Freedom In Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, reveals that when a society, such as the World State, focuses too much on stability, it derails its people’s individuality and freedom and that ultimately avoiding conflict, risk or change doesn’t come free, the cost is individual freedom and it is a great cost to pay for the simple desire of stability.

An American essayist, H.L. Mencken stated, “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants be safe”. I disagree with this statement because an “average man” wants to live. In order to live you must have two necessities; freedom and safety. I believe neither is more important than one another because being free gives you the opportunity to a safe nation, and a safe nation allows you to be free. You cannot live a life without exploring and growing because that would not be considered living. On the other hand, you cannot expect to be free without safety around you.

From the earlier times in our lives till now, we humans have been struggling hard to be free and independent of the things that limit our right to be free. And even though some people say that having security in life can regulate our lives and messy societies, I believe that too much security or limitation causes more dilemmas. Also, by being independent and free, one can learn new things rather than just by sticking to some widely held beliefs. We can see many examples related to this assumption everywhere in our lives, movies, books, and history.

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, bravery is “possessing or exhibiting courage or courageous endurance” (Agnes 178). Oftentimes, people are commended for acts of bravery they complete in the heat of a moment or overcoming a life-changing obstacle. Rarely one is commended for simply living a brave life, facing challenges they do not even understand. The characters in the Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World live a peculiar lifestyle demonstrating bravery for just breathing. Although Huxley’s ideas are surfacing today, the dystopia he creates is unrelatable . The genetic make-up of these men and women is different, creating a human lacking basic function of life. In Western Europe an individual forms in a laboratory, “one egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress” (Huxley 6). The dystopian way of reproduction rarely involves a man impregnating a woman. Huxley’s characters are born in a laboratory. These class divided people are manipulated to be personality less , sex-driven, dumb-downed, assembly line workers. Brainwashing from birth conditions them to go through the motions without doubting their purpose. Government controllers are not looking out for the egg at all, simply manufacturing them to keep the

Freedom does not mean free. The saying has been established in the past, present, and the future which happens to be the setting of where Brave New World by Aldoux Huxley takes place. In futuristic London, though people living there come off as happy with all their wants satisfied and fulfilled, by looking closer into what seems to be a perfectly utopian society, a dystopian society strongly seems visible due to total authority and corrupt government control as further developed by perspective. Huxley's choice of point of view as the rhetorical device contributes to the dystopian purpose for the novel.

The first major component in life is to know that there is no such thing as being completely free. In the world, to be free means, one must have money and to be able to make sacrifices. Additionally, in order for one to earn the freedom they shall defend countries that already spoken as free, to stay free. A great President, Harry Truman, once said, “we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way (Doc 1 A).” This President spoke of freedom, and the problems of the government. President Truman also said, “ the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon freedom of

America is not universally free. This is easily proven with examples from a variety of subjects. For example, take LGBT rights. De jure, gay marriage is legal nationwide. But de facto, when one looks at the social reality dealt with by people who are not heterosexual, one finds that not everyone has the realistic ability to do so. Even on a de jure level, there are the “bathroom bills,” passed by North Carolina and looked at by many states, designed to limit transgender people’s ability to use the bathroom.

In his text Brave New World Aldous Huxley imagines a society genetically engineered and socially conditioned to be a fully functioning society where everyone appears to be truly happy. This society is created with each person being assigned a social status from birth, much like caste system in modern society or the social or the social strata applied to everyday society. Huxley shows the issues of class struggle from the marxist perspective when he says the structure of society in relation to its major classes, and the struggle between them as the engine change its major classes. Huxley describes a perfect society created through genetic engineering where each individual is assigned a class from the time of being . In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley it states “Why not? Bernard’s an Alpha Plus. Besides, he asked me to go to one of the savage reservations with him. I’ve always wanted to see a savage reservation. But his reputation?”(Huxley 123). Clearly the social interactions of the upper castes are a little more nuanced than a simple matter of agreed caste status.

Life should not have to be a decision of what freedom truly means nor should humanity have to fight so hard to incorporate the foundation of equality. We are humans of flawed perfections, who look for acceptance in a

In George Orwell’s 1984, , the protagonist, Winston Smith, is living in a world where there is one source of power that controls everything, the party. Their control of knowledge is the source of their power. Winston wants to believe that he can do something to change the current situation to grant everyone what they need, freedom. The concept of freedom is a dangerous aspiration, the light at the end of the tunnel.Winston is enticed with his own idea of freedom. Although his idea of freedom is quite simple to exercise, through his overconfidence, misplaced trust and ignorance such aspirations become impossible for him to execute.

Freedom is having the power to act, speak or think without restraint or limitations. To have free will and do as you please is very important in life. In Brave New World each caste is restricted to what the government wishes them to think or do. They have no freedom to choose what job to do, which class they belong to or what thoughts are in their brains. It is very hard to have freedom in this Brave New World when the citizens are subjected to rigorous operant conditioning, brainwashed by hypnopaedia from the moment of birth and imprisoned by a hallucinogen. These are "major instruments of social stability"(Huxley 5). The World State uses conditioning as a way to influence children to perform a certain way and like certain things. Conditioning is used in Brave New World to produce a society that is stable and where every citizen is content. The protagonist Bernard Marx longs for freedom and individuality. He ponders what it would be like "if [he] were free -- not enslaved by [his] conditioning" (78) showing his desire to be "free to be happy in some other way ... in [his] own way,

As it is seen in Brave New World, the World State has controlled so much of their lives that they have lost their consciousness through conditioning. In other words, the World State has controlled their minds so much that the people are unaware that they have lost their person freedom but since conditioning has failed on Bernard, he is able to recognize the loss of individuality in the World State. The government controls because they would rather have others lose their personal identity than have them be a threat to society. Therefore, if the country progresses to being all-powerful and invading the lives of individuals, there would be conformity and a loss of individuality.

The struggle for freedom has existed since the beginning of civilization. When creating a nation, leaders must decide who has power, and how much power they should have. But where is the balance between an excess of freedom and insufficient freedom? Two societies shall be compared: North Korea and Somalia. North Koreans have little liberty to do what they choose. The government denies human rights and allows citizens to starve, whilst using wealth better spent on its citizens to grow military might. Giving citizens little freedom of choice is obviously not a good way to govern; however, the opposite also makes for an unstable country ("Life"). Somalia is a shaky society with no central government and instead a series of "clans and sub-clans."

Similarly, Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a government in total control doing all that it can to keep power over the people. From childhood, citizens in this society are conditioned to be perfect tools of the government. On page 22 of Brave New World, the Controller explains how babies are conditioned to hate and fear books and flowers, so as to destroy curiousity and promote work (Huxley 22). If people are formed in such a way where work and lesiure is all they know and love, deviance cannot occur. Also, ever before birth, citizens are forced into predetermined castes through chemical alterations. Early on in the novel, Henery tells Lenina, “And if you were an Epsilon, your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha” (Huxley 74). Regardless of their caste, members of this world are okay with their situation because they are taught to love their position, no matter how degrading it can be. Much like The Party, Brave New World’s government takes special care to remove those who defy set rules and expectations. When explaining the islands to Hemholtz, the Controller says they are for “All of the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community life” (Huxley 227). In order to preserve perfect obedient, society, the government eliminates the deviant by shipping them far away. The

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