Discussion Jumpstarter
Study leader reference - not a definitive answer
Question 1
The speaker uses *Brave New World* to describe a society where people “get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get”; what parts of that description feel uncomfortably similar to how desires are shaped today, and how might that expose what Scripture means when it warns about being “conformed” to the world?
Another way to ask: The speaker says people today “get what they want” and stop wanting what they can’t have. What parts of life now feel like that, and how does it show what the Bible means by being “conformed” to the world?
Discussion Jumpstarter
Direct Answer
Based on the speaker’s teaching, the uncomfortable similarity is that modern life increasingly trains our desires toward comfort, convenience, and control, so we “choose” what a whole system has already made easy and normal. That exposes “conformity” as not only doing sinful things, but slowly adopting the world’s priorities—comfort and autonomy—as if they are the highest good.
- In *Brave New World*, people are “conditioned” so they “practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave,” and if something feels wrong there’s “Soma.”
- The speaker says Huxley saw control would come “through their desires than through force,” producing “foolish and worthless lives.”
- Modern parallels: streaming any music/video instantly; Amazon deliveries “tomorrow”; easy divorce to avoid relational work; drugs “more and more available.”
- Even among Anabaptists, we can live in “our own little boxes,” using texting/social media to “ignore all the people who live nearby.”
- He warns we can “value our own comfort and security too much,” even if we think we’re separate from the world.