Value in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Value in Brave New World

What is value? To take a logical standpoint, it could be defined as the monetary worth of something: a candy bar’s value is one dollar. But to most people, value is more far reaching than a number. To chocolate lovers, a candy bar’s value is a few minutes of bliss; the chocolate hits your tongue and melts; the overwhelming decadence of that smooth, velvety sweetness is enough to keep you happy for the rest of the day. So, value is all about perspective, and it is also a driving force in motivation: value drives people. People work to make money, to buy valuable things or to buy valuable time in the form of a vacation. Rewards – values – are what keeps the economy turning and the world working. In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley crafts a hyper-materialistic society in which arbitrary thoughts, actions and relationships are encouraged; through satire, wordplay, and hyperbolized backwardness, Huxley shows the consequences of a world without value.

Huxley uses wordplay in order to draw parallels from his characters to the real world. By using these names and alluding to people in power at the time he wrote the novel, Huxley illustrates not only the control that they have in the book, but the power that they exert in real life. He wants readers to think about how much they are being controlled and conditioned by their own, usually trusted, government. The citizens of Huxley’s dystopian society praise “Ford.” This character name serves two purposes: one, in this society that is riddled with satire, it mirrors our society and how people worship the ‘Lord.’ While some may believe that this mirrors religion and spirituality, it is merely mockery. The citizens are not worshipping a divine being, nor are...

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