Remnants of Hope in Zamyatin’s We and Huxley's Brave New World

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Humanity, despite Huxley and Zamyatin illustrating two different types of dystopia where servitude is commonplace, manages to hold on to the remnants of hope which can be found in numerous (and sometimes unexpected) places.

Soma, described by Mustapha Mond as ‘euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant’, is a drug that took ‘six years [sic] [to be] produced commercially’. It offers the conditioned society hope by giving them a way to always be happy; ‘a gramme of soma’ can cure anything in their eyes, apart from a ‘glum Marx’ . However, in all actuality it doesn’t offer hope but rather gives the illusion of hope. Instead, it controls the population, enslaving them with happiness. In chapter seven, Lenina ‘[feels] in her pocket for her soma – only to discover that, by unprecedented oversight, she had left the bottle down at the rest-house’ . This horrifies her as she has to ‘face the horrors of Malpais unaided’ as well as exemplifying how reliant they are on soma, which draws parallels to a modern society. Even if doctors don’t always prescribe us a variety of mood altering pharmaceutical drugs to tranquilise and sedate us, many people choose to seek them out illegally. Contra to Marx who said the ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’ , soma is the religion of the people. It is much like how we can become the slave of technology – it can be our master, as it has lost its human purposes. It is now used to restrict human conduct and human choice quite significantly. Mond mentions how soma is like‘Christianity without the tears’ , which goes on to solidify how religion and soma function in the same way – they both giv...

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...inated to be a utopia. It is impossible to remove all the rebels against a system, ‘there is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite’.

To conclude, both We and Brave New World contain glimmers of hope, but in the latter novel, I feel as though Huxley offers no hope that society can be altered. Brave New World, in my opinion, was written as a warning to the world to change course or less turn into the dystopia depicted in the book and judging by society in places like Russia, we are not short of a worldwide dictatorship. We, however, ends ambiguously with One State’s future unclear. This could be taken to be hopeful as birds are repopulating the city and people start to commit acts of social rebellion, breaking the chains of One State’s oppression.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.

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