A World Without Freedom in Huxley’s A Brave New World, Literary Analysis and Discussion
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).
The Essay on Brave New World Society People Stability
... to the Brave New World society in its portrayal of dust, dirt and the different ages of people in the reserve area. ... described the hypnopaedia teachings and drug distribution in his novel. The Brave New World summed up its society with ... happy'. The way the fascist and totalitarian regimes used mass propaganda techniques to brainwash their people was nearly identical to the way Huxley ...
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.
The Term Paper on Brave New World Huxley Society Book
... Huxley, combining his skill for satire with his fascination with science to create a dystopian world in which a totalitarian government controlled society ... other sense is with regard to people, always with a sexual connotation.It is ... the ultimate chemical goal of the human being) we will continue to seek ... personal freedoms, infringing even upon the opinions of its constituents. Author: Aldous Huxley ...
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).
