Chapter XVII - Summary

John the Savage and the Controller Mond are left in Mond's office alone. John states that Mond has paid a fairly high price for happiness, and if he has had to give up anything else.
Mond replies that he has also given up religion and that John must know all about God, which used to be something before the Nine Years' War.

John hesitated as he recalled the night when he was rejected by the village to undergo the ritual of becoming a man and he stood on the precipice, debating whether or not to make the plunge off the cliff. He wanted to, but he found there were no words to explain it.

Mond crossed the room to open a safe and passed John a couple of books about Christianity, including the Holy Bible. He claims to have more, a 'whole collection of pornographic old books'. God was in his safe while the Ford was on his shelves.
John questioned that if the Controller knows about God, then why doesn't he tell society about God? Mond responds simply that they are old - it is about God hundreds of years ago, not about God now. John retaliates that God does not change, thus making Mond reply wisely that men change.
The Savage doesn't think it makes a difference, but Mond disagrees and states that it makes all the difference in the world.

Mond divulges into a story about a man called Cardinal Newman and how he wrote about everyone in the world are God's property but that man will continue to find an independence not meant for humans and that it will do nothing at first but then will not create safety in the end.

He reads another excerpt from another book about how when men grow older, they begin to feel sick and a sense of weakness that old age brings. They fear which makes them turn to religion as it is pure and hopes it will bring delight to their old, vain, sick soul in hope of making up for all other losses in life.

The Controller leans back in his chair and states that the philosophers dreamt about heaven and earth, but they did not dream about the modern world. The modern world is independent of God as they now have youth and prosperity. The religious sentiment is used as a coping mechanism for making up for all the losses in life, but there are none. Why would their world need to look for a superfluous religious sentiment when all is well?
John asks if the Controller does not believe in God. He responds by stating that it is quite probably that there is such a thing as God, but that he manifests himself in different ways. Before Ford, he was manifested as a being that is described in books. Now, God is manifested as an absence due to the fault of civilization. God is not compatible with universal happiness and scientific medicines. Civilization chose the happiness and medicine and believed that God is smut that needs to be locked up.

John interrupts that it is natural to feel there's a God, which is disregarded by Mond's sarcastic comment that it is natural to do up trousers with zippers. John reminds Mond of a man named Bradley that defined philosophy as what one believes by instinct. "As if one believed anything by instinct!" People what they are conditioned to believe, there is no such things as instinct. People believed in God because they were conditioned to believe in God.

John insists that God is needed when one is alone at night and pondering about death, which refers to his own experience, but Mond is not deterred, as society has been conditioned to hate solitude so such a thing would never happen.

The Savage is disgruntled. He suffered at Malpais when they had shut him out from communal activities, and now he was suffering in civilization because he cannot escape the communal activities and be alone. John asks Mond if he remembers a quote from King Lear about how the wheel of fortune has turned its full circle and John asks if it doesn't seem like there is a God constantly spinning the wheel - punishing, awarding.
Mond asks him in return if it truly does - if Edmund had been living in the modern world, he would be sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm around a woman's waist, chewing on sex-hormone gum and watching a film of feelies. "The gods are just".
John isn't so sure and wonders if Mond truly believes that the Edmund sitting in that pneumatic chair hadn't just been punished just as severely as he had in the play as he lay wounded and bleeding to death. "The gods are just". Couldn't God be using his pleasantries as an instrument to degrade him?

Mond asks what position Edmund would have been degraded from - he is a perfect citizen in the society just like any other citizen. John believes that to allow oneself to think of God, you wouldn't be degraded by pleasant vices in the first place - he has seen it at the Reservation.
This statement allows Mond to debate that their civilization are made of Indians. There is no need for the civilized man to feel such unpleasantness - that is what soma is for.

The fact that the modern society gets rid of all things that seem unpleasant is unsettling to John. The society finds it easier to abolish things than to suffer or oppose. John suddenly recalls Linda and how she had overdosed herself with soma as an easy way out of her aged and bloated body and into a sea of holidays. John defiantly believes that what society needs is something that calls for tears and that nothing costs enough in the society (not in money sense of course, as apparently Henry Foster had told John that the new Conditioning Centre would cost twelve and a half million).

John confesses that he likes the inconveniences that the world can hurdle at one, but Mond states that the society doesn't. The society prefers to do things comfortably. John does not want comfort - he wants freedom, dirt, sin, danger. Mond feels that John is wanting unhappiness, and John defiantly claims that that is what he is doing.
Mond continues to say that with unhappiness that John would be claiming the right to grow old, ugly; the right to catch diseases like syphilis; the right to eat too little; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains....

Silence embeds between them until John finally says, "I claim them all."

Mond shrugs his shoulders and says that John is welcome to.