George Orwell Brave New World Analysis

Countless people pursue perfection as their ultimate goal, thereforeso it makes sense that attempting to create a perfect society has been a common goal for centuries. Unfortunately, everyone’s view of perfection is different, making this ultimate goal not only unobtainable but also problematic. At first glance, the novels Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Animal Farm by George Orwell seems simply to be about yet another noble pursuit of perfection, but underneath the surface, both novels demonstrate the perils of striving towards the perfect society at the cost of individual liberty.

In order to overshadow any possible criticisms to their particular view of perfection, characters in both novels continuously trash and condemn any previous societies and practices. In Animal Farm, whenever any characters question

new methods they are met with the response, “Surely, comrades, you don’t want Jones back?” (Orwell 21) The connotation of this response is that the old society was much worse and that if they weren’t agreeable they may have to revert to the old society. The pigs, who emerge as the leaders of the revolution, also convince the other animals that man is the source of all their problems and that any society without man is a better society. The sheep’s constant bleating of “two legs good, four legs bad” (19) serves as a reminder of this concept. In Brave New World, the characters view the past practice of having mothers and fathers as horrifying and disgusting “The world was full of fathers—was therefore full of misery; full of mothers—therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts—full of madness and suicide.” (Huxley 39) Similarly, the previous natural practice of giving birth and raising children is discarded “For in nature it takes thirty years for two-hundred eggs to reach maturity... But our business is to stabilize the population at the moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century—what would be the use of that?” (8) In both cases, the characters are encouraged by the authorities to despise the past and embrace a technologically enhanced future in order to justify polygamy and new ways of creating babies in test tubes.
Throughout both novels, characters point out the often false superiority of their new society in order to convince themselves and those around them that their actions have been justified. In Animal Farm, Squealer presents supposed facts and reports that show how much more successful their new society is, “Reading out in a shrill, rapid voice, he proved to them in detail that they had more oats, more hay, more turnips than they had in Jones’s day, that they worked shorter hours, that their drinking water was of better quality, that they lived longer, that a larger proportion of their young ones survived infancy, and that they had more straw in their stalls and suffered less from fleas.” (Orwell 36). When the animals felt that they were working just as hard as they had in the previous society, there were more facts and propaganda to dissuade such thoughts such as “On Sunday Mornings, Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred percent, three hundred percent, or five hundred percent, as the case may be.” (31) In Brave New World, the characters, particularly the authorities, explain most citizens’ lack of knowledge and intellectual freedom with the view that too much knowledge leads to unhappiness “For of course some general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible.” (Huxley 4) According to the authorities in Brave New World, individual identity leads to instability and chaos, and thus their mass produced society is better “‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.’” (7)
Unfortunately, in both books, despite all the attempts at perfection, there are still major downfalls in the new society.

In Animal Farm, the ultimate goal of what they called animalism was originally equality, yet eventually a hierarchy appears and eventually is justified “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” (Orwell 43) The hierarchy becomes so extreme that the pigs who have emerged as the top of the new social class of supposed equality are indistinguishable from the previous society’s rulers, the humans whom they had overthrown “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” (45) One of the major downfalls in Brave New World is how completely determined each person’s life is by technology. For instance, a person’s life can be easily altered or ended because of a mistake made while they were developing in a test tube “Twenty-two years, eight months, four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis—the first case in over half a century.” (Huxley

187)
Almost everyone strives for some form of perfection. The pursuit of perfection isn’t the problem. As Animal Farm and Brave New World demonstrate, the problem is when people attempt to force their individual views of perfection on the rest of society and resort to taking away rights, lying, and promoting false propaganda and violence in order to achieve this supposed perfection.