one man’s search for an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Consider also:

  1. “we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.”
  2. “But, in the advanced degree of M.M. the answer is that he comes ‘From the East,’ for by this time the Mason is supposed to have so enlarged his knowledge as to realize that the primal source of life is not in the ‘West,’ not in this world; that existence upon this planet is but a transitory sojourn, spent in search of ‘the genuine secrets,’ the ultimate realities, of life; and that as the spirit of man must return to God who gave it, so he is now returning from this temporary world of ‘substituted secrets’ to the ‘East’ from which he originally came.”
  3. “It has always been the custom for Trade Guilds, and even for modern Friendly Societies, to spiritualize their trades, and to make the tools of their trade point some simple moral. No trade, perhaps, lends itself more readily to such treatment than the builder’s trade; but wherever a great industry has flourished, there you will find traces of that industry becoming allegorized, and of the allegory being employed for the simple moral instruction of those who were operative members of the industry.”
  4. “it is, indeed, this innate idea of the existence of a Moral Law which is the basis of all the world-religions, and the value of these to humanity lies in the measure to which they have set the following of a pure way of life above all theologic dogmas”
  5. Revolt Against the Modern World