In this case, a book which is overly heavy handed in its preachy and ponderous “message” including minute details of the “system” and “society” which he is portraying negatively in order to emphasize how undesirable it would be.

Now, do I need to continue to demonstrate that I have a much broader vocabulary than you do, are or you done with the pathetic attempts to side-rail the discussion?

Privacy is a social choice. Secrecy is a tool used by parasites to avoid being held to account for their actions which harm others,and which would lead to loss of social status and possible eviction from the society if those actions were known to all.

And I’ve read Huxley. Found it to be a rather pedantic and dull book that made the same basic assumptions you do, i.e. that accountability will not be enforced equally across all levels of society, but will instead be enforced only for some, while the highest elites will remain unaccountable. It’s this basic assumption that full transparency falsifies. And since EVERYTHING else you argue about is based on this false assumption, nothing you have to say has any validity, but merely reflects your fear and paranoia regarding a future that you have no actual comprehension of.

An accountable society has no need of “Big Brother” or a massive “government” enforcing numerous laws because ALL MEMBERS OF THAT SOCIETY, regardless of “status” know that ANY ACTIONS that cause harm to others will be held to account by the rest of society, and therefore have NO INCENTIVE to engage in those activities, and indeed, be highly motivated to avoid parasitical and harmful behaviors because there are no potential benefits, only penalties.

So “resist” all you wish. But please, do actually try to comprehend that you are arguing against your own fears and misunderstandings, and that I am neither advocating “technocratic socialism” as you appear to assume, nor claiming that total transparency will eliminate “Privacy”. I am simply pointing out the inevitable reality that the human race will have no choice but to become accountable and mature, and abandon unaccountable and self-destructive behaviors that serve only to allow a tiny minority of the species to benefit at the expense of everyone else.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dictionary definitions of xenophobia include: deep-rooted antipathy towards foreigners (Oxford English Dictionary; OED), unreasonable fear or hatred of the unfamiliar, especially people of other races (Webster’s)[5]

In the general sense, Xenophobia is “Fear of that which is different”, and while generally this applies to things which are “foreign” such as people of other cultural origins, it also applies to a fear of change, a fear of the unknown, and a fear of anything unfamiliar. As such, you fit this definition perfectly.

And Mr. Jones. Please explain to me how a world in which every human is free to express their own personal desires in any manner that they chose, with the ability to become anything they chose, and to have every basic animal need met effortlessly so that they may concentrate the totality of their attention on the pursuit of their own individual happiness is “dehumanizing?” Do you perhaps define humanity as suffering? Or perhaps you believe that denying every human an equal chance to reach their own individual fullest potential (whether they actually seek to reach it or not at their own choice) is “humanizing?”

Our present world is one in which no-one can “win” unless they force MASSIVE numbers of others to “lose”. The world I discuss is one in which anyone could “win” (if they choose to) WITHOUT having to deny anyone else their own personal chance at “winning”. A true ACCOUNTABLE society has little need of laws, or government, and none at all for a “Big Brother”, because it would have no PARASITES using secrecy to hide actions that cause serious harm to other members of the human race solely to promote their own “status”.

However, I doubt that any actual attempt to explain how such a society is the most likely result of the current trends in technological and political and social evolution is going to penetrate that preconception you have of “socialism” created by unaccountable systems of control designed to promote the parasites’ interests above those of the rest of the human race. Still, if you are willing to challenge your preconceptions, I recommend reading my fuller discussion of the role of government in an accountable society: http://valkyrieice.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-government.html as well as “God Want’s You Dead” http://www.scribd.com/doc/2532766/God-Wants-You-Dead to understand how ideological fallacies are used to deceive people into acting against their own interests and behave as “disposable agents” for parasitical memeplexes.

Setting

We is set in the future. D-503 lives in the One State,[2] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which allows the secret police/spies to inform on and supervise the public more easily. The structure of the state is analogous to the prison design concept developed by Jeremy Bentham commonly referred to as the Panopticon. Furthermore, life is organized to promote maximum productive efficiency along the lines of the system advocated by the hugely influential F.W. Taylor. People march in step with each other and wear identical clothing. There is no way of referring to people save by their given numbers. Males have odd numbers prefixed by consonants, females have even numbers prefixed by vowels.
Plot

One thousand years after the One State’s conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project’s chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal which he intends to be carried upon the completed Integral.

Like all other citizens of the One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians. D-503′s lover, who has been assigned by the One State to visit him on certain nights, is O-90. O-90, who is considered too short to bear children, is deeply grieved by her state in life.

O-90′s other lover and D-503′s best friend, is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions.

While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for an impersonal sex visit. All of these are highly illegal according to the laws of the One State.

Both repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. I-330 invites him to visit the Ancient House, notable for being the only opaque building in the One State, except for windows. Objects of aesthetic and historical importance, dug up from around the city, are stored there. There, I-330 offers him the services of a corrupt doctor in order to explain his absence from work. Leaving in horror, D-503 vows to denounce her to the Bureau of Guardians, but finds that he cannot.

He begins to have dreams at night, which disturbs him, as dreams are thought to be a symptom of mental illness. Slowly, I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is involved with the MEPHI, an organization plotting to bring down the One State. She takes him through secret tunnels inside the Ancient House to the world outside the Green Wall which surrounds the city-state. There, D-503 meets the inhabitants of the outside world: humans whose bodies are covered with animal fur. The aims of the MEPHI are to destroy the Green Wall and reunite the citizens of the One State with the outside world.

Despite the recent rift between them, O-90 pleads with D-503 to impregnate her illegally. After O-90 insists that she will obey the law by turning over their child to be raised by the One State, D-503 obliges. However, as her pregnancy progresses, O-90 realizes that she cannot bear to be parted from her baby under any circumstances. At D-503′s request, I-330 arranges for O-90 to be smuggled outside of the Green Wall.

In his last journal entry, D-503 indifferently relates that he has been forcibly tied to a table and subjected to the “Great Operation” (similar to a lobotomy),[3] which has recently been mandated for all citizens of the One State. This operation removes the imagination and emotions by targeting parts of the brain with x-rays. After this operation, D-503 willingly informed the Benefactor about the inner workings of the MEPHI. However, D-503 expresses surprise that even torture could not induce I-330 to denounce her comrades. Despite her refusal, I-330 and those arrested with her are sentenced to death, “under the Benefactor’s Machine.”

Meanwhile, the MEPHI uprising gathers strength; parts of the Green Wall have been destroyed, birds are repopulating the city, and people start committing acts of social rebellion. Although D-503 expresses hope that the Benefactor shall restore “reason,” the novel ends with the One State’s authority in doubt. A repeated mantra in the novel is that there is no final revolution.

The novel opens in London in 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian Calendar). The vast majority of the population is unified under the World State, an eternally peaceful, stable global society in which goods and resources are plentiful (because the population is permanently limited to no more than two billion people) and everyone is happy. Natural reproduction has been done away with and children are created, ‘decanted’ and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, where they are divided into five castes (which are further split into ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ members) and designed to fulfill predetermined positions within the social and economic strata of the World State. Fetuses chosen to become members of the highest caste, ‘Alpha’, are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in “decanting bottles”, while fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes (‘Beta’, ‘Gamma’, ‘Delta’, ‘Epsilon’) are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth. Each ‘Alpha’ or ‘Beta’ is the product of one unique fertilized egg developing into one unique fetus. Members of lower castes are not unique but are instead created using the Bokanovsky process which enables a single egg to spawn (at the point of the story being told) up to 96 children and one ovary to produce thousands of children. To further increase the birthrate of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, Podsnap’s Technique causes all the eggs in the ovary to mature simultaneously, allowing the hatchery to get full use of the ovary in two years’ time. People of these castes make up the majority of human society, and the production of such specialized children bolsters the efficiency and harmony of society, since these people are deliberately limited in their cognitive and physical abilities, as well as the scope of their ambitions and the complexity of their desires, thus rendering them easier to control. All children are educated via the hypnopaedic process, which provides each child with caste-appropriate subconscious messages to mold the child’s life-long self-image and social outlook to that chosen by the leaders and their predetermined plans for producing future adult generations.

To maintain the World State’s Command Economy for the indefinite future, all citizens are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as “ending is better than mending,” i.e., buy a new item instead of fixing the old one, because constant consumption, and near-universal employment to meet society’s material demands, is the bedrock of economic and social stability for the World State. Beyond providing social engagement and distraction in the material realm of work or play, the need for transcendence, solitude and spiritual communion is addressed with the ubiquitous availability and universally endorsed consumption of the drug soma. Soma is an allusion to a mythical drink of the same name consumed by ancient Indo-Aryans. In the book, soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free “holidays”. It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run ‘religious’ organizations; social clubs. The hypnopaedically inculcated affinity for the State-produced drug, as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort, thereby eliminates the need for religion or other personal allegiances outside or beyond the World State.