"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted"
About this Quote
Huxley lands the knife with that calmly clinical phrase: “almost infinite.” It’s not just that people are ungrateful; it’s that ingratitude scales. Comfort doesn’t cure dissatisfaction, it feeds it. The line has the cool menace of a lab report, which is exactly Huxley’s point: the modern mind can normalize anything, even its own good fortune, even its own captivity.
The intent is diagnostic, not sentimental. Huxley is circling a failure of perception: we stop seeing the scaffolding that holds our lives up. Safety becomes “normal.” Rights feel like background noise. Technology turns miraculous and then instantly boring. Once a benefit becomes reliable, it becomes invisible, and the invisible is easy to neglect, exploit, or trade away. That’s the subtext: taking things for granted isn’t merely a personal flaw; it’s a political vulnerability. A population that can’t feel the value of what it has is easy to manage, easy to sell replacements to, easy to distract.
Context matters because Huxley wrote in the shadow of mass persuasion, industrialization, and the 20th century’s talent for making the unthinkable routine. In Brave New World, the horror isn’t jackboots; it’s how quickly pleasure and convenience become the default settings of a society willing to forget what it surrendered. This sentence works because it’s deceptively plain: a dinner-table observation that smuggles in a theory of history. The “infinite capacity” isn’t just about complacency; it’s about adaptation, the human superpower that can look like resilience or like sleepwalking, depending on who’s writing the script.
The intent is diagnostic, not sentimental. Huxley is circling a failure of perception: we stop seeing the scaffolding that holds our lives up. Safety becomes “normal.” Rights feel like background noise. Technology turns miraculous and then instantly boring. Once a benefit becomes reliable, it becomes invisible, and the invisible is easy to neglect, exploit, or trade away. That’s the subtext: taking things for granted isn’t merely a personal flaw; it’s a political vulnerability. A population that can’t feel the value of what it has is easy to manage, easy to sell replacements to, easy to distract.
Context matters because Huxley wrote in the shadow of mass persuasion, industrialization, and the 20th century’s talent for making the unthinkable routine. In Brave New World, the horror isn’t jackboots; it’s how quickly pleasure and convenience become the default settings of a society willing to forget what it surrendered. This sentence works because it’s deceptively plain: a dinner-table observation that smuggles in a theory of history. The “infinite capacity” isn’t just about complacency; it’s about adaptation, the human superpower that can look like resilience or like sleepwalking, depending on who’s writing the script.
Quote Details
| Topic | Gratitude |
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