things we have is our freedom of speech, and currently in America that is under attack. It felt very fitting that I read this the week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, because this book really shows where our society is heading. He had ideas that some people didn’t like, and those people were willing to go to horrifying lengths to silence someone who had the audacity to disagree. This isn’t a left vs. right thing – it’s a direct attack on our freedom to be who we are, the very freedom this country was founded on.

Huxley’s futuristic world shows people who have turned away from God and from love to instead focus on hedonistic pleasures, and anyone who questions that society is ostracized. I don’t want to see our world head in this direction, but as of late, it already is. When freedom dies, so does any hope for our world. Everything is made out to be “perfect” in the novel’s world – even down to the clones and how children are conditioned to act. People swallow pills to make them “happy,” but all it really does is dumb them down.

We as humans require philosophy and critical thinking, and from what I’ve seen online the past several days, there really isn’t a lot of that going around anymore. We can’t prioritize comfort and pleasure over truth just because it makes us feel better, we need to keep our eyes open to actual facts. So many of my friends have been sharing “information” about what happened last week, and the extent of their research seems to be that they simply Googled a question and clicked on the first link that came up. Back in high school we were taught to cite reliable sources for the claims we made in papers, and it seems like that skill has completely gone out the window. People just find a “news” source (often an opinion piece at best) that “proves their point” and they end up doing zero digging of their own, because they’re more focused on “feeling better about being right” than actually confronting painful realities.

Happiness without truth is not real happiness, and it is entirely temporary. When faith, family, and dignity are stripped from the human person in the name of “progress,” we lose everything our founding fathers fought to establish for America. When we turn our backs on God and on the truth (which in reality are the same thing), we damn only ourselves.

This is one of those books that I believe everyone should read in their lifetime. It’s also extremely accessible, even for those who don’t spend a lot of time reading full books or who find a visual component helpful. There’s a great graphic novel version available on Kindle Unlimited, illustrated beautifully by Fred Fordham. I read through them side-by-side, and it really helped form the bigger picture.

If you haven’t read this one, I urge you to pick up a copy today and really think about our current society while you read it. Don’t go in thinking about left or right (because again, it’s not really about that). Go in as a human being ready to analyze what is wrong with our world today.