Social Commentary On Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Brave New World In many ways, today's society reflects the society Aldous Huxley wrote about in his novel Brave New World. Huxley predicted excessive drug usage to make the citizens happy, people deciding to buy new products instead of fixing old ones, sex not being treated as a sacred thing like it has been in the past, and many other very accurate predictions for our future. During the time that Huxley was writing this novel, the world was already starting to head in the direction that brought us here. This was a social commentary for his time and it’s still sadly relevant for our time now. We should have taken the warnings from the novel and changed paths before it was too late. Not that we are actually currently living in their society, but we are heading there. We can still avoid making this our reality.

One statistic I found said that 45% of seventeen-year-olds read by choice only once or twice a year. That percentage is declining every year. In the future, I’m worried that we won’t have anyone who actually wants to read books anymore. In the novel this is a goal, at one point the D.H.C. proudly says “They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.” (35) like reading is dangerous. Although, in the book the people are trained into not liking books from an early age by getting shocked when they come into contact with a book. “Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks- already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked.”