Sapiens

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopian novel written in 1931 about a futuristic “Fordist” World State where citizens are environmentally engineered from into an intelligence-based social hierarchy. Humans in this society are shaped through reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and Pavlovian conditioning. The first section of text from “Alpha children” up to “beastly colour” is one of the hypnopædic (sleep-learning) suggestions played on repeat to Beta children as they sleep. The second section, “Till at last the child’s mind…” is a quotation of Mustapha Mond, who presides over one of the ten zones of the World State and oversees the society. “His Fordship” – Mond – argues that art, literature, and scientific freedom must be sacrificed to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of maximizing societal happiness and stability.

As I was re-reading Brave New World in preparation for setting this text, I also happened to be reading Yval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, a non-fiction work tracing human history from evolution to modern day, with the unique lens of not only what happened, but why it happened and how it felt for individuals. To me, this book reads almost like a history of human nature.

I was surprised to find that my own takeaways from these two books felt eerily similar in many respects, and it gave me pause to think about Huxley’s commentary on the human condition, social phenomenon, and the things that drive individuals. I decided to call this piece Sapiens, and craft it around this idea that many things about human nature will be the same whether we’re looking at pre-agricultural group of people or a futuristic society.

The percussion expresses this: the high beeping “Satellite” represents a satellite far off in space gathering information about life on earth. The information from earth takes light years to reach the satellite, and so we have the “modern day” information represented by the singers reaching the satellite at relatively the same time (in space terms) as the “early human” information represented by the Drum Sticks and Sandpaper which symbolize the making of fire. The heartbeat element is common to all ages of humanity. Ultimately, the combination of all this information is in no way confusing to the interpreters at the other end of the satellite transmission, because in the end, human-nature hasn’t changed over hundreds of thousands of years.