Fenn And The Savage

The Fleet Of Stars, 4.

Fenn has learned about history:

famine

disease

poverty

toil

environmental destruction

slavery

private abuse

rampant crime

inherited hatreds

sexual distortion and oppression

superstitious dreads

government

war

regimentation

extortion

torture

 

All that is past. So far, so good. So why are there demonstrations and strange doctrines? Because people lack individual and collective self-determination. The message has to be that we need both self-determination and freedom from past evils, not, as Aldous Huxley's Savage thinks, a return to past evils:

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right, then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

-copied from here.