When I finally finished Brave New World (just in time), I started to think about other books with similar stories. Earlier Grant made the connection to The Giver, and this was the first book I thought about. Other books with similar stories are Delirium and Matched. I'm not sure if anyone has read these books but they are all about creating and maintaining a Utopian society. However, what connects these books is the elimination of feelings and attachments.
The society in each one of these books has a method of ensuring stability and order. In The Giver, people are robbed of memories and must take daily injections to get rid of emotions. They enforce sameness and eliminate anything that will change this. In, Delirium, you are raised being told there is not love. When you finally come of age, you get a procedure that completely cures you of the "disease". You must be evaluated and then paired with someone. And in Matched you are also paired with someone and must take certain pills if you start to question things. Brave New World, I would have to say, had the most extreme methods for establishing stability and order. Obedience was taught early on to infants by the means of torture and hypnopaedia. No matter how much they pushed their beliefs and rules onto their people, these societies always seemed to fail.
The point I am trying to make is that these governments all strived for the same goal; a perfect world. The problem is that no such thing exists. Perfect is not something that can be achieved. It is something to pursue in life and do our best to achieve.
The society in each one of these books has a method of ensuring stability and order. In The Giver, people are robbed of memories and must take daily injections to get rid of emotions. They enforce sameness and eliminate anything that will change this. In, Delirium, you are raised being told there is not love. When you finally come of age, you get a procedure that completely cures you of the "disease". You must be evaluated and then paired with someone. And in Matched you are also paired with someone and must take certain pills if you start to question things. Brave New World, I would have to say, had the most extreme methods for establishing stability and order. Obedience was taught early on to infants by the means of torture and hypnopaedia. No matter how much they pushed their beliefs and rules onto their people, these societies always seemed to fail.
The point I am trying to make is that these governments all strived for the same goal; a perfect world. The problem is that no such thing exists. Perfect is not something that can be achieved. It is something to pursue in life and do our best to achieve.
This was a great post Jocelyn! I have read all these books as well (my personal favorite was Matched) and what you say is true, all these societies try so hard to be perfect but in the end they all crash. Even though our society has problems, we can are not forced to things, we make our own decisions. Lastly, I think that if we didn't try to change people and if we accepted each other, then we would be more "perfect" than those "perfect" societies.
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