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Monday, August 18, 2014
"A gramme is better than a damn"
Adlous Huxely's Brave New World is about a dystopian society. Or is it? I mean really. No one has their own opinions, no one has any curiosity about their world, but everyone is happy. Huxely is credited to creating the most perfect, imperfect world. But what's so imperfect about it? There's no hatred, no pain, no sense of being alone, sure, no one really feels, but no one needs to feel. In a society where love is irrelevant, technology has flourished to limits no one in our modern society could hope to achieve. A person's every desire can be subdued by soma. Everyone is perfectly suited to their caste and the job they have in that caste. No one feels attachment to anyone, so no one feels obligated to help anyone but them self. The society works perfectly, orderly, with everyone being happy with where they are. Of course the only way to achieve this order and stability in society is to strip everyone of personal opinion, but because the World State condition their citizens right from decantation, nobody knows anything different. Nobody has any other opinion. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be stripped of my opinion and forced to think like everyone else, but, if I was born and raised that way, if we all were, then why would it matter? Haha, ok, I don't want to sound like Miss Dictress, it's just that all everyone talks about is how corrupt the society in Brave New World is, and I guess by our standards it is. But happiness is relative. The biggest thing I've noticed while reading this book is how happy everyone seems to be. Sure, they're all brainwashed to believe they are, but they don't know it, and I'd say that's close enough.
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Sharissa, I absolutely LOVE you opinion of the World State. I agree with you and I would not want to give up my life now to live in the World State but, if I was brought up there I would not know any different and I would live a happy life.
ReplyDeleteyour* opinion.
DeleteI agree that if I was brought up in that way and didn't know any other way of living, I'd believe I was "happy" and their would be no reason to change that. However although their society looks organized I wouldn't trade mine for theirs because some people are made to look as sort of a lower class although they don't know it because they've been taught to love what they are and not want to be anyone else. I will say that their methods of teaching are strange and sometimes horrible because of the way the infants were taught to hate flowers and books. My mouth dropped when I read that because it sounds traumatic. Either way living in that society wouldn't be that bad if it was all I knew.
ReplyDeleteFresh new way to look at it! I agree with you. I love when you say "Happiness is relative." This is so true, not just in dystopian novels, but in real life. Human beings tend to label any society dramatically different from their own as unhappy. Scan histories pages: the Europeans wanted to bring civilization and a superior religion to the "savages" of the New World. I'm sure the Aztecs and Incas were happy without the Europeans intervening. (Except, of course, for the unlucky Aztecs who were human sacrifices!) In this case, the readers are like the Europeans and the Aztecs are the people in Brave New World. If the people are content, then life must not be as bad for them as we would like to think.
ReplyDeleteOne of the Brave New World questions made me think of this post. The Director said that murder was not as serious as being unorthodox. Because as he said, a life means nothing because they can just be made thousands of times. Humans can just be cloned and replaced so the value of a human life goes down. Also, they don't want people who are unorthodox (a.k.a. people who can think for themselves) to "corrupt" other members of society. If people didn't constantly consume goods then the society would rapidly fall apart.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at their society from the point of view of a citizen of that society, I would agree that I would probably be pretty "happy" living in the World State. Because I don't know anything other than that society, I would see no problem in the way things are run like the caste system or using soma all the time.
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