self-efficacy, between unquestionable authority and autonomy. To be incorrect or ill-informed is to be human, to be negligent and ignorant is to be something entirely different. In the future Huxley has envisioned, the civilized population is free from worries in any form through annihilation of unwanted stimuli. This includes parents. To avoid the stress of parent-offspring relationship, parenthood is taken out of the picture completely through the advances in biochemistry and test tube babies. Humans are mass produced as a product and shipped out as workers or raised as the traditional child. The term tradition only goes so far however. The children are raised and taught behaviors that, in the past (our time), were discouraged. This being said, those ideas and teachings are becoming more and more excepted and almost expected of young children of this day and time (only not quite to the extent as in the New World). Furthermore, autonomy and self-direction will become not only frowned upon, but also virtually unthought-of. Today in the year of 2014, the idea of thinking for one’s self has become purely thinking about self-needs and ignoring the needs of others. I’ll get mine and you go and get yours is a common assumption when it comes to achievement and motivation. In order to understand the idea of free will, one must understand the idea of motivation. This is one of the very concepts the government of the New World has manipulated in order to maintain stability. Motivation is “the process of starting, directing, and maintaining physical and psychological activities; includes mechanisms involved in preferences for one activity over another and the vigor and persistence of responses” (Gerrig 298). The essence of motivation, in turn with the need for achievement, is the sole representation of what gets a person out of bed in the morning (Gerrig 316). The need for achievement is relatively low, although the incentive of soma keeps the working class motivated. Through the use of pharmaceuticals (soma), the government maintains the illusion of motivation and need for achievement. Without drugs, those illusions would be entirely absent.
The present day use of drugs to maintain certain illusions (perhaps not on such a massive scale as in the New World) is apparent in the writings of Sasha McInnes (162).
She notes, “Corporations and their marketing strategies are increasingly global,” McInnes goes on to visit some of the questionnaire advertisements that lure people into the legal world of drugs. “Lonely? Sad? Worried? In grief? Too happy? Do you FEEL?” (McInnes 162). Her own sarcasms are apparent towards the end of this quote as she addresses the folly of human endeavor and their need to, as in the New World, annihilate unwanted stimuli. Instead of learning and advancing, we take to the quick fix in order to meet demands and skip over hard work because who needs that right? “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and longsuffering” (Huxley 237-238). Once something is done, it takes quite a bit of undoing, as McInnes explains later in her article as she writes, “Re-emerging from the deadly fog of psychiatric drugs was a slow process” (McInnes 163). With this information, it burdens me to think that the amount of people in the world with the desire to change, to make a difference, to be the voice of change is quite small and quite silent. In today’s society, the new part of the New World is already …show more content…
beginning to show in everything we do straight down to the way people carry themselves around with such pride for doing something so simple.
To continue down the path of the search for stability and the way that it includes itself in our day to day, the separation of Alphas and Deltas is (in a metaphorical sense of course) and has been showing for hundreds of years now. I am referring to racism and bigotry. In the New World, the Alphas represent the upper class, the majority, the social norms; and they own everything that comes with that. As the genetic differential course continues down the line, the discrimination becomes more and more apparent. The Deltas are treated as being lower than dirt. They are the simplest people, to be yelled at and pushed around until a desired result is shown; no respect shall be paid to them in return. Again, to show the false sense of stability, each category of person (if one can call them such a thing) undergoes repetitious stages and elements of Pavlovian conditioning and sleep hypnopadia. This includes, for the Alphas, the understanding that they are the highest on the social pyramid and hold the most responsibility while the Deltas are given the understanding and discipline (including electric shock) that ensures they will believe that they are nothing, nothing at all, and that their only purpose is to serve. They will never aspire to be anything more than the simplest of society. Deltas are even trained to not only hate, but also fear beauty and knowledge (electric shock [Pavlovian conditioning]) in a way that prevents the desire to rise in the social triangle that we today climb in hopes of success. The groups in between, Betas and Kappas, are conditioned to maintain their place whether it be the lower or the upper half by listening to statements entreating them to their place (sleep hypnopadia). Their place is the best, not too hard, not to inferior, it is just right. Are we just right? Do we already live in the “sterile Brave New World environment” (Morgan/Shanahan/Welsh 131)? There are some people that are beaten down by life and are sucked into the undermining belief that they are fine, nothing is too difficult, too easy, it is just right. To say that everyone is equal in the eyes of their creator is accurate; everyone is entitled to the aspiration of the American Dream, the idea that anything is possible and that the circumstances any one particular person may have are open to change. However, not every person will aspire to take action against oppression and claim liberty. The last people to do that were the Founding Fathers. They would not all have been classified as Alphas, however they aspired to be more and reached out from the chains of society and rose as they challenged the social norms, waging war against oppression.
The words stability and war do not appear side by side in a sentence excluding possible sites of accident.
The world will always have war; therefore stability is a statistical impossibility. It is human nature to unintentionally pursue the seven deadly sins as sited by John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost. The seven deadly sins are as follows: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. The human race has eaten off the tree of knowledge in the hopes of Satan’s promise, “your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Milton Book VII). In the New World where man makes men and Henry Ford has taken the place of God, Mankind is dead except in the reservations where the uncivilized savages, naturally born people, reside. According to Leon Kass, a bioethicist with degrees in both biochemistry and medicine, “the nightmare of contentment presented in the novel results from tampering with nature . . . ‘creating and manipulating life in the laboratory is the gateway to a Brave New World, not only in fiction but also in fact’” (Morgan/Shanahan/Welsh 131). Because of “tampering with nature,” natural law is therefore unreliable and holds no ground in debate. Some may think this as good and that it indicates real stability because of the impossible becoming possible through enlightenment and the elimination of natural law. Be that as it may, as stated previously, stability is only a mere illusion presented through pharmaceuticals and the pursuit
of shallow happiness in the New World and therefore holds no truth or ground either in the form of debate. Stability is an ideal. A synonym for ideal is perfect. Perfection is impossible to achieve; the word is only used as an exaggeration of the truth. If the New World’s main goal is to gain stability, they will never reach their goal because it is impossible. Their government will always have to go just so much farther. By the time they finally do stretch that extra mile, they will find that their goal has been moved and that they have missed the mark once again. It is apparent by the end of the novel that the world is far from perfect. To say that there is no war in the New World is inaccurate in the sense that, although a war is not waging externally, internally a war is waging in every human. The war is over the use of emotion; the fight to keep down each person’s feelings is wearing on the soles of each individual as they strive to keep emotions out of sight for fear of being out of touch with social norms. A world without emotion is not secure; it is unstable and on the verge of exploding due to deleterious regulations pressed by civilization. The search for an ultimate ideal leads to want and coveting. This combined with the elimination of obstacles will lead to a decline in knowledge and the world’s ultimate annihilation.