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
are 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
against 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
they’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
learned 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. Words
