Huxley Brave New World Analysis

These are just a few examples of how the population is dehumanized and dominated by the World State through the use of technology. Huxley seems to have passed over the ideas of automation so that even the lowest in the caste system have a purpose, including toiling away in factories or working in elevators.

Huxley’s novel takes place in the future, one in which it is acceptable to condition citizens to maximize the overall efficiency of the entire society as opposed to the efficiency of the individual. This future’s biological engineering reaches an all time high level; people are no longer born “naturally”, children are now “decanted” in bottles and pre-natal conditioning is not only acceptable but necessary as a means to limit human behavior. The theme of dehumanized life is a central one in the novel, perhaps the most important one, but one critic argues that although it is evident that this theme dominates the pages of Brave New World, the characters of this novel prove to be more human-like than one might have thought at a first glace. Peter Edgerly Firchow of the Bucknell University Press argues that:

Adlous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, builds upon the ideas that were dominant and fresh in the early part of the twentieth century. One such idea was Psychoanalysis, propagated by Dr. Sigmund Freud. Though a psychoanalytical interpretation can be applied to any novel after the fact, I believe Huxley used elements of the approach in the creation of his characters and plot. In this novel Huxley presents a dystopic society in which various scientific and psychological techniques are used to control people from their conception to their death.

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.

As analyzed by social critic Neil Postman, Huxley's vision of the future, portrayed in the novel Brave New World, holds far more relevance to present day society than that of Orwell's classic 1984.  Huxley's vision was simple:  it was a vision of a trivial society, drowned in a sea of pleasure and ignorant of knowledge and pain, slightly resembling the world of today.  In society today, knowledge is no longer appreciated as it has been in past cultures, in turn causing a deficiency in intelligence and will to learn.  Also, as envisioned by Huxley, mind altering substances are becoming of greater availability

Huxley’s Brave New World is actually becoming more relevant to today’s society as time passes on. Today, we live in a society where we can get prescription drugs for literally everything such as depression. Today, we live in a society where relationships are very hard to have. Marriages break up easily and married couples soon divorce. Today, we live in a society that is obsessed with money and looking young. This is shockingly similar to the Huxley’s Brave New World. As the people in the World State can get soma everyday. There are no marriages in the World State and this is similar to today’s society because marriage doesn’t last long. And in the World State, people do not get old or they die before they do and this is similar to today society

In the novel, the government is shown to be absolute. Citizens are kept under control by being brainwashed through hypnopaedic conditioning at very young ages. Because of their conditioning they have become complacent, making for a “stable and happy society.” The book itself is almost entirely satirical. So here, Huxley is advocating against codependency on technology and materialism, which are both very prevalent within the story.

Like most high school seniors, I was handed a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which I found myself lost in a world where childbearing was mechanicalized, as children were made-to-order inside of test tubes with specific traits and societal roles. Now I sit three years later, reading about how this once imagined world of Aldous Huxley has become a reality as we now have the technology to make these made-to-order babies. As mentioned in lecture, the first test tube baby, or child conceived in a petri dish, took place in 1978. Although this type of treatment was scolded by scientists and leaders around the world it eventually became accepted and now roughly 55 million people are a product of this process of in vitro

Huxley develops his warning about how society should be structured by showing a loss of individuality, the loss of deep personal relationships, the loss of creativity, the loss of freedom of thought, misused technology, the overuse of industrialization, and his uses of imagery and allusions in the novel Brave New World.

Independance and self-awareness is an important part of our society, without it, people lose sight of who they genuinely are. Today’s society relies on people doing their duty to work together, like another cog in a machine. It is easy to find oneself feeling insignificant in terms of an independent person, and because of this, people have to actively find ways to keep ourselves occupied. Aldous Huxley was born July 26, 1984. His father was a scientist that helped to develop the theory of evolution. Science was obviously a large part of his life and was most likely a key source of inspiration for his book. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Individualism is a rarity and society is structured to serve a higher class of people. Society is

Huxley is known for his remarkable use of tone to properly set the mood in his novel Brave New World. Here, Huxley subtly slips in an excellent example of this. This quote was just enough to bring me out of the fictional world I was immersed in, to remember that it was a satirical work of fiction. It also effectively weaves into the theme of mindless conformity that is ever-present throughout the novel. The characters so absentmindedly subject themselves to the collective social body that it is almost admissible when reading their thoughts in the novel. This quote was such a characteristic thing to say for everyone in the novel that I almost didn?t catch that it was an abnormal thought. This quotation accurately depicts how the characters in this novel view aspects of their life. They simply see no reason behind partaking in anything that does not ?increase consumption?, and is therefore an excellent example of Huxley?s effortless use of language in the novel.

Before writing Brave New World, Huxley traveled to America and was troubled of the materialistic ideology and temporary happiness people were indulging in during the Roaring 20s. This influenced Huxley, since the society in the novel were only nourishing themselves with the drug Soma and were only worried in the temporary . This results in the loss of identity since they rely on the drug to be happy and don't want to experience the feelings of pain. And as he grew old, Huxley spent his years in California, “His observations of life in the United States did not in any way make him more optimistic about the condition of the world” (Birnbaum 18). Huxley expressed his distaste in the world and the issues it kept fueling, vividly in Brave New World.

Huxley states, “No social stability without individual stability.” In Huxley’s own life, Europe was no longer the world’s banker. England had lost many of its investments overseas. England also found itself in debt to the United States through war loans. Industry needs were changing which caused even more instability. There was also an amount of overproduction from wartime needs. The obsession with societal stability as a major issue is because it largely eliminates individual freedom. Seeking a stable utopian society, many aspects of life were sacrificed. Intelligence, creativity, the arts, and diversity were either suppressed or eliminated. Through stability, happiness could be achieved, and that would lead to a uniform and content population. It was a dystopia that only those with any diversity left could see. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.” (Huxley, 136). When it was written, the effects of World War I were still lingering. At the beginning of the 1920s Europe was booming with success. But by the end of the 1920s everything changed. Unemployment reached record highs, strikes were frequent, and the government didn’t know how to cope with the failing economy. European countries were ravaged by the United States’ economic crash, leading to the Great Depression. The Great Depression is shown in the book as “The Great Economic Collapse.” This further caused societal instability in the book and served as the turning point. “The Nine Years’ War, the Great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction.” (Huxley, 35). In Brave New World, prior to the beginning of the book, a war had occurred, the Nine Years War. This is the equivalent of World War I. The war is frequently mentioned as the start for change in society; the

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a novel about the future of the world being a dystopian society in which the populous is kept ignorantly complacent. What makes this book unique is not that it is a book about what the future will bring, but that it is an indirect source of the cost of what such a future entails. Huxley also has a feverish use of reader assumption, often leaving readers to guess the outcome of situations through description and well placed hints. Lastly, Huxley seems to have a pension for being exact in both percentages that are used by characters for information in the story and how he writes, he likes to have control of what exactly his words inspire.

In order to uphold his critical view on society and clearly define the concepts that could lead to human demise, Huxley used various powerful themes throughout his novel. The first significant theme to explore is science and its use as a means of control. 15 years after the book was written, in the Foreword he wrote in 1946, Huxley said that one of the themes of the novel was “the advancement of science as it affects human individuals.” Although he did not focus on sciences like nuclear physics even though he was aware of the production of nuclear weapons at the time, he believed that a far more dangerous misuse of science can come from the biological, physiological, reproductive, and psychological side of science as it can be used as a way of controlling society, identity, and stability. Thus, in order to successfully convey this message, he develops this idea in his representations of a world controlled by artificial birth and conditioning and by showing how by erasing individual identity and freedom one can achieve stability because there is no more conflict and no more change.