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The Government’s Control in A Brave New World
A Brave New World is a seemingly prolific novel written by Aldous Huxley. The books starts off with a cloning center, which is where all people are created. All people are made to do a certain job. Their life is put into a predetermined slot into society. The amount of brain power the people have to use is limited, and breaks the people into castes. The people are to a point of not being mentally challenged for their job, and therefore making them contempt to stay doing what they do. The people of this world are given the information the government wants them to think in their sleep. They will keep to what they are taught to think unless something uncommon happens. Conditioning can only keep their mind to the government’s will if the people never run into anything contradicting to what they are taught to believe. Soma is a drug that keeps the people in a basic state of happiness. It is the back up people use when they are in a state of confusion. If anything comes along and does not go along with the beliefs that the population is taught, than they can just take soma and forget about it. Conditioning, cloning, and soma are some of the biggest forms of control the government uses to keep the population under their reign.
Conditioning is a very complex idea consistently mentioned throughout the book. Conditioning is consistently used to keep the population thinking what the government wants to think. The government controls the person after being cloned until they are at an age in which they can fulfill the job they were made to do. The masses of people are indoctrinated, and since the usage of books is limited to the higher castes of society (Alphas and Betas), so there is ...
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... controlled happiness for some, and a place of great sorrow and misery for others.
This world of dystopia is not far away from the society of today, because it is in human nature (Kass 1). The world is evolving into the world depicted by Huxley in Brave New World. The “‘conditioning aims at making people like their inescapable social destiny’” (Huxley 17). The government first started with the taking away of freedom from the people in the world. Although we are not at a point where even our social class and jobs are determined by the government, the elements are shown throughout society today. The ideas Huxley took on the future of Earth are slowly becoming a reality today. The advancements in cloning, the conditioning in advertizing, and the drug abuse of today are some of the ways that Huxley’s dystopia could happen today (Macdonald 1-2).
Works Cited
As analyzed by social critic Neil Postman, Huxley's vision of the future, portrayed in the novel Brave New World, holds far more relevance to present day society than that of Orwell's classic 1984. Huxley's vision was simple: it was a vision of a trivial society, drowned in a sea of pleasure and ignorant of knowledge and pain, slightly resembling the world of today. In society today, knowledge is no longer appreciated as it has been in past cultures, in turn causing a deficiency in intelligence and will to learn. Also, as envisioned by Huxley, mind altering substances are becoming of greater availability and distribution as technology advances. These drugs allow society to escape from the problems of life instead of dealing with reality. With divorce rates higher than ever in the past few decades, it has become evident that lust has ruined the society's sexual covenants. People are indulging in their sexual motives; lust runs rampant, thus strong, long-lasting relationships are becoming a rarity.
According to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World both predicted that society would eventually be governed by a global totalitarian system; however, the key difference between both their predictions is the method by which society’s cognizance would be undermined. Orwell claimed that contemporary society would be controlled by overt modes of policing and supervising the social hierarchy, whereas Huxley stated that society’s infatuation with entertainment and superficial pleasure alone would be enough for the government to have absolute control over the public. Unfortunately, today’s society is not an Animal Farm. All jokes aside, Postman’s assertion of Huxley’s theory, “what
Examining Aldous Huxley’s View on Government Control “Science and technology provide the means for controlling the lives of citizens” (Brave). This quote describes a major and ever-growing problem in the basic, daily lives of society now, and has been since the mid-twentieth century. With technology, medicine, and general knowledge evolving so rapidly, it is hard to find a constant code by which governments can carry out their purpose of regulating societies. In some cases, organization is taken to an extreme level that chokes out creativity and individuality while replacing it with codes and stern punishments (Huxley). On the other end of the spectrum, liberalism can flourish in an atmosphere of prosperity and freedom, but not for very long (Huxley).
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley is a novel about a hidden dystopian society. Huxley describes a perfect dystopia where scientist breed people to be in a certain social class. This is accomplished through conditioning. There are many similarities in today's society that collide with the society in Brave New World. The society of the World State is similar to today’s society in these ways. First, technologies prevent us to think or feel real emotion, second the truth is hidden from us. Finally, objects and people distract us from real life.
This book can be a warning to humanity, telling society that brainwashing can become common and destroy the modern day world. This book makes the people of the modern day world think about what could happen in the near future if society decides to go farther and more into scientific research. Misuses in science could contribute to the making of man into an animal, not a smart, adapted, emotional connected human being. In “Brave New World,” Huxley creates a world that is complete and utterly disturbing to what humanity could become. The people in the World State are controlled through psychological conditioning on a ground breaking scale.
The novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley first published in 1932, presents a very bleak out look of what future society will be like. The novel presents a future of where almost total conformity is a carefully guarded aspect of society. Even before one is "decanted" they are conditioned to fill a specific roll and to act a certain way.
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society. Through actual visualization of this Utopian society, the reader is able to see how this state affects Huxley’s characters. Throughout the book, the author deals with many different aspects of control. Whether it is of his subjects’ feelings and emotions or of the society’s restraint of population growth, Huxley depicts government’s and science’s role in the brave new world of tomorrow.
Conditioning the citizens to like what they have and reject what they do not have is an authoritative government's ideal way of maximizing efficiency. The citizens will consume what they are told to, there will be no brawls or disagreements and the state will retain high profits from the earnings. People can be conditioned chemically and physically prior to birth and psychologically afterwards.
In Huxley’s, Brave New World, there is a society, known as the World State, where people are divided into different castes, and depending on the caste they are set in determines their place in the community and purpose in the world. If one is an Alpha, he/she will be highly intelligent and be a leader of the free world, while one who is an Epsilon has lowered intelligence and is conditioned to do physical labor. From the process of the human beings being created in test tubes, to their birth and development, they are trained to believe in certain truths. Brave New World is a Utopian novel that uses a form of brainwashing to conform people to the ideal society placed in the plot. Other literature works, and real life occurrences, make it evident that brainwashing is used to condition to believe and behave I certain ways, which become their morals and truths.
Within the first couple of chapters alone, Huxley describes the conditioning process and the abilities to manipulate the thinking, feeling, acting, and genetic makeup of all processed children within the World State, as well as expresses the ironic nature behind the World State’s motto: “Community, Identity, Stability” (Huxley 3). The emphasis behind the motto connects to the overarching idea of the importance of the group and the unimportance of the individuals; furthermore, the motto screams the inference of freedom, but contrasts due to the lack of community as a whole, lack of individuality, and lack of stability in one’s self. The continuity within the perpetual “lacks of” grasps hold of not just the World State, but America. Government holds restrictions on what classes students can take in schools, what lunches they are served, etc., connecting to the control within the World State as it determines the thought processes and education given to every child. The conditioning of the children and the lack of choice in present day society within education systems creates a lack of understanding within the idea of freedom and what it truly means to be
Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading Brave New World elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. Huxley's novel presents a startling view of the future which on the surface appears almost comical. His intent, however, is not humor. Huxley's message is dark and depressing. His idea that in centuries to come, a one-world government will rise to power, stripping people's freedom, is not a new idea. What makes Huxley's interpretation different is the fact that his fictional society not only lives in a totalitarian government, but takes an embracive approach like mindless robots. For example, Soma, not nuclear bombs, is the weapon of choice for the World Controllers in Brave New World. The world leaders have realized that fear and intimidation have only limited power; these tactics simply build up resentment in the minds of the oppressed. Subconscious persuasion and mind-altering drugs, on the other hand, appear to have no side effects.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, portrays a future society where people are no longer individuals but are controlled by the World State. The World State dominates the people by creating citizens that are content with who they are. Brave New World describes how the science of biology and psychology are manipulated so that the government can develop technologies to change the way humans think and act. The World State designs humans from conception for this society. Once the humans are within the society the state ensures all people remain happy. They program these humans to have needs and desires that will sustain a lucrative economy while not thinking of themselves as an individual. Huxley describes the Worlds State’s intent to control their society through medical intervention, happiness, and consumerism which has similarities to modern society.
In 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote a thrilling dystopia titled Brave New World. Centered on a man struggling in a world where emotions have been forsaken for peace and stability of the entire community, the novel has a shock factor that is quite electric. Though it was popular in the 1950’s with college students because of its portrayal of gender, the true merit of Huxley’s work can be found in its predictions for the future. The practices in the novel are alarmingly similar to many aspects of today’s society. The approval of drug use to induce happiness, the constant effort to make life better through technology and the everlasting trust in the government are all characteristics shared by our society and that found in Brave New World.
In today’s society a person is shaped by family, friends, and past events, but in Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, Brave New World, there is no such thing as family, history and “true” friends. The government controls every aspect of an individual from their creation in the hatcheries to their conditioning for their thoughts and careers. In this brave new world the ideas of stability and community reign supreme, and the concept of individualism is foreign and suppressed, “Everyone belongs to everyone else, after all,” (47). Huxley perverses contemporary morals and concepts in Brave New World, thus distorting the ideas of materialistic pleasures, savagery versus society, and human relationships. These distortions contribute to the effectiveness of Brave New World, consequently creating a novel that leaves the reader questioning how and why.
According to events from the past, history today has repeated itself due to the sustained and increasingly high levels of drug and alcohol use as well as the popularity of casual sex displayed on media platforms. Huxley’s idea of the “utopian” society is manufactured, just as it is being artificially created today; in the modern world, euphemisms are frequently used to cover up the real truths. Similarly, the “brave new world” hid