Power Control In Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s text, Brave New World, will leave you questioning your perspective on life and it’s choices. Within the novel, curious readers can see that government control over all in an attempt to create a utopia, can sometimes have a counter effect, creating a dystopia. Wielding it’s tool of conformity, The World State has forced its ideology into the minds of its people at a young age, in hopes of avoiding rebellion. In many ways this is how our society functions in the real world. The genre of Huxley's text may be fiction, but the society fabricated in Brave New World may not be so fictional after all.

The government having full control over who, what, and where you will be. In the novel, babies are lulled to sleep of by repetitive recordings of state suggestions. Such suggestions are referred to as hypnopaedic conditioning or sleep teaching and is used as a means of control over citizens. They only learn what the state allows, yet never know anything but the suggestions.

The alternative environment, the Savage Reservation, allows for the freedom of thought and choice; however, these freedoms had previously resulted in chaos and instability, in which the World State seeks to prevent. The World State is the superior place to reside due to its blissful ignorance and sustainability. According to the Controller, “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy – to preserve you, so far as that possible, from having emotions at all” (Huxley 44). By being inherently emotionless, the citizens of the World State are free from every emotion, thus negativity and pain are unfamiliar.

This is one of the many characteristic that makes the World State a dystopian society. The citizens’ fear of the outside, the government’s restriction of knowledge, conformity to uniform expectation, and the constant propaganda used to generate a strong hold on the citizens restrict their emotions and mind to emulate the fallacy of a perfect world. The misuse of biotechnology and conditioning by the government results in the manipulation of the human brain and genes creates a pleasure seeking world which blinds the citizens of the dystopian society presented to

Aldous Huxley, the author of the dystopian fiction book Brave New World, writes of a society paralleled to our own, as he tells of a ‘savage’ who is introduced to a system of life unlike anything he has

In Brave New World, they are conditioned many ways, but the world controllers have the same goal for each person, “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny” (Huxley 26). “Men will come to be valued more and more, not as individuals, but as Personified social functions” (Holmes 26). These people are created to work, love their jobs, and not get distracted, which is why they do not want them getting attached to people emotionally or feeling pain from betrayal or death. They cannot change who they are or who they were made specifically to become. Holmes does well showing how the controllers try to distort everyone’s views when he says, “The more noise you listen to, the more people you have round you, the faster you move and the more objects you possess, the happier you will be-the happier and also the more normal and virtuous”(Holmes 27).

Modern Psychological Acclimatization Mental and moral conditionings are both of major thematic importance. Americans prefer to believe that, while flawed, they obtain the freedom to live under their own opinions as they wish. Shocking the audience is the primary objective of Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, and the hypnopaedia is arguably the most controversial aspect of this “perfect culture”. The fear of being, for lack of proper description, brainwashed merely for a more convenient social system is horrifying. It is crucial towards the understanding of the World State’s success to recognize the similarities to the world in general.

In democratic countries, people often believe that they are free to choose their destinies, while in fact, everyone’s life is controlled in one way or another. The idea of manipulated life and freedom is a popular subject in dystopian fiction and film. The novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the film Never Let Me Go by Mark Romanek, and the TV episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, Twilight Zone are all examples of exploring how social control of life and freedom does not benefit the individuals. Life has been controlled by society. In Brave New World, the World Controllers control people’s intelligence by manipulating the oxygen amount supplied to their embryos.

Ignorance is bliss. This idiom encompasses one of the main overarching themes of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, social conditioning, eugenics, and Soma. In this futuristic fictional utopia, society has succumbed to the absolute control of the state in the form of Communism. Every aspect of their lives is controlled by World Controllers, from the distribution of Soma, to the hypnopedia slogans and rhymes. In this “perfect” world, all the needs of the people are met.

Moreover, the future workers are accustomed to the difficulties their jobs later will have like extreme temperatures or caustic and toxic chemicals (Huxley 12-14). The mind of every single individual is also shaped by hypnopaedia (sleep-teaching) where it gets inculcated the reluctance of lower castes and the contentment with its own caste until the infant believes that these are his or her own

Equilibrium has Father speaking to the masses about rules and regulations. Brave New World relies on conditioning and hypnopædia for their brainwashing: “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them” (234-235). This is true for a person of any era, but in the context of Brave New World, conditioning is subconscious. Every repeated phrase is drilled into everyone’s brain. The perfect way to control a

Truth and happiness are two things people desire, and in the novel, an impressive view of this dystopia’s two issues is described. In this society, people are created through cloning. The “World State” controls every aspect of the citizens lives to eliminate unhappiness. Happiness and truth are contradictory and incompatible, and this is another theme that is discussed in “Brave New World” (Huxley 131). In the world regulated by the government, its citizens have lost their freedom; instead, they are presented with pleasure and happiness in exchange.

Under capitalism, human emotions are concentrated: in processing people, the product is state of mind. Hochschild believes people

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopia of Brave New World, he clarifies how the government and advances in technology can easily control a society. The World State is a prime example of how societal advancements can be misused for the sake of control and pacification of individuals. Control is a main theme in Brave New World since it capitalizes on the idea of falsified happiness. Mollification strengthens Huxley’s satirical views on the needs for social order and stability. In the first line of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, we are taught the three pillars on which the novels world is allegedly built upon, “Community, Identity, Stability" (Huxley 7).

Collectivism in Brave New World In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the essence of humanity is questioned. The World state completely destroyed the whole concept of being a human by taking away the people's individuality. The analysis will focus on chapter 1, from pages 11 through 12, which is a perfect example in the book of how collectivism sacrifices the uniqueness of humanity.