When William Shakespeare put those words in the voice of Miranda, Prospero’s lonely, castaway daughter, “brave new world” was an expression of awe and wonder, if a naive one.
Some 300 years later, when Aldous Huxley borrowed the phrase as the title for an early work of dystopian fiction, it was something much more sinister.
There’s the one more akin to Huxley’s, or perhaps Orwell’s. The one that flows to us via social media, mostly but not only Facebook, carrying the lies of Putin’s propaganda machine. It’s the one that was just enough to get a horrid excuse for a human elected president in the United States and to pass an evil referendum in the United Kingdom.