Sexual Interaction In Brave New World By Aldous Huxley

Society in Personal Relationships In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley we are introduced to a society that we believe to be much different to our own. When thinking about their society to our own you can begin to find some major things that are the same. One being how close our society is to theirs in the concept of personal relationships. When thinking about the Brave New World and the way that Huxley has presented relationships to us he really has just taken the concept of sex and love or even just sex and any king of emotion and just thrown it away and got rid of it.

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.

“Everyone belongs to everyone else” (Huxley 29). Early on, Huxley introduces the idea of promiscuity to reader through this quote. Said by one of the world controllers, Mustapha Mond, to a group of students, this moment is a major understanding point of licentiousness in their society. Throughout the book, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, promiscuity is an underlined constant that sculpts the new world’s way of life.

As for intelligence there have been three capacities and virtues that should be targeted for moral enhancement, which are the sensitivity to the features of situations, thoughtfulness about doing what is moral, and the proper capacity for people to make proper judgments. The continued progress in the modification of learning, cognition, memory, the capabilities of decision-making will help assist the moral enhancement with these tasks. There have also been many neurochemicals that have been used to enhance cognitive abilities, which include increased attention span and cognition span. Drugs like OxyContin have also been used to help with empathy, and to make people feel happier. It may be believed that a drug like soma was only possible in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, but perhaps not. Utilitarian’s have been pushing for human enhancement that uses drugs, genetic engineering and nanotechnology to ensure the maximum amount of happiness possible while attempting to eliminate any pain. Proponents believe that this would reset the brain’s thinking patterns, and allow people to think more positively by keeping our minds engaged, rather than in a constant dull and depressing state. Many anti- depressant drugs are attempting to do just this. It is safe to say that moral enhancement is not just a potential innovation, but a technology that is already beginning.

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

Unlimited meaningless sex sounds great right? Life in the Brave New World is entirely different than it is now. We have lost our compassion and our freedom, and now we have been turned into mindless beings. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley teaches us the importance of being human through the portrayal of the necessity of individuality, history and relationships. The lack of individuality is a common theme presented throughout the book.

Huxley used parody in order to address the human impulses in regards to relationships. Humans have natural impulses of sexual activity, impulses controlled by the morals within today’s society. Many of the people within today’s society hold the common belief that every relationship should resemble monogamy. In Brave New World, the authorities believed that the restraint of these impulses created social instability. Therefore, they decided to control people’s relationships, discouraging monogamy and, instead, encouraged the people to sleep with whoever they want, as “everyone belongs to everyone else”. The act of sex is influenced by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment. This allows them to act

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.

thought to be trashy and cheap.  Children are taught at a young age to be

At the very beginning of the novel sex is shown to play an important role in the new society because kids are playing sex games in bushes. This should immediately evoke a sense of bewilderment by the reader because sex amongst children is looked down upon by normal society. Throughout the entire novel sex occurs quite often, but love is never correlated with the intimacy. The characters simply choose who they want to be with and then act upon the person without putting forth much effort at all. Having sex with others and not loving the person is something that is normally looked down upon in normal society, so Huxley obviously intended to have a large impact on the readers. To further his exploitation of taboo subjects, Huxley makes the New World a society in which drugs known as Soma are used to fix any problem that may occur. Whenever something that seems like it might be the least bit problematic arises, Soma is taken to ease them of any tension. This eliminates any problem solving and rids of the overall satisfaction from overcoming difficulties. But problems seldom occur to inhabitants of the New World, and Huxley wanted to make drugs commonplace in Brave New World. So, Soma is also taken during most instances of sex which increases the drastic impact on the reader. All of Huxley’s exaggerations of the New World is meant to make the reader think about his own society and think about the path

"Š What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? (Huxley 41)."

The color of the groups uniform determined how intelligent and skillful the people were mentally. A certain color(grey) determined if you were clever, an Alpha, and another color(green) determined if you were vapid, an Epsilon. More specifically, every individual was made to believe this in their sleep. As Huxley states, “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki… Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid”(Huxley 27/28). Huxley is stating that brain washing begins since one is born and occurs when an individual is not aware of what is going on in their surroundings.

Society in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World was an exaggerated society of the United States during the 1920s. These extreme societal boundaries were unknowingly predicting the future. Brave New World developed a liberal trend toward materialistic views on physical pleasure. Throughout the novel, there was dependence on science for reproduction, open-minded views on sex and, ideological concepts that disvalue family and relationship. In the modern-day United States these views are reciprocal and ever-present, however, these views were not directly mirrored, values today are not completely lost.

During the writing of the novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, the author of the book, saw the way society was beginning to change. Throughout the story, he explores many different predictions that he has seen create an affect our world today. One of the main predictions he made was on the way promiscuity has changed the view of romantic relationships. As Huxley began to see people’s sexual behavior change he used his ideas to integrate in with how the world would turn out. Huxley incorporates promiscuity in his utopian society called the World State, to foreshadow how the world is conforming to the beliefs incorporated in the novel.

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