Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World

As for intelligence there have been three capacities and virtues that should be targeted for moral enhancement, which are the sensitivity to the features of situations, thoughtfulness about doing what is moral, and the proper capacity for people to make proper judgments. The continued progress in the modification of learning, cognition, memory, the capabilities of decision-making will help assist the moral enhancement with these tasks. There have also been many neurochemicals that have been used to enhance cognitive abilities, which include increased attention span and cognition span. Drugs like OxyContin have also been used to help with empathy, and to make people feel happier. It may be believed that a drug like soma was only possible in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, but perhaps not. Utilitarian’s have been pushing for human enhancement that uses drugs, genetic engineering and nanotechnology to ensure the maximum amount of happiness possible while attempting to eliminate any pain. Proponents believe that this would reset the brain’s thinking patterns, and allow people to think more positively by keeping our minds engaged, rather than in a constant dull and depressing state. Many anti- depressant drugs are attempting to do just this. It is safe to say that moral enhancement is not just a potential innovation, but a technology that is already beginning.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, is a masterpiece of science fiction. His imagined, dystopian state creatively employs facts and theories of science, as well as his very own thinly-veiled commentary on the future of society. His family background and social status, in addition to molding Huxley himself and his perspective, no doubt made impact on his writing and contributed to the scientific accuracy of his presentation. However, Huxley certainly qualifies as a social commenter and his extensive works, while sometimes biased, were always perceptive comments on the future of mankind, predictions made based on current event in his world. In other words, current affairs had undeniable impact on Huxley’s novel, and his

Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut." -Mustapha Mond (234). Instead of relying on fear to control the people and letting them choose from their own perspective, the government controls them through happiness; a fake happiness which is put into their heads as they grow up. In the novel, according to the World State, happiness is combined with stability. The basic goal of the brave new world is, supreme: the "happiness" of all, even if the consequences lead to the loss of freedom and free will. We can see how important it is for the state to improve happiness upon the people when Mustapha Mond says: "The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma." (220). The government's goal is to control people but it uses a very inhumane way. People aren't experiencing what life is really about because the state wants to keep people away form questioning. The essay Brave New World Society's Moral Decline found in www.123helpme.com, talks about Huxley's beliefs and predictions of the future when he was writing the novel. Some of these, he believed were

Adolf Hitler once said, “The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time…until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.” The motif of governmental control manipulates the individuals in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Society within Brave New World is conditioned to follow specific guidelines and to possess the same beliefs. The bureaucracy dominates the population of the New World socially, mentally, and physically. The motif of executive authority and domination assists in establishing characters, mood and atmosphere, and the additional theme of using technology to manipulate characters.

The color of the groups uniform determined how intelligent and skillful the people were mentally. A certain color(grey) determined if you were clever, an Alpha, and another color(green) determined if you were vapid, an Epsilon. More specifically, every individual was made to believe this in their sleep. As Huxley states, “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki… Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid”(Huxley 27/28). Huxley is stating that brain washing begins since one is born and occurs when an individual is not aware of what is going on in their surroundings.

In Brave New World Aldous Huxley, creates a dystopian society which is scientifically advance in order to make life orderly, easy, and free of trouble. This society is controlled by a World State who is not question. In this world life is manufactured and everyone is created with a purpose, never having the choice of free will. Huxley use of irony and tone bewilders readers by creating a world with puritanical social norms, which lacks love, privacy and were a false sense of happiness is instituted, making life meaningless and controlled.

A Brave New World published in 1932 by Aldous Huxley was about a utopian society in which people were placed in castes because of how their embryos were modified. Little did the author know less than a century later the idea of “designer babies” might be a reality. Designer babies are very similar to Huxley’s idea; a person could be genetically altered before they were born. Unlike Huxley’s book, in which embryos were genetically modified due to government industrial control, designer babies’ destinies are determined by parental control. Although, gene alteration can prevent genetic diseases, predetermining genetic outcomes should be illegal because of its negative effects on society; the effect genes have on each other, and the underwhelming success rate.

In his novel, “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley portrays a society in which the government has full control. At the time of the books writing America was striving for this status quo of complacent pleasantry, censorship was an issue, and things that were extreme or painful were being removed. As man has progressed through the years, societies have tried to arrive at a utopian society, where everyone is happy, disease is nonexistent, and strife, anger, or sadness are unheard of. Only happiness exists. But after reading Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World,” one comes to realize that this is not, in fact, what the human being really longs for. Huxley’s intended audience seems to be people that have the vision of a perfect society. He wrote the book as a dark satire. It's meant to mock (in a serious manner) the concept of a perfect society being possible. Huxley successfully made the point that there is more to life than stability and complacent happiness by utilizing a number of rhetorical strategies.

When one reflects on the period during which Huxley’s novel was written and the modern world of his time, the comparison to the socialist world cannot be ignored. The whole idea of a utopia is very similar to socialism. The World State society is under the complete control of the government. Pre-destination department chooses what people will learn, what they will do and how they will look. Each caste wears a different color clothes and does different type of labor. None of these decisions are made by people themselves. In our society, even with the socialism, where government decides what products to produce, in what quantities, and how people will live, people still have a choice and opportunity to be different. Stability and individuality in utopia are reached by taking away the individuality from people. In the World State government controls desires and consumption by creating and destroying the demand for certain objects through the psychological training of infants.

This was Huxley’s worst fear for the future, a world where conformity causes all individuality to die off and become extinct. This is his reason for writing the book, Brave New World, to inform and warn people of the horrors that could be just around the corner if they continued on the path they were on. He wrote it as a satire regarding the increased consumerism of the roaring 1920’s in America, therefore “in the Brave New World, happiness means having everything under control” (Weber, 1), especially economic and government control. “In his satirical and sinister novel, warfare and poverty have been eliminated, but also family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. In their place, Soma, a powerful drug provided by the

Today, one 's perceptions of happiness are more often than not associated with material achievements, advancements, or perhaps, love. In Brave New World, however, happiness is based upon the pursuit of stability and emotional equilibrium Aldous Huxley 's dystopian novel, Brave New World serves as a warning of the ominous. Set in London, the totalitarian regime instills the motto of "stability, community, [and] identity"(Huxley.1.1) in its citizens. Huxley 's dystopia attempts to find the greatest amount of happiness for the largest sum of people. The simple, less complex characters of the novel seek to achieve happiness through means of scientific conditioning, thus, leaving one

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

Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World propels the idea that the population in the utopian world is confined by the government only allowing them to be happy combined with the misconception of what being free truly means to a citizen.

Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley, a story about a futuristic society that believes stability is the ultimate need for survival. In this society, human beings are born by genetically engineered. They are being put in a ranked caste system that determines their position in the society. For example, the Alphas are considered superior to the Betas. Everything in the society is preprogrammed, any hardships and challenges are to be excluded.

The New World, a man-made Utopia, governed by its motto, Community, Identity, Stability (Huxley 3). A man-made world in every way. Human beings fertilized in bottles. Identity, gender, intelligence, position in society, all predestined. Human beings classified in the order of precedence: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Every one conditioned to be a certain way. Every one works for every one else (Huxley, 74). All man-made to ensure social stability. Is society in the New World truly better than in the 2000s? Are people in the New World truly happier than we are in the 2000s? Do we in the 2000s have any thing in common with the New World? Are there significant sociological differences between