The Authors of My Change, Part 1: Aldous Huxley.

In which I discuss how Aldous Huxley's writings have impacted me as a person.

During a conversation with one of my close friends, she remarked that it really feels like we’re living in a dystopian novel, and I completely understood her. Our eyes are fixed on our phones, we walk past the struggling and hungry without a second thought; social media convinces us that the people around us are evil instead of simply misguided, and disinformation makes us believe the wrong things, often for the right reasons.

Our minds are controlled by tiny little boxes that fit in your pocket and can change your outlook on the world. It does sound truly dystopian.

In trying to navigate this modern wasteland, I’ve come to remember the authors that impacted me the most. Simone Weil and Aldous Huxley, were the ones that came to mind almost immediately. For the first part of this two-parter, I will focus on Aldous Huxley, the author of ‘Brave New World’ and, more importantly for us, ‘The Doors of Perception.’

On Judgement:

In his book ‘The Doors of Perception,’ Aldous Huxley, famed author and philosopher, tripped out. He took two-fifths of mescaline under the supervision of a psychiatrist who studied the psychoactive chemical. It’s certainly an odd book to gain some kind of character development; even stranger that I did not finish the book.

Yes, I didn’t finish it.

It was really boring. Half the book is just Huxley talking about how all these paintings I had never seen were really beautiful when under the influence of mescaline. Not to mention, the way Huxley writes is meandering, overly verbose, and takes a while to get to the point; I thought I was going to get an account of how these drugs affect you, rather than Huxley doing a creative writing assignment on how beautiful he can make his prose.

However, there is a passage early on that stuck with me. In this passage, Huxley is discussing how close taking psychoactive drugs takes you to the brink of madness.

I read (a bit of) this book when I was around 16/17 mainly because I was interested in his experience, I was not expecting it to fundamentally change my outlook on other people.

Here is the passage in question:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

In this, Huxley is noting the isolation the mentally ill must feel. The feeling that no one will ever understand what they are going through. That lives will be lived in entirely different universes of experience, that, although we can communicate with one another and share in experiences that are substantially similar, the “insane and exceptionally gifted” live on such different planes of existence that we will never begin to comprehend them.

For me, however, Huxley perfectly captures the inherent loneliness of human experience. I will never be able to share the same jubilation and joy as someone else. But, in this dispiriting and yet fundamentally true observation, there is another conclusion you can reach. We may never truly know each other and what the other goes through, but that’s a good thing.

Let’s briefly talk about judgement and judgemental people. To get definitions out of the way, being a judgemental person is to form, always negative, opinions about a person far too quickly and for those opinions to encompass the entire person’s being, regardless of how minute the action you initially judged them for.

In the span of my entire life, I will never, ever, know what it is like to be someone else. They are entirely separate “island universes” that I will never have access to, except at second-hand. Therefore, to judge someone’s entire being because of one action that covers a granule of sand in the desert of their life is incredibly silly.

Secondly, and this is to judgemental people, because we are incapable of experiencing someone else’s life, we almost always frame the actions of others within our own paradigm. The first person that you think of when you begin to judge someone for a minor infraction is yourself. Judgements are borne out of insecurity.

For example, you might see someone wearing a crazy outfit, an outfit that sticks out from the rest of society, and you begin to judge them for that. You begin to think that this person has tacky taste, that they are probably weird, that their friends are probably weird, that they have taken drugs, etc…

In this moment of judgement, you are drawing on your own insecurities and projecting them onto other people.

You view others the way you view yourself.

Because you are the only other being that you truly know.

The correct course of action is to acknowledge what is and then accept it. There is nothing moral or immoral about wearing a bizarre outfit. To put it simply, it is what it is.

Now, if someone were to do something you consider immoral, then you have free rein to judge them all you want. I personally think littering is immoral, disgusting behaviour, and the Met Police should have a mandate to arrest anyone caught littering. But those are actions that, in my opinion, have demonstrable harm on others. Wearing a weird outfit, having a different haircut, and smoking weed has no harm on others. They are simply neutral.

This experiential isolation is the beginning of so many arguments between people; the anger borne from the frustration that the person you are quarrelling with isn’t seeing it from your perspective. You are feeling isolated and annoyed that your combatant isn’t feeling what you are feeling. And there’s the rub: they will never know what you are feeling. You can attempt to communicate it, but it will never encompass the actual experience. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to make an attempt to understand regardless of how futile it might be.

Here’s one branch of this line of thinking that some might find controversial, but I do not judge celebrities and the well-off when they complain about their lives. When one of these groups complains about their lives, people are quick to point out they’re well-off and have no right to complain. But, you have to remember, their life is the only one they have experienced. So to reduce their complaints, to me, comes across as silly, to put it lightly, because the notion that they can ever gain a direct insight into the lives that others lead is pointless.

I remember a conversation I had with a man on the tube where he said, “If you’re living in London, you have no reason to be depressed! Just look at the lives in India or back home in Africa!” This, to me, is ridiculous because the life that a person leads has only one comparison: itself. Life is only relative to itself. The implication then is that at some point, in accruing enough wealth, you will never be sad or angry or depressed because someone will always have it worse than you. Even children in Africa have no right to complain then because someone else might be dying of cancer or malaria somewhere else. I hope you can understand what I’m saying here. Otherwise, I’d be coming across as the insane patients that Huxley was empathising with.

It’s been five some-odd years since I read that passage, and I still think about it to this day and how much it has affected me. The main reason I was never a particularly judgemental person was, to be completely honest, because I just didn’t care enough to worry about what other people are doing. But, this passage from Huxley provided a logical reasoning for me to be less judgemental rather than just not caring. It gave me a communicable and conveyable way to explain why others should be less judgemental.

The crux of which is that we are alone, and that we will always remain alone. And that’s a good thing.