"People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings, and make the individual blooms more beautiful?"
What is the best way to run a society? What structure of people leads to the greatest amount of flourishing? Sure, a wizard's decentralized libertarian archipelago might be the best collection of societies, but what does the best island within that collection look like?
In the novel Island, author Aldous Huxley imagines such a community.
You may know that Huxley was also the author of Brave New World, which was a dystopian novel that warned about the excess of comforts and consumerism in the twentieth century. If Brave New World presents the problem, Island presents the solution. Published a year before his death, Island is Huxley's picture of what an ideal society could be. Island could be described as a utopian fiction, but a completely different kind. Island is fundamentally different from most utopian fiction - it focuses on a different path to societal-wide happiness while grounding itself in the confines of the real world.
(I have forgone the trite I, II, III section breaks in favor of ATTENTION - this is the word repeated by Myna Birds strewn throughout Pala to keep people in the present)
In most fiction, utopia is portrayed like this:
Which is to say, it's portrayed like a technological wonderland. The Culture, Wakanda, Laputa - all societies that are seen as better than ours, because they are more technologically advanced.
Which is funny, because deep down, I think we can all agree that technology only indirectly contributes to happiness. Did upgrading my iPhone 12 Pro to an iPhone 13 Pro Max really increase my life happiness? Probably not. Did replacing my Vizio 4K TV with a LG 4K OLED panel help me become a better person? The answer isn’t just “no”, it’s “obviously no”. It’s like asking “did drinking orange juice help you become a better driver”.
So, what does increase life happiness? Huxley argues: emotional awareness, relationships, and self-actualization. Think of someone you know who is extremely well adjusted - confident, kind, and is distinctly able to shape their life into something that they want. Pala is a society optimized to create those kinds of people.
Pala is a different kind of utopia - it isn’t a utopia because it has technology a few generations ahead of us; it’s a utopia because it has life satisfaction a few generations ahead of us.
“But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn't the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn't make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction.”
So, how is society actually arranged?
The family structure is an interesting deviation from ours - while we consider the nuclear family the atom of society, Pala has the MAC - mutual adoption club. MACs are collections of twenty or so couples, plus ten or so few ex-husbands and ex-wives, plus some retirees. As a unit they all watch over twenty or so children. If a child finds the weight of living under a certain set of parents unbearable, they are encouraged to migrate to another home within their MAC. When children migrate to other homes, they stay there anywhere between a few days and a few months - in the meanwhile, the parents get some therapy from the other parents.
Huxley makes the case that traditional style parents can be the root of a lot of people’s suffering - Farnaby’s father was highly religious, and an abusive alcoholic. A MAC can avoid hurt like this by giving children an escape valve. I was fortunate enough to have great parents, but I know a lot of people who would have had better upbringings with an option to migrate, even if for just a little bit. Huxley also encourages what we would call “free range parenting” - letting children do things all on their own, the opposite of hover parenting.
The economic structure reads like an odd mix between socialism and libertarianism.
First the socialist part: their society "doesn't permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average." In the United States, the median household income was $67,521. Meaning the maximum income in Pala would be about $337,605. (I think it’s possible that the income cap would be the most unrealistic part of Pala in 2022, and we haven’t even gotten to giving psychedelics to children yet.)
Then, the libertarian part: "Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats. Pala's a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there's plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government."
To me, this sounds like a left-libertarian’s paradise. Society generally follows the will of the people, but gets distorted by two key factors - money and power. Pala puts caps on both of these.
For recreation, the primary hobbies are sex and drugs. Well, kind of - more like tantric sex and psychedelics.
Huxley thinks that tantric sex can cure a lot of society’s ills. A lot of the focus is on maithuna, or, coitus reservatus (basically, sex where the guy doesn’t cum). There’s a lot of talk about sex becoming something more, in a Buddhist sense: "And that's the whole point of maithuna. It's not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it's the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one's sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation." Also, contraceptives are freely available from the government at no cost (except taxes) if people want to change it up.
The psychedelic is called moksha, and it seems directly inspired by magic mushrooms and mescaline. Huxley was a big believer in psychedelics, to the point that he wrote one of the foundational texts on the matter - Doors of Perception. Huxley even took 100μg of LSD on his deathbed. Moksha is seen not as a drug to escape reality, but as a drug to understand it and contemplate it.
“And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you'll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that's for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird's advice: Attention!”
For education, a heavy emphasis is put on understanding the child:
“Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with /static/images/acx/images38_67 or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered…” This goes on for another half of a page.
The other interesting bit for education is… using psychedelics on children. Children can reject it if they want to, but moksha is taught as a way to get children to think critically and ignore dogma.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with people discussing utopias is realism. People have a completely impractical pie in the sky idea of how a society could look, without much consideration for the real world. Fortunately, *Island* takes realism very seriously, on both a global and local scale.
First, let’s talk about dictators. How can a paradise like Pala exist in a world, our world, where Stalin and Hitler have existed? Island has a short but direct dialogue about how a high amount of suffering within the world can be explained by unfulfilled, unhappy men seeking power. (Men specifically seemed kind of sexist to me, but honestly, when I think of the all time most evil people - Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are all men. In fact, a good amount of suffering carried out at the time of writing can be explained by Putin. I guess, fortunately, feminism hasn’t brought equality of outcomes in evil and bloodthirsty autocrats)
Island lays out two types of these evil, unfulfilled men - the Peter Pan and the Muscle Man. It’s absolutely shocking to me how well this corresponds to our 2022 view of malicious people. The Peter Pan corresponds to what we would describe as an incel, a man who grows up far too late. For the canonical example of a Peter Pan, Island chooses who most would describe as the most infamous man ever - Hitler:
“A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or cooperating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldn't draw.”
So - how do you solve a would-be Hitler?
"It isn't hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X-ray their wrists and give them an EEC. All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution's sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena—without punishment and without a sword…
For Peter-Panic delinquency, what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals. Given a tolerable environment, the result will be sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months. Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn't been the faintest possibility of eventual praj-naparamita and karuna, eventual wisdom and compassion.”
This seems… entirely reasonable to me. Pre-screening for mental health seems like a no-brainer, and honestly it’s a little insane to me that we don’t do it. I have distinct memories in grade school of being taken out of class to be tested for color blindness - why can’t we do it for mental illness. Surely there are some predictors of early mental illness in grade school students, and if instead the best we can do is wait until symptoms manifest, that’s a lot better than the system we have now, which entirely puts the burden on the people suffering from it to check in with a doctor.
The Muscle Man corresponds to what in 2022 terms, we would call toxic masculinity. Machismo, ignoring your own feelings, “feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility”. The book defines the canonical example as Stalin, which is fair, but I immediately think Putin.
How do you fix a muscle man? Teach them to be open with their feelings. Give them other outlets for their aggression - mountain climbing, cutting down trees, taking long hikes.
Machismo is a local maximum for self confidence. It’s near impossible to leave it once you’re already in it, because you have to cross the pit of despair. But being open with your feelings is a global maximum - it gives you a good amount more self confidence than machismo, and it has the benefit of not being inherently toxic.
One of the most interesting patterns in Island is all of the main characters are in some sort of grief. Will Farnaby, the protagonist, lost his wife after she got in a car crash caused by her being distracted and upset by Farnaby’s serial affairs. Dr. Robert McPhail is the main tour guide of the Island, and represents a bridge between the outside world and Pala. Throughout the book, his wife is on her deathbed. Susilia is the nurse that helps Will recover from his ship crash, and is probably most emblematic of the natives of Pala. Her husband had died in a rock-climbing accident a few months before the book started.
“We're not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable."
This reads like a steelman to me. Huxley puts the main characters in the aura of death, and has them show some realistic happiness. Even for those in the throes of grief a place like Pala is a fundamentally good place.
"It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living." She gave him a sad little smile and added, "It isn't easy."
Near the end of the novel, Will Farnaby takes some moksha and reflects deeply on his wife's death. It helps him recontextualize it in ways he never had before (which to be fair is the modus operandi of psychedelics). This shows that Pala as a society isn’t just compatible at handling grief like ours is, it’s maybe even better at it.
At its worst, Island lists off some concepts that probably seemed neat to Huxley, but never really took off. He tries to make the case that hypnotism will revolutionize medicine. To be completely honest, I don’t know a lot about hypnotism. I do know it hasn’t exactly taken modern medicine by storm. It could be that it's been completely overlooked, but I’m gonna venture a guess that there’s a reason it hasn’t really found a niche outside of… middle school magic shows.
But honestly, Island has way more hits than misses. Gay acceptance, anti-colonialist beliefs, revolutionizing the education system, work/life balance, psyechedelics as therapy, all in the year 1962.
At its best, Island reminds me of what I like about Scott’s essays - if you start with a complete and nuanced model of the world, then your arguments, questions, and stray thoughts all become more complete and more interesting than anyone else. Island grows from the idea that utopia isn’t a set of sufficiently advanced technologies, but a way that people could live. And Huxley feeds this idea with another one - the idea that the world, and life itself is beautiful.
I wholeheartedly recommend Aldous Huxley’s Island.
" 'Patriotism is not enough.' But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do."
