Boy oh boy. Well, the thing is it is a society that is completely in thrall to a system of basic pleasure orchestrated with the questionable justification that a life without real pleasure or pain is a better one. The people are oblivious to all art and real achievement, they have no desires and no ambitions, they create nothing and have no desire to, they feel no real emotions and all sex is mechanical, and they happily march to their own deaths at a certain age. If a vision of humanity as infinitely complacent, all advancement come to an end, a billion pampered babies with their unremarkable and entirely calculated lives engineered since before birth — if that doesn't strike you as a dystopia, an "inverted utopia" in which what is meant to be perfect is anything but, well brother, I don't know what should!
> The people are oblivious to all art and real achievement
Or, maybe the people in our real society are oblivious to the peace and happiness experienced in A Brave New World's society.
> they have no desires and no ambitions, they create nothing and have no desire to, they feel no real emotions and all sex is mechanical, and they happily march to their own deaths at a certain age.
Are any of those differences actually useful things inherently, or only in pursuit of happiness? If you've got your happiness from another source (a drug), why keep doing the things that were previously necessary to attain happiness?
Well, people have been unable to settle on a comprehensive definition of happiness in the few thousand years the argument has been documented so I don't think we'll settle it here. But consider that we identify so many kinds of happiness, from the fleeting to the unforgettable: joy, euphoria, satisfaction, ecstasy, etc. I think Brave New World is about excluding all else in life but one of those. If that sounds good to you, go for it! No one can tell you what happiness is — except that's exactly what the authorities in Brave New World are doing, and they are eliminating the option of pursuing other, perhaps greater happinesses than the one they have chosen for you.
How is now not what you describe? Maybe there are no clear puppet-masters driving it, but vast swaths of people in the US live like this and fervently support it right now.
Yes, we have arrived. I have become more and more interested in Huxley over the last few years as I have become more and more aware that we have become something like what he described. The only thing left is for the powers that be to take advantage of our state of passivity and transition us to 1984
