The Authoritarian State In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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“Brave New World” is a novel that was written in 1931 about the future. In the novel it is taken place at a Savage Reservation in New Mexico. The timing that this is written is 2540 A.D. referred to in the novel as 632 years “After Ford,” meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car. The point of view of the novel is in the third person, primarily from the point of view of Bernard or John but also from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz Watson, and Mustapha Mond. The theme of “Brave New World” is the use of technology to control society, the incompatibility of happiness and truth, the dangers of an all-powerful state. What is so crazy about this is that Aldous Huxley predicted the future quite well. The authoritarian state in Brave New World is obsessed with making people “happy” even if …show more content…

Its aim is “universal happiness” because if people are happy there’s more likely to be social stability. People must be made to “like their unescapable social destiny”, officials insist. Brave New World, the antihero known as “the Savage” rebels against the happiness agenda, telling his smiley-faced rulers: “I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin… I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” I believe that we should claim the same right against prying in our emotional lives today.

The people of Brave New World are kept calm with a drug called soma. Described as having “all of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol and none of their defects”, it’s a psychoactive drug that induces feelings of calm, therefore contradicting any need to discover and potentially tackle the true source of one’s distress. Soma subdues

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