The Western world, Huxley believed, placed too much emphasis on scientific progress at the expense of a love for beauty and art. Huxley had himself desired a scientific career before the near blindness that he suffered during childhood kept him from such pursuits.

The novel also comments on humanity's indiscriminate belief in progress and science. Many readers initially found this difficult to accept, living as they did in the aftermath of World War I, when a lack of societal control had caused a war that inflicted great pain and death on an entire continent. Through Brave New World and his other writings, he suggested that beauty is a result of pain and that society's desire to eliminate pain limits society's ability to thrive culturally and emotionally. This intrusion, he believed, limited the expression of freedom and beauty that is integral to the human character.

Huxley, by 1932, had observed the increasing tendency of Western government to intrude upon people's lives. Huxley's novel is chiefly a critique of the socialist policies that states had begun to advocate in the early twentieth century. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and true relationships.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future.

Brave new world