The Anti-Utopian World
Have you ever thought about how it might feel to have your life controlled by the government? Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World explores this very topic. An allegory of an industrialized society, Brave New World describes a kind of society that formerly gets inherited with specific traits in order to complete profounding tasks. The purpose of doing so is to keep the society running smoothly. Totalitarianism is subjected upon people from the day of their birth with the usage of much science and technology. There is much lack of individuality as every person is put in a specific caste which really determines who they are. Each and every individual is brainwashed by the government. The World State’s goal is nothing but perfection. However, none of it is for the benefit of the people as they have no freedom and face strong measures of inequality. In sum, in Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World, the World State clearly portrays a dystopian society.
To begin with, there’s no such thing as freedom for individuals in the World State. For example, the government attempts to use many types of methods to control people such as determining their caste. People are created to either be Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, or Epsilons. This also means that they have to do different jobs, according to their caste. However, it is understandable that everyone is happy with the caste that they’re and how they’re being treated by the government. The reason why is that
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.
In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley creates a scenario where the government has control over the people and their ideas. Throughout the novel, we are shown the different methods and techniques the leaders utilize to control the lives of the people. After reading the story, we can point out similarities of government control from our world and the book. Huxley has a message for us about government power and what it could do to us.
True freedom is the ability for each person to live as they desire; such a place is described as a utopia. Unfortunately in the dystopian novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the novel portrays a completely controlled society that has absolutely no freedom. Although you do have the few dissatisfied individuals who set out for a form of change. These individuals represent the optimistic part of the novel, despite conditioning, drugs and biological engineering; the human naturally wants more to life than just following orders.
When someone would not follow the rules, the government would use their power to force scare tactics upon them. For example, a person by the name of Bernard was not obeying the government at all. He had to glean information of the government in order to know how to destroy it. By Bernard having so much temerity, he had to pay for his action. For Bernard having to pay for his actions, the Director was very acrimonious and threatened to have him removed from the Reservation. People need to go against the government so they can have a free life instead of living under the control of them. Bernard in they only person who has figured out the government’s ways to have the people obey them. People are raised to obey the government and when they don’t, they get punished.
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.
A Brave New World published in 1932 by Aldous Huxley was about a utopian society in which people were placed in castes because of how their embryos were modified. Little did the author know less than a century later the idea of “designer babies” might be a reality. Designer babies are very similar to Huxley’s idea; a person could be genetically altered before they were born. Unlike Huxley’s book, in which embryos were genetically modified due to government industrial control, designer babies’ destinies are determined by parental control. Although, gene alteration can prevent genetic diseases, predetermining genetic outcomes should be illegal because of its negative effects on society; the effect genes have on each other, and the underwhelming success rate.
Totalitarianism diminishes the idea of individuality and destroys all chances of self-improvement, and human’s natural hunger for knowledge. In George Orwell’s famous novel, “1984”, totalitarianism is clearly seen in the exaggerated control of the state over every single citizen, everyday, everywhere. Totalitarianism can also be seen in the book “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, in which humans are synthetically made and conditioned for their predestinated purpose on earth. The lack of individualism will lead a community towards a dystopia in which freedom is vanished by the uncontrolled power of the state.
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.
As man has progressed through the ages, there has been, essentially, one purpose. That purpose is to arrive at a utopian society, where everyone is happy, disease is nonexistent, and strife, anger, or sadness is unheard of. Only happiness exists. But when confronted with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we come to realize that this is not, in fact, what the human soul really craves. In fact, Utopian societies are much worse than those of today. In a utopian society, the individual, who among others composes the society, is lost in the melting pot of semblance and world of uninterest. The theme of Huxley's Brave New World is community, identity, and stability. Each of these three themes represents what a Brave New World society needs
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley shows the loss of freedom and identity in the effects of government control through the artificial
Government: this word is used to define the system that maintains the state and her people. This system is run by officials who, hopefully, have the nation 's best interest at heart; but these best interests for a country often find themselves conflicting in their particular perspectives. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the government has chosen to preserve the interest of state and this dystopia is the result of mankind choosing the wrong faction in the conflict of interest. To clarify, the principles, theories and arguments presented here in are democratic in orientation and not communistic, because the arguments aim toward freedom and rights. Those in control in Brave New World have misguided the nation’s populace into
Dystopian novels have become more common over the last century; each ranging from one extreme society to the next. A dystopia, “A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control,”[1] through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, criticizes about current trends, societal norms, or political systems. The society in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is divided in a caste system, in which humans are not individuals, do not have the opportunity to be individuals, and never experience true happiness. These characteristics of the reading point towards a well-structured
Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World written in 1931 is about a futuristic dystopian society in which a totalitarian government controls society through the use of science and technology and consumerism, not unlike many societies today. The advancement of sciences and technological development is the basis of society in Brave New World as the citizen’s in the society are genetically modified and engineered from birth in order to be more productive and to consume more. Although the dystopian society takes this scientific control to an extreme, we see in today’s society technology taking over the lives of individuals in order to be eligibly more efficient, more productive, and promote consumerism. A clear parallel between the novel
The formative years of the 1900’s, suffered from communism, fascism, and capitalism. The author of the Brave New World, Mr. Aldous Huxley lived in a social order in which he had been exposed to all three of these systems. In the society of the Brave New World, which is set 600 years into the future, individuality is not condoned and the special motto “Community, Identity, Stability” frames the structure of the Totalitarian Government.
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