Brave New World

¶ … living in the kind of horrific society that Aldous Huxley warned about almost a century ago. In Brave New World, Huxley wrote about a world where people are only concerned with satisfaction of desires. They are constantly entertained through visual and tactile means in addition to being constantly drugged. Although we have not yet reached a pointer where we are artificially reproducing, there are still far too many similarities.

Decades ago, Huxley was concerned that society was denigrating into a condition where people are obsessed with consumption and with feeling satiated to the point where they no longer question their government or the motivations of other people. He was fearful of people becoming so complacent as to allow themselves to be dominated by a dictator. The subject matter he writes about might not be pleasant, but it is necessary. The closer our society comes to reflecting the one he imagined, the more we need to read Brave New World.

By reading about the hollowness of a world without the love of families, with constant consumption of material goods, and retardation of individual it is hoped that somehow we as a people can prevent our sliding even further into the abyss. In Brave New World, there are no families. Children are artificially produced via machinery (Huxley 26). Most are limited in their intelligence or physical strength so as to function as lesser members of society. Sexual interactions are not for procreation because children are not born naturally anymore.

Instead frequent promiscuous sex is to be had simply as a means of entertainment. There is no emotional intimacy related with these occasions of physical intimacy. There are no mothers and no fathers. In this society, the family unit is quickly being destroyed. More and more people are having children out of wedlock and then the father and/or mother abandons the child to the care of another family member. A man or a woman will have multiple children all with different people.

Young people are losing their virginities before they leave elementary school. We are witnessing the destruction of the family as a unit. Huxley also talks about consumer-driven societies. No one in Brave New World ever stops accumulating. They are taught from a young age to want and buy and throw away so they can buy some more. "Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches" (Huxley 49). They are being sold products even when they sleep. This is what is happening in the world right now.

People buy a cellular phone and pay $100 or more. Then a few months later a new version comes out with maybe a different color or button size and then they have to spend more money when their original phone is still perfectly good. The device matters, the label matters, the name matters. What is most frightening about Huxley's book is that no one is allowed to be an individual. Uniqueness is bred out of them at birth (Huxley 28-29). Anyone who possesses individuality has it drowned out of them.

They do not have time to think or question because they are always being stimulated. In the real world, people are always entertained. They have phones which play games and music and handheld devices which surf the Internet and televisions with hundreds of.