The best books to understand the Western’s social unrest and decay

I was very young when I first read this book. Many years later I took it back from the shelf and went through its pages with older eyes.

The reality portrayed by Émile Zola in the 19th Century is quite brutal. The coal miners back then – with their struggle for life, excess work, permanent fatigue, lack of knowledge and understanding, contrasted by the careful calculations and comfort of their masters – mirror miners and other workers today.

Greed on one side, poverty on the other regarded as normal. The very few with enough wit to overthrow the injustice were silenced, as it happens today at the productive facilities of the capital.

Social unrest? No wonder.

When our English teacher explained the opposing worlds in this book, we were supposed to take a side.

I do not know about Mr. Huxley’s intentions upon writing this marvelous and entertaining work, but the title itself is sarcasm on the world to come. A society where people are genetically designed to belong to a class and perform according tasks in full enjoyment.

The upper classes waste time, having fun and sex driven by a drug, while who knows who or where, technology, goods, and food are produced and supplied.

In our world today, metaverse and virtual reality are that drug, with people thinking that home office is actual work, while who knows who... A sad prediction right on target about a vacuous society.

A book to read between the lines.

You and I are recently witnessing the popular upheaval in France as a result of the chronic reduction of the purchasing power.

A new story? Ha, no! The French Revolution was about the same thing at the same place: making ends meet. Anatole France takes us through a particular subject within the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the trials of the bourgeoisie should end in bloody executions.

It is very interesting to get under the skin of those jurors to understand why uprisings happen. I can easily see why people seek revenge without any conscience. The ambiance is captivating, the plot is pulling.

Indoctrination is the key in this very interesting book.

Western society permanently blames other cultures about brain-washing of the people, but refrains to talk or admit its own. I can see the religious indoctrination of our Christian Society; the money-minded, capital compelled, behavior of our masses. I can see the entertainment curtain pushing people away from books.

In this story about the future of humanity, the smoke enlightens and corrects the path to follow, using a simple tool: fire, to torch books and withdraw imagination to obtain a perfectly aligned and ignorant civilization.

But you, reader, as myself, will preserve books, ideas, and true progress. Perhaps we will all be condemned for nurturing thoughts.

This book is an unfinished work, hard to follow, because it is a draft never reviewed by the author and published posthumously.

However, it is a must-read, so please do not be discouraged as I was, for the ideas that it encloses picture a more equalized society practically based on the changing of our economic road, nothing else than ending capitalism as we know it.

Two subjects are of particular interest: first, how to correctly retribute people for the wealth they generate through their work; and second, a demonstration of how excess production and money amassing do not amount to wealth. An interesting lesson in economics.