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Brave New World The Perfect World Essay

Brave New World: The Perfect World? Essay, Research Paper


Brave New World: The Perfect World?


Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World presents a portrait of a society which


is superficially a perfect world. At first inspection, it seems perfect in many


ways: it is carefree, problem free and depression free. All aspects of the


population are controlled: number, social class, and intellectual ability are


all carefully regulated. Even history is controlled and rewritten to meet the


needs of the party. Stability must be maintained at all costs.


In the new world which Huxley creates, if there is even a hint of anger,


the wonder drug Soma is prescribed to remedy the problem. A colleague, noticing


your depression, would chime in with the chant, “one cubic centimetre of soma


cures ten gloomy.” This slogan is taught to everyone, from the youngest to the


oldest. Unhappiness, intellectual curiosity, disagreement, suffering – none of


these feelings is allowed in the world which Huxley creates. At the first sign


of unhappiness, Soma is prescribed. Emotions of all types are strictly


controlled to provide stability and predictability within the population.


Another of the panaceas for social ills is the belief that everyone


would enjoy his or her work because he or she was “made” or trained for it when


young. Consequently, from birth, everyone in Brave New World is slotted to


belong to a specific social and intellectual strata. In conjunction with this


idea, all births are completely planned and monitored. There are different


classes of people with different intelligence and different “career plans.” The


social order was divided into the most highly educated, the Alpha+, and then in


descending intelligence, the following divisions: Alpha, Beta, Beta -, Gamma,


Delta, and Epsilon, which is the last group comprised of those citizens of the


lowest intelligence who are necessary to perform society’s most menial jobs.


Another of the problems with the society which Huxley depict

s is that


the people do not have individuality. They are all conditioned by subliminal


messages and artificial stimuli to respond the same way. Although all people are


meant to respond identically without thinking, a few are made ‘imperfectly’ and,


as a result, do have personalities. These people violate the principles of


technology and artificial personalities and consequently have to be sent away so


as not to “contaminate” others. To maintain order in Brave New World, the


Resident Controller must have complete authority over more than just the


present; he must also have influence over the past. In order to be able to


achieve this, he must be able to rewrite history. This gives rise to one of the


most famous quotation from Brave New World, “All history is bunk.” The ability


to rewrite or “edit” history is not so far distant from our current


technological society. A simple stroke of the computer keyboard can make a


global change in information disseminated on a network or to thousands of


electronic bulletin board subscribers. Being able to distinguish the true from


the false is becoming increasingly difficult. Brave New World focuses constantly


on the question of whether technology requires a sacrifice of human


individuality. In this novel the reader is keenly aware of the dangers that


homogeneity poses to the quality of life. People may enjoy life with


technological advances, but if they are required to forfeit individual


personalities or interpretations about life, Huxley makes us see that life will


become meaningless.


In comparison to 1984, Brave New World makes the technology less obvious


to the members of the society themselves. The characters in Brave New World


participate willingly in their manipulation by the government. They happily


take the wonder drug Soma, “the wonder drug.” In contrast, in 1984 the people


seem to sense they are being controlled by Big Brother, but here the domination


is imposed on them by the government.

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