Consumerism In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley depicts a future world that has mechanized and removed all sense of life to being human. In this world, people work for the common good of the community and are conditioned to dislike what, today, we would consider common and healthy relationships with people and environments. The story follows a man, John, not born into the culture and his struggle with the unfamiliarity with the “Brave New World”. Published in 1932, Brave New World often leaves roots back to the world Aldous was in when he was writing the novel. I believe the genius of Huxley’s writing was his ability to effectively select the traits of 1930’s society that would later become a staple for Americanism in the coming century and, in time, allowing for a relatable story to the modern day while giving us warning to the future.

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.

During the 1930s, the times of World War II and the Great Depression, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. There were several issues going on in Huxley’s time that are still present in today's world . Huxley features some of these problems in his book, Brave New World. These problems include drug or medicine usage, women and gender inequality, and traditional marriage/homosexuality. Since this book was written during the times of the Great Depression and World War II, these factors also contributed to some of these issues. Since World War II and the Great Depression are over, these do not affect the problems today. Although some of these problems are still a problem in today's world and society, they are not as much of a problem as they were during Huxley's time.

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.

Drugs, promiscuous sex, birth control, and total happiness are the core values of the World State in the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In today’s society things like drug use and reckless sex are often seen as taboo, but in World State, these activities are glorified and even considered normal. Aldous Huxley attempts to address to readers the harsh realities and cruel ways of our society in an exaggerated form. His purpose in doing so is to open the eyes of society to what the world might come to if things like technology and humanity get out of hand. In the World State, the motto that people are conditioned to live by is “Community, Identity, and Stability”, all three of which are ironically twisted to encourage members of the society

How would you feel if you were exiled? Most would say this would be a terrible experience. However, several theorists have many different views on the impact of being exiled. American theorist Edward Said claimed, “It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” But on another note, he said it is “a potent, even enriching.” Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, expands on this idea of exilation. Throughout the novel, several characters are faced with being exiled, whether it be from their home or community. In particular, a man by the name of John seems to experience the bulk of it. John’s experiences show that being exiled is

Brave New World is set in a dystopian London in a time called A.F. which means after Ford referring to after the making of Henry Ford’s Model T. This new era called the World State was developed after the Nine Years’ War which destroyed everything, leaving no traces of the history. A mythologized version of Henry Ford replaces the faith civilization once had in Christ, turning all crosses into T’s. “All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God,” (Huxley, 45). Everything in this time period is based off of science. All the new developments in technology such as human cloning, rapid maturation and prenatal conditioning have overpowered the human race, dehumanizing them. “For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century - what would be the use of that?” (Huxley, 5). Out of

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment”. And how true that is. We learn from a young age that it is better to fit in than stand out and that if one does stand out they will be ridiculed and teased into conforming. Our society stifles individuality and hides how they truly feel in order to fit in. Not only that, but we tend to stifle emotions in our society just as much as individualism. We refuse to create actual bonds with one another, never truly opening up to others and to the possibilities of love and pain. There is a similar society presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both societies would much rather engage in “easy

In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley confronts the way in which mass production and capitalism serve to disempower the individual by cementing a self-reinforcing system of consumption and production wherein the individual is reduced to his or her utilitarian function. Although the novel touches on a number of ways in which the individual is disempowered and commodified in contemporary society, from pacifying drugs to an overreliance on technology, Huxley's critique of capitalism remains the most prominent, if only because the novel includes explicit references to the father of modern capitalist production, Henry Ford. Huxley's critique of capitalism becomes most apparent in the third chapter of the novel, when the tour group is taken over by Mustapha Mond, "his fordship" and the Resident Controller for Western Europe. Examining Mond's discussion of the time before the institution of the World State, Huxley's creative demonstration of capitalist reduction, and the function of the individual within capitalist society reveals the ways in which the novel seeks to highlight the dangers of unrestrained capitalist and the consumer culture is perpetuates.

In Brave New world, Aldous Huxley portrays a dystopian society that has lost all values and morals of today's civilization. There is also the social change occurring in the form of people beginning to talk more openly about subjects that have previously been kept behind closed doors. All of these political and social issues are shown by using imagery, metaphors, and symbolism to express Huxley’s tone toward how present-day society will become at the rate of the social and political change currently taking place in the world.

“Whenever anyone felt depressed or below par, he would swallow a tablet or two of a chemical compound called soma.” Through Chapters Revisited, it is understood that in Brave New World, society is put under the theme of the controller by enabling him to hold the key to their happiness and comfort ability through soma. The people of this society became so accustomed to this routine that they became reliant on soma, leaving them exposed to manipulation. “…Why don’t you take soma when you have those dreadful ideas of yours? You’d forget all about them (92).” Huxley uses satire of soma to show how society is inclining closer and closer to the reality of soma because of how easily prescription drugs are given out as well as consumed for any minor issue. Douglas Van Praet writes an article concerning how marketers manipulate you without your knowing. “The only way to overcome these unconscious influences is to better understand the process of decision making by becoming aware of the environmental cues that can trigger these learned behaviors.” By reviewing the satires Huxley has portrayed, it leaves readers with a new understanding of the need to be aware of the influences put on society in everyday life. Brave New World pitches the idea of what conveniences are worth the price of printing society in a place

One may think that the society in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a gross representation of the future, but perhaps our society isn’t that much different. In his foreword to the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned this statement when he wrote: "To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda...." Thus, through hypnopaedic teaching (brainwashing), mandatory attendance to community gatherings, and the use of drugs to control emotions, Huxley bitterly satirized the society in which we live.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley illustrates what is actually happening in modern society. The novel is a satire of a totalitarian government and although it is fantasy, there are early traces of it occurring in modern day. It is hard to imagine a government that is solely based on the ideals of the people when there is an elected government body who makes decisions. The government’s goal is to have stability and prosperity and that, at times, is accomplished at the expense of the individuals who are governed. Accordingly, there is danger in having an all-powerful state because personal freedoms are lost. More so, there is power in having knowledge that others do not possess because it is a gateway for the government to control the public

“Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ is largely about what we got – a consumerist post God happy land …” This quote from Kyle Smith in his article about Brave New World is an example on how the world is becoming the dystopia that Aldous Huxley created in Brave New World. In Brave New World people are taken away from reality by a drug called soma, the belief in Henry Ford as a God instead of a person, the technological control from birth that changes what a person wants to something that the government wants the citizen to know, the fear or an all powering state, and the alienation of people forced into a society they don’t want to be in or are not wanted in.

In both texts, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World it is clear from the start the societies show a heavy reliance on state control as a means of maintaining the dystopian civilizations. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a powerful presentation of a dystopian society under the influence and control of a totalitarian government. Orwell uses the character of Winston as a vehicle to explore the extent of the governments’ oppressive techniques. Through clever use of free indirect speech as the narrative structure, the reader is instantly immersed into a deprived society under perpetual surveillance of the omniscient ruler known only as ‘Big Brother’, and the effective but perverse methods the state uses to maintain power. In the text