Imagine a world where all of your fantasies can become reality. Imagine a world without violence or hate, but just youth, beauty, and sex. Imagine a world of perfect “stability” (42) where “everyone belongs to everyone else” (43), and no one is unhappy or left out. This sounds like the perfect world. But it’s not. Looks can be deceiving as proven in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. In his novel, he introduces us to a society that strives to satisfy everyone’s wants and needs by inflicting pleasure in order to bring stability. However, in order to truly achieve this stability, old world ideas relating to art, history, and religion are abolished, and are replaced by new age technology. As a result, the people of the Brave New World …show more content…
Without them, we are not humans: we are simply mechanical clones. For instance, take the people of the Brave New World. Their rationality does not come from their hearts or their own minds, but from a machine that feeds them pointless, repetitive rhetoric to keep them happy, under control, and unaware. It is because of this that the people of the Brave New World are shallow, cold, and have no compassion for anyone else, but themselves because they are “conditioned” (40) to be that way. This is clearly evident with the way they react to death. They do not mourn the dead or conduct a funeral like we would. Instead, they burn and destroy the bodies the same way they try to destroy their past. They purposely forget people to prevent individuality. They live in a society that “objects to anything intense or long-drawn” (40), and they believe that “ending is better than mending” (52). It is for these reasons why marriages, parents, and natural births no longer exist in their world. In turn, the people have become completely self-centered and egotistical. What kind of person in their right mind would want to live like this? Clearly, individuality is not worth stability because it’s our emotions, whether they’re good or bad, and our freedom to chose what we want to believe that separates us from machines, and makes us human.
Furthermore, as technology advances, we are gradually losing control of
Close your eyes and imagine a world free of war, suffering and pain; an environment that provides all the necessary luxuries to maintain eternal happiness; one that is stable, friendly, peaceful and enjoyable. In this world, every inconvenience known to man is rid of. We are no longer affected by disease, aging, heartbreak, depression or loneliness; conformity is at hand and stability is achieved. Now envision a world where there is no love, families do not exist, humans are no longer conceived yet created in test tubes, and sexual promiscuity is not only acceptable but enforced. Picture an environment where there is no religion, art or history. The human mind and body is assembled accordingly and we lack the freedom of
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
"'God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.'" So says Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. In doing so, he highlights a major theme in this story of a Utopian society. Although the people in this modernized world enjoy no disease, effects of old age, war, poverty, social unrest, or any other infirmities or discomforts, Huxley asks 'is the price they pay really worth the benefits?' This novel shows that when you must give up religion, high art, true science, and other foundations of modern life in place of a sort of unending happiness, it is not worth the sacrifice.
Is the push for a perfect utopia enough to siphon motherhood, family, and love? As in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates the destruction of the idea of family in this ’perfect world‘. People in the world today have the ability to express love and obtain a family. Huxley explores the futuristic outlook on a world (in many ways similar to ours) that would not allow such humanistic traits. Science is so called the ’father of progress’ and yet the development of Fordism and the evolution of artificial fertilization deteriorates the social value of science. Brave New World offers incites on an innovative world trying and, even more frightening, succeeding to create a utopia while destroying family and erasing the humanity in people.
In this world where people can acquire anything they need or want, we have to wonder, “Is the government controlling us?” Both the governments in A Brave New World and in the United States of America offer birth control pills and have abortion clinics that are available for everyone, thus making birth control pills and abortion operations very easy to acquire. Although both governments offer birth control pills and abortion clinics, A Brave New World’s government requires everyone to take the pills and immediately get an abortion when pregnant. This in turn shows us that A Brave New World’s government is controlling the population and the development of children. China is one of the few countries that currently have control of the
Every culture ever known has operated under a system of values. Many varied on exact principles, but most applied the idea of Natural Law. Or, as C.S. Lewis would refer to it in his Abolition of Man, the Tao. In this particular book Lewis discusses the implications that would follow could man overcome this basic value system that has been in place since the development of rational thought. However, paradoxical as his opinion may seem, he holds that to step beyond the Tao is to plunge into nothingness. Simply put, it is his claim that to destroy, or even fundamentally change, man’s basic value system is to destroy man himself.
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.
In the Sci-fi futuristic novel “Brave New World”, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley introduces the idea of the utopian society, achieved through technological advancement in biology and chemistry, such as cloning and the use of controlled substances. In his novel, the government succeeds in attaining stability using extreme forms of control, such as sleep teaching, known as conditioning, antidepressant drugs – soma and a strict social caste system. This paper will analyze the relevance of control of society versus individual freedom and happiness to our society through examining how Huxley uses character development and conflict. In the “Brave New World”, Control of society is used to enforce
Huxley's work, Brave New World, is a book about a society that is in the future. This book contains many strange things that are generally unheard of today. Yet we see that some of the ideas that are presented in this book were already present in the 20th century. The idea of having one superior race of people can easily be seen as something that Hitler was trying to accomplish during the Holocaust. Huxley presents the society in his book as being a greater civilization. A totalitarian type of leadership is also presented in his book. According to him, this would be the best and most effective type of government. Hitler also thought that a totalitarian government was best. We see several similarities between Hitler's Germany and Huxley's
As man has progressed through the ages, there has been, essentially, one purpose. That purpose is to arrive at a utopian society, where everyone is happy, disease is nonexistent, and strife, anger, or sadness is unheard of. Only happiness exists. But when confronted with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we come to realize that this is not, in fact, what the human soul really craves. In fact, Utopian societies are much worse than those of today. In a utopian society, the individual, who among others composes the society, is lost in the melting pot of semblance and world of uninterest. The theme of Huxley's Brave New World is community, identity, and stability. Each of these three themes represents what a Brave New World society needs
Aldous Huxley wisely inserts many instances of distortion to the elements in Brave New World to successfully caution the world about its growing interest in technology.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World introduces us to a futuristic technological world where monogamy is shunned, science is used in order to maintain stability, and society is divided by 5 castes consisting of alphas(highest), betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons(lowest). In the Brave New World, the author demonstrates how society mandates people’s beliefs using many characters throughout the novel.
In many cases when you read a novel you may find comparisons between the "fictional" society and your realistic one. The author may consciously or unconsciously create similarities between these two worlds. The novelist can foresee the future and write according to this vision. In Brave New World, Adlous Huxley envisions the future of our society and the dangerous direction it is headed in.
In the novel Brave New World (BNW) by Aldous Huxley, education and creative expression aren’t exactly the way today’s society teaches education and self-expression. BNW contains similar issues that can be comparable and/or contrasted related to today’s society. In Brave New World, creativity and self-expression doesn’t exist. Having individualism allows people to have the right to freely express themselves. Freely expressing ideas and emotions will lead to instability which would go against the society’s moto, “…COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABIBILTY.”(pg.3).
Imagine the world in which everyone is happy, there is no pain or suffering, no fear of death, no sadness, everything is good, and the government doles out happy pills, known as Soma, the perfect drug. That society has been created in Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World.” Is everyone truly happy? What do the citizens give up in exchange for living in this utopia and is it worth it? "Brave New World" was published in 1932. Set in a dystopian London six hundred years into the future, the novel follows future citizens through their brave new world. The fact that it was written seventy years ago and so much of it rings true in our world makes it a novel that is captivating. Huxley's story is compelling and terrifying at the same time. It