Mccarthyism In Brave New World

The first similarity between the brave new world’s society and today’s society is that there is a way to create false happiness by removing pain and sorrow. In Brave New World, Huxley created a pill called soma that makes everyone happy all the time. In today’s society, everyone has a way to cope with pain and sorrow, for instance some people use technology, or consume drugs or alcohol to create false happiness. These coping mechanisms are similar to soma because they take the pain and sorrow away and allow the person to be happy for a short period of time. Soma is a more permanent solution to eliminating unhappiness, which is just a little more advanced than drugs, alcohol and technology. Mustapha Mond describes soma to John by saying, “‘And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts’” (Huxley).

This is similar in today’s society because nowadays when people are unhappy, they just go on their cell phones, or watch television, or consume drugs and alcohol to forget about what is making them unhappy.

Also, in Brave New World, Huxley compares soma to art when John is asking Mustapha Mond as to why there is no art or anything to make people actually happy, just soma to make them fake happy, Mond says “‘that’s the price we have to pay for stability’” (Huxley 226). Mond is saying that in order to be stable everyone needs to be happy all the time and the only way to make them happy all the time is with soma, not art of books or anything else. Huxley created soma to force us to compare it to our everyday coping mechanisms for pain and suffering. By realizing how similar soma is to technology or drugs or alcohol, we are being cautioned by

Huxley.
Another way Huxley cautions today’s society is by comparing how the two societies condition the young. In Brave New World, the children are conditioned through hypnopeadia and shock therapy. Hypnopeadia is the use of a tape recorder suggesting how each child should act while they are sleeping. These suggestions are repeated over and over again until they are ingrained in the child’s mind. The director explains the conditioning by saying, “‘Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions! […] Suggestions from the State!’” Another way in Brave New World, children are conditioned by shock therapy. Books and flowers are put in front of babies and then when the children play with the books and flowers the director says, “now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock’” (Huxley 20). The director shocks the babies because they are not supposed to like books or flowers because they are Delta’s, one of the lower castes. In today’s society, like in the brave new world society, children are conditioned. But instead of hypnopeadia and shock therapy, children are conditioned by socialization, which is a process for children to adopt the norms and ideology of society. Children today are socialized by agents of socialization. Family, school, peers, and media are all agents of socialization. All of these agents of socialization condition children to behave and think a certain way. For instance, in school today’s children are conditioned to raise their hand when they have a question. In today’s society, hypnopeadia and shock therapy are thought of as extreme measures to condition children, but Huxley does this on purpose to warn today’s society to be cautious on how we further condition children with schools and other agents of socialization.