Brave New World

10 Pages 2421 Words

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwells’s Nineteen Eighty-four are the most influential futuristic novels of the 20th century (Firchow 83). In Orwell’s story the state controls its citizens with fear and punishment. Winston Smith (protagonist of 1984) is forced to love Big Brother by the starving rats in room 101. In Aldous Huxley’s satire the World State’s motto is Community, Identity, and Stability. The novel begins in London in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632 and introduces a very stable society. This stability has been achieved by a controlled genetics program and by various psychological methods that we learn about through the course of the novel. Mr. Huxley called the psychological methods used in Brave New World mind-manipulation. through sleep teaching and infant conditioning the citizens of the World State are brainwashed into liking their unescapable social destiny (Huxley 11). Those few who do not fit into the community of the brave new world are exiled to an island. In the novel Bernard is sent to Iceland; and Hemholtz Watson is shipped to the Falklands. In his forward to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Mr. Huxley wrote that he expects large government projects in the future that seek to “make people love their servitude” (xix). This love of servitude is the stability of Brave New World. People are happy and ask no questions. They do their job (that they were created to do), have sex, take drugs, and happily accept death when they are sixty years old. In Brave New World Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, tells John the Savage: “The people are well off; they’re safe; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave” (Huxley 169). Harold Bloom ...