Mr Savage and the Terms of Our Captivity

John, known as “the Savage”, is a character in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. Shakespeare gives him a way to question the life its administrators have designed. In Chapter 16, John asks why people cannot watch Othello. Mustapha Mond admits the play is better than their manufactured entertainment, but explains that citizens conditioned against lasting attachments could not understand it. Love, fidelity and jealousy have become threats to social stability. Shakespeare matters because the plays show forms of human life that the State prevents its citizens from experiencing. Mond understands their significance and reserves the right to read the books he forbids others to read.

Our present arrangements distribute that conditioning through competition. A student chooses what will improve employability; a worker calculates what will preserve income; a writer learns what will gain attention. Each decision is reasonable within its immediate circumstances. Repeated across a life, these decisions make income, status and visibility the standards against which other possibilities are judged. Thought learns to anticipate what will be rewarded. Interaction becomes a negotiation over access and advantage. Planning carries the same calculations into futures we have scarcely begun to imagine. Whatever cannot obtain recognition, funding or permission progressively ceases to appear practicable. By the time we exercise a choice, the conditions of participation have already shaped what seems worth choosing.

The advantage accrues to the small circle able to administer those conditions and the extremely wealthy interests that enable it. They control access to resources and recognition, and can reward conduct that preserves their control. The promise of eventual independence keeps the rest of us adapting. We spend years meeting requirements in the hope of acquiring enough security to refuse them. A promotion rewards our adaptation and gives us more to lose by refusing its terms. Our work and attention sustain the arrangements we hope to outgrow. The security we obtain becomes a reason to preserve the conditions under which it was obtained. The trap reproduces itself by making the costs of changing those conditions personal and immediate, while making the promised freedom depend on continued compliance.

John’s attempted withdrawal exposes the difficulty of beginning elsewhere. His retreat becomes a spectacle, and crowds gather to consume his rejection of their way of life. His inherited ideals also make him punish desires he cannot reconcile with them. His refusal has been formed through language, habits and obligations that withdrawal cannot erase. Our existential crisis lies in this entanglement: the relations through which we could create different futures keep being recruited into the continuation of the arrangements that restrict them. Freedom requires us to alter the dependencies through which we make one another’s lives possible. John’s exit becomes their entertainment; the civilisation he rejects finds another way to reproduce itself through him.



Huxley, A. (1932) Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.