Huxley's Brave New World: An Oppressive Dystopia Without Individuality

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: An Oppressive Dystopia Without Individuality

Utopian civilizations have long since filled the minds of writers as ways to point out the moral wrongs of an actual society. Beautiful and perfect places shine where the world today is covered with grime in order to highlight their differences. Opposite of a utopia is a dystopia; where there is essentially the same idea, but seen in the negative view. Dystopia serves as a warning, showing the dysfunction of a society if certain modern aspects of the real world were to be taken and evolved past ethical bounds. Often this is shown through advances in technology, such is the focus of Aldous Huxley, because of how humanity has reached a seemingly never ending technologically

Instead, workers were forced to take whatever jobs were available,” (Napierkowski and Stanley). Desperate people were forced into severe conditions where the pay was not enough to make up for the harsh, long, and mind numbing work. This aspect of his background explains why Huxley wrote his workforce to be altered from even before birth, to show all the dehumanization a person would have to go through in order to “enjoy” their jobs. Unskilled laborers were given “‘less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.’… ‘The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’ The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters,” (Huxley). Brave New World took the oppressive working conditions of Huxley’s time and continued the ideas of how workers must schedule their lives around the job they are “lucky” to have in order to have one at all. Workers begin training in a test tube, being conditioned in ways work house owners wished they could put their employees through. With no job security, safe working conditions, time off, and virtually no pay, the citizens of Huxley’s real world were much too close to becoming the machines that were already replacing them. Hence the eradication of individuality in Brave New World’s workers, Huxley took his surroundings and amplified them until they became an eerie combination of laughable and realistic. Workers in Brave New World worked alongside machines performing the same task test tube after test