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"Brave new world" made a very good case for Mill's side of that argument. I found it convincing, for what that's worth.


I found both this book and the above JSM quote to be violently antithetical to the very existence of all pleasure seekers.

My disdain for them led me into the arms of the philosophers who don't hate pleasure and the sensual world, like Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and the works of the critical theorists.

The general disdain for hedonism felt in this world is extremely stupid. Brave New World is objectively a utopia, regardless whatever that one native american MC thought


I think what I found convincing was that, despite it being a utopia, the people living in it were awful. I read it imagining myself living there and saying 'of course if I lived there, I'd be happy' but they weren't, and the things that made them unhappy were so incredibly petty.

It's funny to see Nietzsche invoked in this context, since I'd imagine him giving much more weight to the slightly-more-ubermensch native MC than that of the society he clashed with. Nietzsche's a very subjective philosopher of course, but I'd imagine him saying that to love the world would be to refuse to engage with it in the glib way the society in BNW does.




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