Modern Society In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Modern Society is Copying a Fictional One “A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.” says David Harsanyi. As time goes by, everyday habits are altered to match current events and society. Neil Postman makes a point in Amusing Ourselves to Death by stating that modern society is becoming like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and not like George Orwell’s 1984. Postman includes many factors in his argument like the different forms of entertainment, control, and the concealment of truth and information. The society in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is controlled by pleasure, egoism, and the irrelevance of truth. Neil Postman is correct, modern society is becoming
In the fictional society, soma is prescribed to almost every single person. On Lenina and Bernards’ date, they had to meet the Warden and “when the Warden started booming, she [Lenina] had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden's face in an expression of rapt attention" (Huxley 47). Lenina had consciously taken a dose of soma because she had recognized that she was going to be bored and then concluded that the answer to her problem was to take drugs. The citizens had been conditioned to make these type of decisions. Like in Brave New World, modern society prescribes drugs to make the lives of the elderly easier to live. In reality, “antipsychotic drugs are overprescribed for older men and women with dementia”, reports the U.S Government Accountability Office in a Week article. In the same article, Time notes that “the use of antipsychotic drugs may increase the risk of death for dementia patients”. This implies that doctors and care takers are over prescribing drugs to the elderly to have more control over them so they are easier to manage. In Brave New World, the citizens are also given drugs that make their lives better, in a sense, but shorten their life span. In modern society, drugs, that are prescribed to a large group of people, may
In Brave New World, Bernard and Lenina go to an Indian Reservation. The Warden mentions that anyone who is born in the Reservation is destined to die there (Huxley 48). As they arrive to their rest-house via plane, the pilot assuringly says to Lenina that the savages of the Reservation, the Natives, are tame and that they will do no harm. The pilot adds in that “they’ve got enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks” (Huxley 50). The Natives are often described and mentioned as savages. They are thought to be an uncivilized, barbaric, and vicious population. In Huxley’s fictional society, the savages are tamed through constant violence until they ‘learn’ to do as the ‘civilized’ people tell them to do. Like in Brave New World, modern society abuses Native Americans. The New York Times wrote that “American Indians are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by the police”. The New York Times also wrote that “adolescent [Native] women have suicide rates four times the rate of white women in the same age group”. American Indians are not being treated as equals. The fact that Natives are more likely to be killed by the police, who are supposed to protect, is outrageous. Their race is being targeted or it is not given enough attention. Both societies wound the lives of American Indians, which is not acceptable in any way. Hate towards a race has become one of many normal