There’s a saying, usually attributed to Truffaut, that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. You can ply the audience with sad violins and depressing “war is hell” monologues all you want, but as soon as the action scenes start the viewer’s lizard brain takes over. “Yeah, scrag those bastards! Semper fi!”

Aldous Huxley likewise attempts the impossible – he wants us to hate paradise. In this book (set 500 years in the future), society has advanced to unimaginable levels of human development. Everyone is young, healthy, and beautiful. Your days are spent relaxing and stimulating the pleasure centers at ear, mouth, and groin. Even the lower classes seem to have made out well. And there’s a drug that provides raw, undiluted pleasure to your brain, in case you want to cut out the middle man.

Brave New World is a distaff counterpart to 1984. Its central thesis: “what if Big Brother kept control of society by loving people to death? What if it took away your free will simply by making you too happy to care? Wouldn’t that be equally hellish?”

No, actually, it wouldn’t be equally hellish. Brave New World’s supposed dystopia sounds like a wonderful place to live, and the when the hero rebels against the system you want to slap him for being a idiot. Roger Ebert once said something like “it’s hard to cheer for the hero when the villain is the one making sense.” Likewise, it’s hard to call something a “dystopia” when you’d trade your present life for it in a heartbeat. The characters in this book (chiefly John and Bernard) will leave you gobsmacked by their audacity. Yes, hedonism isn’t everything, and it’s possible that I’d be just as unfulfilled as them in the World State. The point is, I’d sure love the opportunity to find out.

Some parts of Aldous’s future society seem discomforting to the modern reader, such as the sexualisation of children. And I think a true paradise would be one in which people can fulfill their individual preferences, rather than just drowning the brain in dopamine and serotonin. But Brave New World fails at what it attempts. A paradise wrapped up in a “THIS IS HELL” box is still a paradise. All the characters’ acts of rebellion seem false and contrived – like the torturous gimp logic you’d need to throw away a winning lottery ticket.

This is the same problem I have with a lot of rock and roll memoirs. All of them follow an obligatory arc, massive success, then a crash down into drugs and depression where we’re supposed to pity them and reflect that wealth doesn’t bring happiness. It just makes me roll my eyes and say “give me a break.” Yes, I’m sure Nikki Sixx gets sad sometimes. But still, you just can’t feel too sorry for a millionaire rockstar living in a mansion.

Maybe this wasn’t an impossible venture. Maybe Huxley could have made me hate this society. But it wouldn’t be by making it a paradise, it would be by making it a more ambiguous futuristic society, like the one in Vernes’ Paris in the 20th Century, that has many good things, but also lot of unexpected emergent problems.

It would be a place like modern South Korea, a technological Aladdin’s Cave that has the second highest suicide rate in the world. There’s things to be said there, about how pursuing progress for the good of the people inevitably leads to pursuing progress for the sake of hitting quotas and metrics, the people forgotten. You’d talk about Schelling points and positive feedback cycles and all the other ways the war can be lost even when every battle has been won.

But it stands, Brave New World is just a statement of “I’ve read 1984, and you know what would be even more awful? If MiniLuv was really about love!“

When Upton Sinclair ran for Congress as a socialist, he got 60,000 votes. When he ran the same platform under the slogan “End Poverty in California”, he got 879,000. His conclusion was that Californians would gladly accept socialism – just so long as it was called something else.

Writer, editor, and game developer Vox Day believes that modern day America has gladly accepted a regime of thought policing under the label of anti-racism, feminism, and equality – broadly grouped together as “social justice”. A reductive social justice concept is that if you are male, white, straight, you are either an oppressor, or benefit from the oppression, of women, ethnic minorities, and queer people. These are pretty firm categories. White people who live in trailer parks are presumably contributing, somehow, to the systematic oppression of Will Smith’s kids.

What’s interesting is that the poor oppressed classes always seem to be able to get their oppressors fired, suspended, or censured, often for fairly disproportionate things. Pax Dickinson tweeted some Family Guy level jokes on his personal Twitter account. Satoshi Kanazawa reported on the results of a science experiment done by someone else. The CEO of Mozille donated $1,000 to an traditional marriage organisation in 2008. Thank God that the hammer of justice fell on such villains. You can talk about glass ceilings and invisible knapsacks, but Vox asks: are you really oppressed if you can so easily destroy the livelihoods and reputations of your oppressors? At this point, social justice seems like a boxer with a 84-21 record, still claiming to be the scrappy underdog.

Vox overstates his case in the title and nearly every page of this book, but then he’s built a reputation as science fiction’s enfant terrible, and his readers probably expect nothing less. Much of the book is interesting and reasonable. There’s some interesting amateur psychoanalysis of SJWs, and some history of how we got where we are. I could have done with less GamerGate, and a less exhaustive account of the SFWA’s internal politics. There’s a lot of things in here that literally nobody will care about in 3 years.

Towards the end, he’s in uncomfortable territory that will make some readers wonder if he’s that big an improvement over the social justice warriors. He comes up with a battle plan for combating SJWs that includes items such as “restricting their speech” and “denying them employment”, based on such dead giveaways as having a COEXIST bumper sticker. I prefer an alternate battle plan that includes items such as “minding my own business” and “leaving people alone”

And he doesn’t address the other problem: the fact that helping the downtrodden is a fundamentally worthy goal, and that many social justice warriors have their hearts in the right place, destructive and dangerous though their movement has become. Social justice is basically an overgrown sense of altruism, like a peacock’s tail growing until it smothers the bird. Vox Day’s approach to the problem is Genghis Khan’s: “Kill them. Kill them all.” I think a lot of these people could be met halfway, and could have their mental energies directed in a positive direction.

Otherwise, this is a decent book’s who’s time has come – social justice certainly isn’t directed in a positive direction right now. I think I first noticed it in 2007 or so – the way everything had become stifled, cringing, and apologetic. I once watched a Stephen Pinker debate about gender differences, and he prefaced his argument with several minutes of grovelling apologies about how oppressed women are and he’s not denying that and [insert more self-flagellation]? Why? What was he scared of? Anthropologist Gregory Cochran described a friend who thought he might do research in an area with politically sensitive implications (the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews), and was told he had balls. Why should a scientist doing science require balls? Nicholas Wade wrote a book about biological differences between races, and had virtually the entire genetics community perform an Amish-style shunning. Why? Even if the book’s wrong…does this normally happen? If Paul Krugman makes a mistake about the Laffer curve, does the entire economic world rise up and spit him out? Why are some topics and some ideas just…off limits?

Vox Day might not be the hero we need, or the one we deserve, but he’s the one we have. I just hope he remembers that Nietzsche line about reflective abysses. Nietzsche wasn’t a SJW, because he didn’t lie.

Have you ever listened to a conversation in a foreign language? That’s what sexual fetishes are like. They’re exciting if you speak the language. If you don’t, you’re left watching two people make noises with your mouth, your brain struggling to pattern-match their syllables against some meaning until eventually you give up.

I don’t find BDSM interesting, so much of Venus in Furs is a conversation in Putonghua or Sundanese. After I gave up trying to follow the conversation, I looked for a story, and there wasn’t much of one.

It’s a book within a book. A man reads a text about a “supersensual” man, Severin von Kusiemski, who falls under the spell of a woman with the South Park-sounding name Wanda von Dunajew. She wears furs. She captivates him – literally. He wants to be her slave. They go away on adventures together. The tone of the book feels like cordial that’s on the verge of fermenting into poison: a fantasy pushed as far as it can go.

Venus in Furs contains frank descriptions of a lot of things that would not have names for decades to come. It’s also unfocused, and suffers from the curious comorbidity of too much and not enough. The plot’s repetitive, with events looping around like a 12 inch record caught in a groove. But von Sacher-Masoch keeps adding in all these asides about metaphysics and gender roles and paganism, throwing the novel’s forward momentum into a talespin.

Sacher-Masoch likes to set up bowling pins and then forget to knock them down. Partway through the story, a few black female slaves assist Wanda in humiliating Severin. Could that have led to a reflection on real bondage? And the shallowness of what he experiences with Wanda? After all, Severin can reclaim his freedom and dignity whenever he wants, whereas some people can’t. BDSM’s just a fantasy, which is good in real life, but in a fictional book, why couldn’t he have gone beyond fantasy? Why not talk about real bondage? Venus in Furs dwells obsessively on saccharine instead of real sugar.

Apparently in BDSM there is a concept called “topping from the bottom”, where the submissive person uses the fact of their submission as collateral to manipulate or control the dominant. “I gave up my freedom for you. You really owe me, so let’s run this relationship on my terms.”

I’m the furthest thing from an expert, but Severin seemed like he was topping from the bottom a lot. One of his first acts is to make Wanda sign a contract of his servitude, stating among other things that she must always wear her furs. This adds a false, insincere dynamic to their relationship: like putting someone in chains and giving them the key. It’s like von Sacher-Masoch was topping me from the bottom. The book lures you in with the promise of revelation, intimacy, and one man exposing his secret heart. He immediately starts offloading mountains of ruminations on gender roles and metaphysics and paganism. This book could be subtitled “Dear Diary.”

The fetish-as-language metaphor breaks down. When you hear an unfamiliar language, the problem is that you don’t understand it. With a sexual fetish, you understand it perfectly well, it just has no meaning. After it’s possible to learn a new language, but I don’t know that it’s possible to learn a new fetish. If you can, Venus in Furs is no Berlitz Easy Language course.