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Everyday people are given a choice – a choice to reach for their
goals or do what makes them happy. In a perfect world, these would be
one in the same. Aldous Huxley presents this utopian world in his book
Brave New World, where the people are governed and trained in manner.
He presents a totalitarian regime that not only ensures that people are
happy, but also is able to control the behavior of each individual and
keep society stable. Through the use of science, people are not only
created, but also conditioned to guarantee they will be happy members
of society. Throughout the book, Huxley also introduces many of the
main philosophical issues that are social necessities for perfect
stability within this society. These include the role of consumption,
sexuality and emotions, the role of history, and the redefinition of
religion.
Conditioning plays a large part in the success of this society.
Children are taught throughout their life to be happy with their caste
so they have no desire to change. The basic ideas of society are also
“wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless
conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer
distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior.
For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief,
hypnopaedia. The greatest moralizing an socializing force of all time”
(28).
Conditioning is one of the main basis’ for this modern civilization.
“The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a
deep, personal revolution in the human minds and bodies” (xvi).
Conditioning allows the government to establish this love of servitude
and use it to their advantage in preventing such things as uprising and
encouraging other things such as consumption.
The society Huxley presents is based on many things, on of which is
the desire to consume. The people have been conditioned in this manner.
From the economic standpoint of the society, if people consume readily
as they do, there will always be a need for jobs thus completing the
supply and demand cylce. In one instance, the masses are taught to
“hate the county… but simultaneously [conditioned] to love all country
sports. At the same time [it is seen to] that all country sports shall
entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume
manufactured articles as well as transport” (22). The people are also
taught through hypnopaedia to throw away old clothes and buy new.
The new “religion” in the society is also based on the theme of
consumption. It is not a religion in the conventional sense of the
term, but rather a system of ideologies that uses Ford as its leader.
The society replaces the Christian “Our Lord” with “Ford” and use the T
instead of the cross. This religion is based around Ford because he
introduced mass production with the Model T car. The ability to mass
produce was viewed as an important invovation because it allowed
society to create more, and there fore the people could consume more.
Huxley also identified that monogamy, sex, and family ties generate
most human emotions. Thus, he created a society that is based upon
promiscuity and baby factories to eradicate emotions by replacing them
with pure sexual desire and nothing else. “As political and economic
freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to
increase”(xvii). Because family life and monogamous relationships have
been destroyed, emotions are directed mostly by the state, which makes
social control and stability possible.
History and religion are viewed as well as dangerous and potentially
corrupting. History gives people a sense of time outside their own time
frame. This sense of the past encourage people to think about
progression through time, which is something society cannot permit
without causing social upheaval. In the modern society of Brave New
World, “history is bunk” (34). With nothing to base the past on such as
God or morals, history is regarded as strange and backwards – a threat
to society.
As man has progressed through the ages, there has been, essentially,
one purpose – to arrive at an utopian society. A society where everyone
is happy, disease is nonexistent, and strife, anger, and sadness are
unheard of. Only happiness exists. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
counters this by showing that these items are not what the human soul
really craves. In a utopian society, the individual is lost in the
melting pot of semblance and world of uninterest. Huxley uses his
knowledge of science along with his imagination to show how a utopian
society would be. Huxley’s satire reveals that the world he is
presenting as a Utopia, is actually a dystopia. In Brave New World, he
removes individuality and has made happiness and the enjoyment of life
into an artificial feeling with the constant presence of soma. Freedom
is what makes people humans and in a world where freedom the freedom of
choice is taken away, feelings then disappear.
A place that Huxley had intended to be a untopia is in reality a
dystopia. This reality to any human would be devastation for everything
that people have worked for. People want to be free and the chance to
feel. As the Savage put it, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want
poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want
sin” (246).
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