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A Brave New World Argumentative Analysis

Decent Essays

Within the last couple of decades, technology has become a huge part in everyone’s daily lives. Everyday we look at our phone almost every five minutes and when we get home we all hop on some other form of technology such as our computers or televisions. However, this is almost exactly what Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman fear. There are some truths and some falsehoods to the statements that Postman proposed such as the idea that we will begin to enjoy our oppression, we will be ruled by the very things that we love, and that we will eventually be thrown so many lies that we will seize to know what the truth is and we will be exploring both sides of these assertions. The first assertion being qualified is that which states how people will …show more content…

In other words, Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. In Brave New World people are controlled through hypnopaedic conditioning and soma. Soma is a drug that causes people to have a happy high without any of the downsides of doing normal drugs. What this all means is that in the World State everyone is too busy being being sedated into thinking that they are happy about everything to notice that they are being controlled and used like farm animals to run their “perfect” society at the most efficient levels they can achieve. At one point in Huxley’s novel, a character says "..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..." (pg. 56). This shows how in the World State people continue to block out the gloomy world by constantly subjecting themselves to something they love which in turn is only hurting them. In our own society, technology has become so prevalent in every household that even internet is starting to be considered a necessity. Research has shown that “compulsive Internet use leads to changes in the brain—particularly in reward pathways—comparable to those observed in drug addicts” (Promises 1). In other words our phones and social media are our society’s form of soma. On the other hand, the reality that Huxley portrays is far from our reality for one simple fact. That fact being that our government does not mandate consumerism at all. In the World State, there are “‘Soma distribution[s]’” in which the government hands out soma to delta workers(pg.232). This is a stark contrast to our society due to the fact that we do have “pleasures” that affect our lives, but the

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