Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates a perfect society: “community, identity, stability” (Huxley 7). This superb environment, however, is only achieved through the dehumanization of each individual. The world is run by world-controllers, a powerful oligarchy, whom have successfully brainwashed, or conditioned, children for the sole purpose of controlling their minds (Biderman 549). In result, individuals have lost their ability to think and act for themselves. Children are stripped of human rights, even before conditioning, by being a product of governmental test tube reproduction. They are artificially produced and only made with the consent of the world-controllers. Not only are they produced by the government, but they are produced in scores of embryos that are all identical for a sole purpose. Their lives are then controlled by the government to ensure happiness and success. Each citizen has their own little job in the social system and during afterhours, is told to be adventurous, dangerous, and promiscuous. It all sounds like a magical fairy-land, until suicide becomes the only option to escape dehumanization. The process of dehumanization starts when life itself beings. The process of sexual reproduction is reduced to a mere act of test tube fertilization, “but a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, [and] will divide” into scores of embryos (Huxley 6). This allows for the government to create and maintain the population of a society it wants, while still encouraging people to be promiscuous. Meaning, the government can produce a product it needs for a specific function and still allow for people to feel pleasure. Bokanovski allows the government to produce “ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six i... ... middle of paper ... ...rough dehumanizing each individual by stripping away their natural rights of life, liberty, and property, but then it is only a false utopia, because people are no longer people without those rights (Locke 5-6). So ask yourself, is a perfect society worth losing your natural rights? Works Cited Biderman, Albert D. "The Image of "Brainwashing"." Oxford Journals (1962): 547-563. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York City: Perennial Classics, 1998. Locke, John. "Second Treatise, Of Civil Government." Woll, Peter. American Government Readings and Cases 16th Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. 5-6. Morgan, S.Philip, Suzanne Shanahan and Whitney Welsh. "Brave New World: Philosophy, Politics, and Science in Human Biotechnology." Population Council (2005): 127-144. Rogers, Winfield H. "Aldous Huxley's Humanism." The Johns Hopkins University Press (1935): 262-272.

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