Aldous Huxley publishes the novel Brave New World, in which, at the height of the Great Depression, the supreme value is happiness, which is induced through chemicals (“soma”). Revolutions, wars, suicides, and depressions disappear. This vision is generally much more horrendous than that of Orwell’s 1984, but it’s difficult to explain why: everyone is happy, all the time: what’s wrong with that?
