Recently I was thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and that led me to the following video. A relatively short portion of it discusses the more general topic of utopian literature versus dystopian literature, and the speaker points out that those visions share collectivist characteristics and that therefore utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same coin, and that efforts at creating utopias lead inevitably to dystopic nightmares.

Here’s the excerpt

I once attended a philosophy class of my son’s that consisted of a discussion of Candide’s Dr. Pangloss’ insistence that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” That statement seems absurd on the face of it – how could it be? But by the end of the class it seemed quite plausible that in fact, this is the best of all possible worlds – accent on the word possible.

NOTE: I wrote about Brave New World in this 2024 post.