Brave New World Essay Ap Psychology

Nadine Zahreddine

AP Psychology

Brave New World Essay

10/6/15

In Brave New World, in order to form a utopian society the people must achieve their prime goals of “Community, Identity, Stability.” Community was achieved by encouraging people to live in solidarity. Identity was achieved by dividing the society into different castes and teaching them to conform; those who felt more than a minimum of individuality would be considered outcasts. Finally, the desire for stability: to achieve this, there must be a loss of individuality and the undoing of Mother Nature- minimizing risk and change. By successfully engineering these particular conditions, it produces a world where people finally live their “happily ever after,” however at a great

cost. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, was constructed to show readers that even the most “perfect” society is in fact a dystopia; Huxley did this by referencing different psychological elements, as well as, moral implications to prove that a society can never become a utopia because of human nature.
The key ingredients in the novel are the absence of individuality and emotion.

Emotions are personal, intimate feelings that influence us to act on our beliefs or dreams. They persuade us to become better people and to grow, learn, and love. For this reason the government in Brave New World discourages these intensified characteristics. They believe that happiness creates control and stability. They try their best to eliminate all painful emotions, meaning all passion is gone.

Once individuality and emotion were completely eliminated, dehumanization enters as personal expression. Individual expression was never important because the people don’t have the ability to express their emotions. “But that’s the price you have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art" the leaders would say (Huxley, 189). The only way the people in Brave New World see the purpose of life is through maintenance of well

being.
Brave New World emphasizes on the ideas that were dominant and fresh in the early twentieth century. One idea was Psychoanalysis, publicized by Dr. Sigmund Freud. Huxley used various elements of the approach on the characters and plot. He presents a dystopia where scientific and psychological techniques are used to control the people from their impression of death. Freud divided the personality into the id, the ego and super-ego. The id is home to animal urges like hunger or sexual desire. The first aspect of personality in developing babies is the id; they are always demanding their impulses to be satisfied immediately. The ego develops next and it attempts to control the impulses, however, only in ways that are “socially acceptable”. In the novel, there are no restrictions on the gratification of sexual desires. In fact children are encouraged to participate in “erotic play”, "We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. ‘But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness’" (Huxley, 22). The super-ego is internalized moral values of society and the child’s parents. However, because there are no parents in Brave New World, values must be required through sleep teaching and classical conditioning.
Another psychological reference found in the novel was classical conditioning. The director leads a group of students to the Nurseries: the Infant Nurseries Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms. As the students observe a group of eight-month- old babies, the babies are presented with books and flowers. As they cheerfully crawl towards the books and flowers, a shrill alarm rings. This causes the babies to suffer a mild electric shock. Once the babies are given books and flowers for a second time they cry with terror and try to get away causing them to grow with “an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers” (Huxley, 17). This situation relates exactly to John B. Watson’s experiment on Little Albert. The reason this classical conditioning was featured in the book was because a hatred of books was ingrained in the minds of the lower castes. They believed that reading books would “decondition” them.
Believe it or not there were many interesting comparisons between our society and the Brave New World society.

A few examples include hypnopaedia, tyranny of happiness, drugging the commonality, and fashion for euthanasia. In Brave New World, hypnopaedia was used to brainwash the people to accept promiscuity and use and abuse Soma. It’s a form of subliminal reinforcement where slogans were played while an individual slept. Once awake the individuals would behave exactly the way their controllers wanted them to behave. Today in our society, we are blasted with information on TV and social media that make us wonder if what we hear is true or false. Not everything we hear is true, but sometimes we are brainwashed by these falsifications to think a certain

way.
Another comparison is drugging the commonality. In the novel, drugs are encouraged: “and do remember that a gramme is better than a damn” (Huxley, 45). The drug soma, a hallucinogen is known as the “perfect drug”. It’s a psychoactive drug that creates a feeling of calms and annihilates the negative feelings. In our modern society, antidepressants and alcohol are used in similar ways. Just like in Brave New World, we prefer to restrain “malice and bad tempers” with drugs and alcohol then try to seek help for our emotions.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley uses different techniques to emphasize a society that thrives for a utopia, but doesn’t succeed. In fact, their society is the opposite: a dystopia. Throughout the novel we notice the different theories of psychology that create this world. However, this seemingly “perfect” world only deprives individuality and is only focused on the “norm”. Although they may think they created a utopian society, they only weakened it.