Brave New World

Imagine living in a world with no mom and dad, and that at any of your sides you see many copies of yourself, and the only society you know is the one made up of some sort of hierarchy where you are not allowed to have any feelings or even think. This is the world depicted in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The book was published in 1932, he was looking to provide people a picture of a future perfectionist society full of science and
“happiness”, but this vision somehow became the world we live in now. In the novel Brave New World, Huxley gives us a view of a society that can only achieve stability through fictional happiness. This is an example of a Utopian society that attempted to create a perfect society. At that time, changes in science were becoming frequent and Huxley noticed these changes. With the invention of the assembly line, the Ford Company allowed people to afford cars. Huxley was able to see where these advances in science were leading.
When a person thinks of a utopia he or she thinks of a place where everyone is happy, with no diseases, where anger and sadness do not exist. As the motto of this world says “Community,
Identity, Stability.” These three words hang in a sign over the Central London Hatchery and
Conditioning Centre, this creates and conditions new human life. These words are the slogan for this society. "Community" means that all persons must work together to maximize the greatest happiness for society as a whole, and it occurs through the artificially implanted ideas of
"Identity" that each person has. Regardless of the hierarchy they have, each person is supposed to be happy with their own identity. And "Stability" is the ultimate goal of society because only through stability can happiness be maintained and all unpleasant feelings and emotions be eradicated. We are living in a Brave New World society in the present days. In the novel, people were being cloned and their lives had been already planned even before their birth with the use of psychological technologies to control the future behavior. Conditioning, combined with prenatal treatment, created individuals without individuality: each one was programmed to behave the way the government wanted. The citizen’s mind was being manipulated basically through the use of drugs and propaganda. “The principle of sleep-teaching or hypnopaedia, had been discovered.” He critiques modern government institutions whose power and ideals has slowly inserted into the minds of ordinary people. They teaching the children with some kind of propaganda while they were sleeping, the will play a message that they wanted all those children to know for the rest of their lives. The book was written years ago, really far from our time, but the scary truth is that we are living in the same standards as the world idea of Huxley. Together with the media, our government manipulates us to do what they want. For example, those TV commercials of cell phones that tells us to buy smart phones because they are better and then year after year they come up with improvements that are not real and we buy them because we think they are going to be better but we are just being stupid consumers giving money to those big companies. The government approves this because by consumerism, we generate the need of more therefore, more production, more jobs and will better the economy.
This utopian society, had also its benefits. Their liberalism respecting relationship and sex, was not as bad because they had no compromises. the government taught them not to have serious relationships with other people. There were no family values, they encouraged to freely have sex with any person they wanted because sex would make them happy. We can see this, when Lenina tells Fanny that she’s been sleeping with the same guy during four months and
Fanny responds “It’s such a horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man… have somebody else from time to time, that’s all.” They do not condone exclusivity in a relationship, because that involved feelings of love and family and could lead to a disturbance on their social stability. We can totally mirror this in our present society. For example, few days ago a law gave underage girls the ability to purchase the morning after pill. This liberalism in sexuality is bad in the long run. This is allowing children to start their sexual life earlier, when thirteen year old kids are already having sex, there would be no exclusivity by the time they get married; there will be no family values within our society everything will be just about sex just as it was on the book.
But were not responsible for those actions because this was all they knew. They manipulated them since babies so they’ll grow up to be a part of their caste and to do what that caste was supposed to do and be happy with it, therefore be more productive in society.
Even though, this world was depicted as perfect and everyone seemed to be happy with their lame controlled lives, there were people that were really affecter with the ideals. For example, alpha Bernard Marx, he was a quiet guy that like to use soma (their cocaine-like drug) seemed to be in love with Lenina, he wanted something more than sex from her, but she was know pretty much as a slut, because probably half of the men in the conditioning center had slept with her and he is disgusted to hear the men in the elevator talk about Lenina as though she were meat. People in our society would look upon Brave New World; we would see it as a place of immoral behavior and obscenity. This could this possibly be because they were conditioned to all that and cannot realize it. They could just as easily be conditioned into thinking that only their thoughts are correct.
Everyone's goal in every culture is to reach a state of ultimate happiness. The society of
Brave New World is just the same, but they go in different way by manipulation on actions, feelings and reproduction. There’s no need to sacrifice personal desires for the greater good. I think that what will make us really happy is the ability to freely make decisions about our own behavior and life, rather than relying on our society standards and what the government wants us to do. As an individual, I enjoy making my own decisions about what I want to be and about my sentimental relationship. I think anyone would want to strive to reach their full potential when they have the opportunity and freely reach their maximum happiness.