Aldous Huxley

I was searching a few things about Aldous Huxley, and came across this quote.

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

Now, I have already read Brave New World and did enjoy it greatly. It's one of those books that you would gladly read again because you know that you can extract something new from it each time you open it. I observed that a main underlying theme in both the book and in the quote above is the conformity of an individual to society and the thereof loss of humanity. We cannot simply adjust to an environment which we disagree with simply because it it expected of us, we must utilize what makes us different in order to obtain what is best for us. We believe we find comfort and stability in fitting in with a specific pattern and merging with the crowd, but in reality we only lose the most important part of ourselves. In Brave New World my favorite character by far was John because he saw a world in which although happiness reigned it was false and where there was no individual but only a mass, and he detested it. He tried to fight against it, stood up to it alone and when he could not defeat it he resorted to suicide. Death was a worthy alternative to losing oneself in such a sick society.