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The three are taken to the World Controller's office. Mustapha Mond enters and shakes hands with all three of them, but it's John he addresses. He says he understands John doesn't like civilization. John, taken off-guard by the good-humored intelligence of the Controller's face, replies truthfully. He doesn't. John admits there are some nice things about civilization, and is surprised when Mustapha Mond quotes Shakespeare. The Controller admits he's one of the few who knows about the books; since he makes the rules, he can break them with impunity. John asks why the books are prohibited, and Mond says they haven't any use for old things here, especially when they're beautiful. Beauty is attractive, and they want people to be attracted by new things. Besides, they couldn't understand stories like Othello and Romeo Juliet. John asks why they couldn't write new stories like Othello that the people could understand, and Helmholtz adds that's exactly what he'd like to write. But the Controller says if they did that, the story wouldn't be Othello at all. To write something the people could comprehend, the story couldn't possibly be anything like the old ones. He says the modern world isn't like Othello's world. It's stable now, and people are happy. They get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off and safe, and they're never ill or afraid of death. They're ignorant of passion and old age, and aren't plagued with parents, children or lovers to feel strongly about. They're so conditioned they can't help behaving as they ought. And if anything does go wrong, there's always soma. The Controller laughs. Soma, which the Savage chucked out the window in the name of liberty! He tells John he can't expect Deltas to understand what liberty is, much less Othello. John protests, saying Othello is good, and the Controller agrees it is, but that's the price you pay for stability. They sacrificed art and science so everyone could be happy all the time and society would be stable. Art, instead of having meaning, provides agreeable sensations. Science is limited to exclude the pursuit of Truth, which is incompatible with happiness. Happiness, he says, actually looks pretty squalid compared to the spectacular display when people over-compensate for misery: wars, the fight against misfortune, passion, doubt. Happiness is never grand. As for the Bokanovsky groups, they're the foundation on which everything is built. They're happy with their undemanding eight-hour shift work, and happy with their soma recreation. They have everything they need. Once, he says, they tried shortening the workdays to four hours, since they have the technology to make work more efficient. But the workers were no happier; they just had more time to take soma. As for populating the world with Alphas, as John now suggests, the Controller tells them about an experiment in A.F. 473, in which they populated the entire island of Cypress with nothing but Alphas. Alphas can be completely socialized, as long as you have them do Alpha work. Within the constraints of Epsilon work, they'd go mad, and the experiment proved it. The Alphas on Cypress were given supplies to get started and left to manage their own affairs, but laws were ignored, orders disobeyed, and people doing low-grade work intrigued to get the better positions, while those in the better positions intrigued to keep them. Soon, civil war broke out, and after nineteen of the twenty-two thousand were killed, they petitioned the World Controllers to take over the government, which they did. The optimum population, the Controller says, is modeled on an iceberg, with eight-ninths below the water. There are many inventions that might make modern life even easier, more efficient, says the Controller, but they can never be used, because truth is a menace and science is dangerous. Once, people believed Knowledge was the highest good, but mass production demanded a shift of emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Universal happiness keeps the wheels turning when truth and beauty can't. And of course, when the masses seized political power, it was happiness rather than truth and beauty they wanted—the ability to live comfortably, peaceably, and securely. The Controller admits that once he was a pretty good physicist, and he, like they, undertook some unorthodox theories that nearly got him what Bernard and Helmholtz will get. The announcement galvanizes Bernard, who begs the controller not to send him to an island, until the Controller finally has to call a security team to vaporize him with soma. With Bernard removed from the room and put to bed, the Controller continues. He says if Bernard had any sense, he'd realize being sent to an island is a reward, rather than a punishment. There, he'll be able to live and work with people like him—individuals—in a word, everyone who's anyone. Mustapha Mond sighs and tells Helmholtz he almost envies him. He says he was given a choice between being sent to an island, where he could have got on with his pure science, or going to the Controllers' Council, where he might one day succeed to an actual Controllership. He chose the latter. Although happiness is a hard master, especially when it's other people's happiness, duty is duty, and you can't consult your own preferences. That was how he paid for his crimes against society—by choosing to serve happiness. Finally, the Controller asks where Helmholtz would like to go, since there's a large choice of islands. Helmholtz chooses something relatively uncomfortable—windy and stormy—which might inspire his writing. The Controller says he very much likes the idea, though he officially disapproves of it. All the same, he grants the wish, proposing the Falkland Islands. The Controller's explanation of society provides a rational counterpoint to John's pre-modern values. The contrast between the Controller's description of the pre-modern world, carried over from Chapter 3, and the modern one is all the more horrifying for the thread of truth it contains. The pre-modern world he describes is one of hypocrisy, selfishness and violence. It's a world that demanded comfort and stability and accepted the easy solutions it was offered, even at the price of emotional and intellectual freedom. The Controller, far from being the unfeeling dictator one might expect, is a free-thinker himself, who was forced to choose between the pursuit of truth and the good of society. This represents a powerful question in the novel, which only the reader can answer for himself: which is the greater good? Free will, knowledge and emotion are necessarily accompanied by struggle. To eliminate the struggle is to eliminate the higher ideals and settle for a comfortable conformity. The fact that the World State has pursued other options, all of which have failed, warns that it is the people comprising society—rather than a few individuals—who determine the outcomes. People must either accept misery as a part of being human, or sacrifice emotion and individuality in favor of creating a happiness that is nevertheless artificial. In the end, the World State persists, precisely because it is the choice of the majority. It doesn't execute nonconformists; in fact, the punishment is really a reward. Freethinkers are given a comfortable place to live among others like them, where they're free to pursue their own ideals without compromising the stability of society.
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