Huxley's Future

In the following passage Neil Postman contrasts George Orwell's depiction of the future in his novel 1984 with that of Aldous Huxley's in Brave New World. Both of these novels were written around the same century during the times of war. Both of these novels address some of the same issues, but they both portray these issues in a different way. These authors are both predicting what would happen to the civilization that we live in if we continued with our way of life. Neil Postman asserts that "Huxley's prophecy is more relevant today than Orwell's". In my opinion Huxley's prophecy is in fact more accurate today than Orwell's and the civilization that we live in today is gradually moving towards the civilization that is depicted in Brave New

“The sooner you step away from your comfort zone, you'll realize that it really wasn't all that comfortable.” This quote by Eddie Harris Jr. allows us to recognize that comfort zones aren’t good for progress in almost any scenario imaginable. When we stay in a place that is so repetitive and familiar that we become stagnant, it is so incredibly hard to push ourselves to get out of it. One of the most valuable skills we can have is the ability to recognize when our comfort zones are holding us captive from experiencing new things and growing from those circumstances. In Source 1, “Tiptoeing Out of One’s Comfort Zone (and Of Course, Back In)”, by Alina Tugend, the protagonist describes her recent experiences having stepped out of her comfort

Pieper describes work and leisure from a unique perspective. He believes that work is a necessary part of life, but one that should not consume our every waking moment. Piper challenges our modern definition of work to show us that time away can be beneficial. The leisure that he references is not a period of just not doing anything. He argues that our time not consumed by our work should be devoted to philosophy and theology that enriches our lives. What the modern world uses as leisure, which is not thinking at all, is what Pieper would call being sloth. The time away from work is meant for personal and spiritual growth. Idleness robs our time as much as work, but leisure allows us to expand our horizons. Comparing Huxley's Brave NEw World

Huxley’s craft in concluding Brave New World suggests that an amoral society has defeated all goodness, ultimately resulting in the suicide of John the Savage which is a reflection of how rigid social structure, encouraged promiscuity, and the use of science as means of control lead to a horrific society. In particular, John is a very moral and religious person with the belief that, “God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic." (Ch. 17). John criticizes the way rigid social structure degrades these values. The caste system’s domination limits the ability to act freely and generate any intellectual beliefs. This suggests that when too much control is put into organizing a society, it can conclusively result in the lack of integrity

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

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

The Brave New World that Huxley created in his book is one of dramatically stratified social classes, Alpha through Epsilon, designed and conditioned from even before birth to fit into their predestined role in the society. Especially for the upper classes, everything is engineered towards comfort and consumption, to the point where people can even escape uncomfortable emotions by taking a drug known as

Huxley’s imaginative examples of how we prioritize superficial desires illustrate to the audience that our society needs to care more about our lives and the lives of those around us, instead of looks and drugs. For years we have used our technological and scientific improvements for our shallow desires, not for the health of our society. The parallels between Huxley’s society and ours exist because his brave new world represents an exaggerated version of our world, he meant his novel to display the faults of sophisticated

The universal truth that Huxley is trying to say in The Brave New World is that every utopia is a dystopia. A society in which people believe the world they live in is pure and clean will believe that their society is a utopia but there are other people that think other wise. In chapters 1, 2, & 3 the book depicts a society that seems perfect and is in harmony. We learn that people in this society are conditioned, they cannot think for themselves but are told what to think.

The same with the castes, the consumerism, the violence etc. The world created by Huxley is eerie in how real it feels. This seems like it could be a potential future society. novel still has relevance for our society. Huxley mocked the growth of "mass society" -- mass production, consumerism, mass media, popular culture,

What would the world end up like if we lived in a utilitarian society? After reading the brief excerpt from Huxley’s Brave New World, my fellow classmates and I have gotten a taste for what this society might look like. Huxley created a dystopian society of the future that is only concerned with the happiness of its members. The character “the Controller,” has the power of knowledge of everything from the past, but his duty is to steer the society into total happiness. Huxley made the point, “They get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.” They, referring to the members of this dystopian society, are allegedly “happy.” This point is both inquisitive yet a little unsettling to me. When you go on to read more about what the society is like, you understand that this happiness is really achieved by medicating impulses, restricting literary works, and eliminating what they might view as threats and dangers. When “the Savage” argues with the Controller about this happiness of the new world, the right to be unhappy is introduced. We should desire other things than just happiness, and the right to be unhappy

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.

Most Americans place the rise of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drug use in the 1970’s, but Aldous Huxley, author and English scholar, was ahead of his time. Starting in the 1940’s, Huxley began using a hallucinogenic drug under the watch of a psychiatrist conducting a clinical study as he wrote novels. One of his best known novels, written while he was using psychedelics such as mescaline and LSD, is Island, a story set on the imaginary island of Pala in Southeast Asia. Pala appears to be a utopian society, untouched by the Western influences of capitalism and widespread industrial areas with high consumerism. One of the main pillars of Palanese society is use of a psychedelic drug called ‘moksha medicine’ for enlightenment, mind-expansion,

Technology, which has brought mankind from the Stone Age to the 21st century, can also ruin the life of peoples. In the novel Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley shows us what technology can do if we exercise it too much. From the novel we can see that humans can lose humanity if we rely on technology too much. In the novel, the author sets the world in the future where everything is being controlled by technology. This world seems to be a very perfectly working utopian society that does not have any disease, war, problems, crisis but it is also a sad society with no feelings, emotions or human characteristics. This is a very scary society because everything is being controlled even before someone is born, in test tube, where they

Huxley shows in his novel how advancement in technology does not always mean progress for the human race or society in general. "Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world... you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get... You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.