BNW Topic 2
TOTALLY NOT MLA FORMATTED! DON’T COMPLAIN! -_- Im watching you!
The 20th Century brought about a great many scientific breakthroughs and a furthering of knowledge and how science interacted with the average every day person. Yet the promise of such advancements can be skewed to extremes. A good many novels were written to caution the next few generations against such atrocious acts. These warnings set forth by Aldous Huxley are clear: be weary of social conditioning, genetic conditioning and control through a set of ideals set forth by a world state. By looking at the novel, Brave New World, one can see how the novel can be considered a cautionary tale, and how some of these ideas are present today.
The novel, Brave New World,
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When the safety and upbringing of the world is left alone to an ever so powerful world state some things that have been an erroneous taboo are suddenly accepted as norm within the regards of children. Another horrendous act that the world state has set in motion to help the children is the sleep teaching or social conditioning. During children’s sleep the children are played many a numerous of sayings that the world state wants them to believe. The two problematic treatments of children can lead to the control factor that the world state wishes to achieve. The factor of subconscious item conditioning and hypnopaedic teaching lead to the evident conclusion that the idea of a world state absolute control cannot be trusted and is questionably spotty at …show more content…
The effects include not only the lack of individual thought but also the lack of any notable ambition and or any sense of natural exploration of the world they live in. For example when presented with individual opinions, Lennia is horrified and instantly switches into close minded thought. When one acts as an individual they are considered a threat and are henceforth given a warning and ultimatum. This ultimatum is either go live in isolation, or become a cog in the system for the greater good. This type of world stifles individualism and ambition, which in turn leads to the normalization of anything commanded for the greater good of the controlling power. These sort of actions are what some regimes have used in the world to control their citizens. This has happened a few times throughout the 20th century. Examples of this include the Germans in the 1940’s and the Russians in the cold war. The methods used throughout the novel indicate that the more one becomes reliant on a central power, the more they give up their right to be an individual and consist of only in the moment thought. A quote from a literary analysis by Sloboda Noel provides a clear and evident warning about world states, “By preventing people from reflecting upon their lives-and from dreaming- the World state keeps people rooted in the moment” (Sloboda
BNW Literary Lens Essay- Marxist Since the primitive civilizations of Mesopotamia and the classical kingdoms of Greece and Rome, people have always been divided. Up to the status quo, society has naturally categorized people into various ranks and statuses. With the Marxist literary lens, readers can explore this social phenomenon by analyzing depictions of class structure in literature. In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, readers are introduced to a dystopian society with a distinctive caste system.
Social stability can be the cause of problems. After reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, we are informed that “Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!” Now is it worth it? Is it worth the sacrifice? Questions like those are addressed throughout the book. Huxley wants to warn us of many things, for example the birth control pill, the way that we can colon ourselves and many other things. He wanted us to know that many of the experiments that they do to the caste in Brave New World, we were later going to do investigate more ourselves or start doing them to others. We have all, at a point; come to a point to the question where we ask ourselves “is it worth it? Is it worth the sacrifice?”
The totalitarian society took away children from their parents to brainwash them. They completely changed how the children thought. They made the children think of themselves as everybody else and that everybody that exists is one whole person and that being different from everyone else is extremely bad. The children were trained to use the word “we” in terms of themselves and they never taught the words “me”, “I”, or “my”, they were known as the unknown forbidden words that some thought about but couldn’t find. The children were even taught a creed which declared that the individual is nothing when compared to the group....
...en. The society is facing a challenge of whether or not the world should stop mental control or keep it going with the worry that it may take over the world one day. More realistically though, it could turn man into a community of people who is controlled by the government and does not have any emotions and can not figure out anything for themselves.. If the world misuses psychological conditioning enough, it will be a threat to humanity and that is not something that people of this world should think of as something good, because it could potentially ruin all of mankind together.
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society. Through actual visualization of this Utopian society, the reader is able to see how this state affects Huxley’s characters. Throughout the book, the author deals with many different aspects of control. Whether it is of his subjects’ feelings and emotions or of the society’s restraint of population growth, Huxley depicts government’s and science’s role in the brave new world of tomorrow.
There were quite a few changes made from Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World to turn it into a “made for TV” movie. The first major change most people noticed was Bernard Marx’s attitude. In the book he was very shy and timid toward the opposite sex, he was also very cynical about their utopian lifestyle. In the movie Bernard was a regular Casanova. He had no shyness towards anyone. A second major deviation the movie made form the book was when Bernard exposed the existing director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, Bernard himself was moved up to this position. In the book the author doesn’t even mention who takes over the position. The biggest change between the two was Lenina, Bernard’s girlfriend becomes pregnant and has the baby. The screenwriters must have made this up because the author doesn’t even mention it. The differences between the book and the movie both helped it and hurt it.
Social engineering wipes out dreams and individual thoughts. Scientific dictatorship individuality is stamped out (Bowering 98). The very first thing a newborn needs is bonding with a mother. This sets in motion, security and love. Through the controlled upbringing of these beings, they are subjected to countless conditioning.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley deftly creates a society that is indeed quite stable. Although they are being mentally manipulated, the members of this world are content with their lives, and the presence of serious conflict is minimal, if not nonexistent. For the most part, the members of this society have complete respect and trust in their superiors, and those who don’t are dealt with in a peaceful manner as to keep both society and the heretic happy. Maintained by cultural values, mental conditioning, and segregation, the idea of social stability as demonstrated in Brave New World is, in my opinion, both insightful and intriguing.
The characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World represent certain political and social ideas. Huxley used what he saw in the world in which he lived to form his book. From what he saw, he imagined that life was heading in a direction of a utopian government control. Huxley did not imagine this as a good thing. He uses the characters of Brave New World to express his view of utopia being impossible and detrimental. One such character he uses to represent the idealogy behind this is Bernard Marx.
A Brave New World is a seemingly prolific novel written by Aldous Huxley. The books starts off with a cloning center, which is where all people are created. All people are made to do a certain job. Their life is put into a predetermined slot into society. The amount of brain power the people have to use is limited, and breaks the people into castes. The people are to a point of not being mentally challenged for their job, and therefore making them contempt to stay doing what they do. The people of this world are given the information the government wants them to think in their sleep. They will keep to what they are taught to think unless something uncommon happens. Conditioning can only keep their mind to the government’s will if the people never run into anything contradicting to what they are taught to believe. Soma is a drug that keeps the people in a basic state of happiness. It is the back up people use when they are in a state of confusion. If anything comes along and does not go along with the beliefs that the population is taught, than they can just take soma and forget about it. Conditioning, cloning, and soma are some of the biggest forms of control the government uses to keep the population under their reign.
While many may believe humans are inbreeded with certain believes and morals, they automatically diminish the probability of being brainwashed. Literary works as Brave New World, and the government of North Korea, prove controlling the mind to be possible.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World portrays a society in which science has clearly taken over. This was an idea of what the future could hold for humankind. Is it true that Huxley’s prediction may be correct? Although there are many examples of Huxley’s theories in our society, there is reason to believe that his predictions will not hold true for the future of society.
The World State also uses controlled groupings of people to brainwash them further into thoughtless people with no sense of individualism. Lastly, the World State uses drugs to create artificial happiness for people, leaving no room for intense emotion which causes people to revolt against the World State. Within the novel Brave New World, it is seen that the World State eliminates individuality through social restrictions, government controlled groupings and the abuse of drugs to maintain control of the population. Social restriction robs individuals of their creative personalities by preventing freedom of thought, behavior, and expression; but is vital to the World State for maintaining complete control over the society. Social restriction’s purpose is to enforce obedience, conformity and compliance out of people.
Literature is both shaped by our culture and shapes it. Because of this it is an effective representation of the culture of a time. One can tell how people were affected by the events of the times by how it comes through in their writing. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a prime example of this. The work was targeted at people in a post WWI world. This is a time between WWI and WWII where the world is still shocked by how rapidly the science of war had advanced. People also continue to be appalled with the mass death of a World War caused by such technology and therefore yearn for a more stable world. Because of this yearning, they attempt to create a more stable environment for themselves. Most people had lost faith in the institutions they came to know because those institutions caused the War. Therefore the League of Nations was founded in 1919 only 13 years before “Brave New World” was published in 1932.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the author depicts a collective society in which everyone has the same values and beliefs. From a young age, the people in the World State’s civilization are conditioned to believe in their motto of “Community, Identity, Stability.” Through hypnopaedia, the citizens of the World State learn their morals, values, and beliefs, which stay with them as they age. However, like any society, there are outsiders who alienate themselves from the rest of the population because they have different values and beliefs. Unfortunately, being an outsider in the World State is not ideal, and therefore there are consequences as a result. One such outsider is John. Brought from the Savage Reservation, John is lead to conform to the beliefs of the World State, thus losing his individuality, which ultimately leads him to commit suicide. Through John and the World State populace as an example, Huxley uses his novel to emphasize his disapproval of conformity over individuality.