As man has progressed over time there has been one thing strived for more than anything else. That has been to arrive at a utopian society, where everyone is happy, disease is nonexistent, and conflict, anger, or sadness are unheard of. In a utopian society only happiness exists. While reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I came to realize that this is not what humans really want. In fact, utopian societies are much worse of than the societies of today. In his utopian society the individual is lost in the melting pot of similarity.
In the utopian society that Huxley presents, everyone is happy, but there re no differences between the people. Everyone is brought up to be happy, and most do not even know what sadness or anger is. All emotion is cured artificially through surrogates or drugs. Even happiness alone is not unique to the individual. Soma, the hallucinatory drug, the ‘perfect drug’ that is used by all, even induces the same kind of happiness. It is hard to imagine what it would be like if everyone was always in the same mood. The same thing, a drug, would make everyone happy.
Personally, I would thing this would make people more apathetic because no matter how bad things got they could just take some Soma. The only variant is to what extent this happiness overwhelms the user. \”Everybody belongs to everyone else\” (Huxley 127) is the basic psychology of the society. This suggests that an individual owes everything to society, but society in turn owes everything to him or her. This applies to all. No one gains off the efforts of others and no one performs excessive manual labor for minimum wage. Everyone is the same. In Huxley’s perfect world, sex is a normal undertaking.
Each individual engages in it almost everynight, but it is not for pleasure. Along with that, no one knows what marriage is. They simply have each other and move on. Everyone is even the same in bed. The people in this society are not given any sort of mental flexibility. If you spend time alone, or think, you are considere strange, and are considered an outcast. Nobody wishes for this, and so nobody commits this unspeakable crime. Everyone goes out at night with a different partner, or takes a few grammes of soma and goes to bed for a soma-holiday. Nothing new, nothing different. Each person of this society has a predestined future.
They all develop in their fetal stages inside a jar, where they are provided with their needs, are vaccinated gainst all known diseases. Also, special treatments are performed to aid in the mental growth of the individual after ‘birth’, according to their future occupation. An example of this is when: The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundredth meter mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. `To improve their sense of balance,’ Mr Foster explained. `Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job.
We slacken off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that hey’re half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate topsy- turvydom with well being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads. \” (Huxley 32) All two hundred and fifty beings will be the same – they will look alike, talk alike, act alike, have the same job, and generally be the same people inside different media. One never knows which is which. After birth, all children are mentally conditioned to think and act with the same motives.
Through hypnopaedia, all of the basic rules of the society are earned by the children, and they learn to repeat and abide by these rules. There are no chances for anyone to develop any differences, and if they do, they are exiled so that they cannot influence those around them. Nothing changes in this society, including the government and the lifestyle of the people that live in it. Maybe most importantly, the Bokanovsky method of reproducing causes great numbers of genetically identical human beings. As well, the same ovary can be used to produce over seventeen thousand individuals with the same basic genetic background.
Everyone is the same. All people are brought into this society with the same birth, same upbringing, same lifestyle. Any differences are modified immediately. Huxley presents what seems to be the ultimate ideal in utopian societies. In actuality though, nobody is open for mental growth. All people are limited to set barriers. Although this would appear a perfect society at first, it becomes obvious later on in the novel that the race will no longer evolve. Nobody will have new ideas. Nobody will improve on society. Nothing will change. This is not what the human race desires. It desires to acquire knowledge, unceasingly and neverendingly.
