Why Should Students Read Brave New World
When well-nigh people think of what dystopia our gild is sprinting towards, they tend to think of 1984 , The Handmaid's Tale , or the Hunger Games. These top selling, well known, and well-written titles are fantabulous warnings of worlds that could come to pass that we would all exercise well to read.
However, one bottom-known dystopian novel has done a much ameliorate chore at predicting the future than these 3 books. Brave New Globe, written in 1931 by author, psychonaut, and philosopher Aldous Huxley, is well known but hasn't quite had the pop-culture quantum that the other three did.
This is regrettable, as information technology offers u.s.a. a detailed image of a dystopia that our gild is not only moving towards just would be happy to take.
Henry Ford With His Model T. In the novel, Ford is worshiped as a god for his employ of the associates line in a way that is frighteningly like to how nosotros swoon over tech gurus in Silicon Valley. (Getty Images)
For those who oasis't read it, Brave New World is the description of a nightmare society where everybody is perfectly happy all the time. This is bodacious through destroying the costless will of most of the population using genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning, keeping everybody entertained continuously with endless distractions, and offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to continue people happy if all else fails.
The world state is a dictatorship which strives to assure order. The dictatorship is managed by x oligarchs who rely on an all-encompassing bureaucracy to proceed the world running. The typical person is conditioned to beloved their subservience and either be proud of the vital piece of work they practice or exist relieved that they don't take to worry about the issues of the world.
Global stability is ensured through the Fordist organized religion, which is based on the teachings of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud and involves the worship of both men. The tenets of this organized religion encourage mass consumerism, sexual promiscuity, and avoiding unhappiness at all costs. The assembly line is praised as though information technology were a souvenir from God.
Huxley's dystopia is especially terrifying in that the enslaved population admittedly loves their slavery. Even the characters who are smart enough to know what is going on (and why they should be concerned) are instead content with everything that is happening. Mayhap more than terrifying than other dystopian novels, in Brave New World there is truly no hope for change.
The similarities betwixt the world of today and the globe of the book are many, even if our technology hasn't quite caught upwards still.
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While the human assembly line described in the commencement part of the story is withal a far-off fantasy, the bones concepts that brand it piece of work are already hither. Today, people brand choices to influence the genetic makeup of their children regularly.
Pre-natal screening has created the ability for many parents to decide if they wish to deport a disabled fetus to term or non. In Iceland, this has resulted in the near eradication of new cases of Down's syndrome in the land. Well-nigh 100% of detected cases pb to an abortion shortly after.
Similarly, testing for a child's sex earlier birth is a well-known procedure that leads to a broad gender gap in many countries. Less well known is the process of sperm sorting, which allows for a couple to choose the gender of their child as part of the procedure of in-vitro fertilization.
The to a higher place examples suggest nosotros're open to soft eugenics already. Imagine what would happen if people could determine their child's potential IQ earlier birth, or how rebellious they will be every bit a teenager. It would be difficult to advise that the development of such technology would not be hailed as progress past those who could beget to use it. Huxley's visions of a genetically perfected upper caste might be available soon.
As this article suggests, some pick in baby design is already here and more will be available soon.
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The characters of Brave New Earth enjoy endless distractions between their hours at work. Diverse complex games take been invented, movies now engage all five senses, and there are even televisions at the feet of death beds. Nobody ever has to worry about being bored for long. The idea of enjoying confinement is taboo, and most people go out to parties every night.
In our modernistic guild, most people genuinely can't go thirty minutes without wanting to bank check their phones. We have, but as Huxley predicted, made it possible to abolish boredom and fourth dimension for spare thoughts no matter where you are. This is already having measurable effects on our mental wellness and our brain structure.
Huxley wasn't alert us against watching television or going to the movies occasionally; he says in this interview with Mike Wallace that Boob tube can be harmless, but rather confronting the constant avalanche of distraction becoming more important in our lives than facing the problems that affect u.s.. Given how stressful people find the idea of a tech-complimentary day and how we have our popular culture and then seriously that it was targeted for use by Russian bots, he might take been onto something.
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Brave New Earth'due south favorite pill, Soma, is quite the drug. In small doses it causes euphoria. In moderate doses, it causes enjoyable hallucinations, and in large doses, it is a tranquilizer. It is probably a pharmacological impossibility, but his concept of a society that pops pills to eradicate whatever vestige of negative feelings and escape the doldrums of the day is very existent.
While information technology seems odd to say that we are moving towards Brave New World in this era when official policy is opposed to drug employ, Huxley would suggest nosotros consider it a blessing, since a dictatorship that encouraged drug use to zonk out their population would exist a powerful, if lite handed one.
While today we have a state of war on drugs, it is not on all drugs. Anti-depressants, a powerful tool for the treatment of mental illness, are so popular that ane in eight Americans are on them correct now. This doesn't include the large number of Americans on tranquilizers, anti-anxiety medications, or those who self-medicate with alcohol or increasingly legal marijuana.
These drugs aren't quite Soma, just they behave a hitting resemblance in function and use.
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In the book, the stability of the world country is partly based on full employment. A graphic symbol informs us that automation has been purposely stalled to assure everybody can work since free time would give them plenty extra time to think about their condition. Mass employment relies on mass consumption, however, and numerous systems are in place to assure everybody keeps using new products fifty-fifty when they don't demand anything.
Consumerism is a significant chemical element in all major economies today. While information technology makes sense that a visitor would accept an incentive to continue united states of america buying things to remain assisting, Huxley's point is that consumerism tin also be used to continue us pointlessly chasing afterward items that we think we need to be happy every bit a distraction from exploring other pursuits.
While Huxley thought a dictatorship would take to status people to desire to buy new things and throw out last year'due south products to buy similar just newer ones, the lines and fights at Black Friday sales suggest otherwise. Or the lines for every new release of the iPhone.
And just in case you lot idea it was simply corporations getting in on the pressure, don't forget George Bush-league wanted you to fight terror by shopping.
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In our modern lives, a like view on happiness as exists in the novel is developing. In his book The Happiness Industry, William Davies argues that modern capitalism has come beyond the concept of making happiness the only acceptable mental state and run with information technology to make more coin. Our new plant slew of Corporate Happiness Officers and self-aid gurus are all designed to keep us happy, consuming, and unwilling to question the larger system in place, he argues.
This notion is summarized in his book in one, jargon-laden, sentence:
The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can merely possibility divert disquisitional attending away from broader political and economical problems.
While claims that we are redefining unhappiness equally unacceptable might seem overblown, the standard manual of mental illness now says grieving for deceased loved ones more a few days is problematic. Perhaps Mr. Davies is onto something.
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Huxley expressed concern in his follow-upward book Brave New Earth Revisited that the increasing complexity of technology and global problems had led to a concentration of power both in business and government. This concentration, he argued, not simply made people more comfortable with the thought of existence subjugated but also made dictatorship easier to enact.
Today, we have a higher concentration of wealth and power than always before. In the Usa, the peak one% are richer than ever, six corporations control 90% of the media, and the ability of undemocratic institutions such as corporations or byzantine bureaucracies are greater than ever before. Many Americans cull not to vote and take the aforementioned influence on their government that they would if they had no correct to vote.
This tin pb to situations little unlike than that of 1984 only without the hard-totalitarian edge that came with information technology. In 1984 in that location was but one tv set station, and there was no attempt to hibernate the fact that the government controlled it. In the United States today dozens of seemingly different networks are controlled by a few conglomerates and often promote the aforementioned worldview and opinions as a effect.
Huxley himself warned against this very situation when he talked about how we were approaching his dystopia back in 1958:
Well, at the present the goggle box, I recall, is being used quite harmlessly; it's being used, I call up, I would feel, it's being used too much to distract everybody all the time. Simply, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the aforementioned things the whole time; it's ever driving along. It'southward non creating a wide front of distraction it'southward creating a i-pointed, drumming in of a unmarried idea, all the fourth dimension. It's plainly an immensely powerful instrument.
Despite being able to find this out or plough the channel, millions of people willingly continue to watch what might exist called propaganda from friendly faces. Indeed, they love it. This soft totalitarianism is often difficult to discover or state an objection to, which Slavoj Zizek argues is the point.
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Huxley thought nosotros could salvage ourselves, though we had to act quickly. While his concerns around overpopulation and eugenics have been shown to be bunk past the march of history, his other ideas all the same have merit.
In his follow up book Brave New World Revisited, he argues for the decentralization of power as a means to restore the value of autonomous government to the typical person who might otherwise realize their vote is meaningless and lose organized religion in democracy as a result. He suggests that we tin meliorate educate people for freedom by drawing their attention to the methods of demagogues and sleazy advertisers. He encouraged those seeking freedom to move to the countryside or to establish stronger neighborhood ties in the cities to resist the force per unit area to only engage with others equally an economic unit and not as a total man.
He was also warm to the ideas of syndicalism and worker cooperatives, which seek to restructure workplaces to characteristic workers democratically managing them. He saw this as both a way to decentralize the economic system and ameliorate autonomous participation.
Aldous Huxley's Dauntless New World was a prediction of a nightmare he thought we would be safe from for at least a few hundred years when he wrote it in 1931. By 1958 he realized he had been very optimistic. While we aren't entirely doomed to the pleasant slavery he envisioned quite yet, the march of progress continues to bring us the tools which brand it ever simpler to enact. If we will make the choices needed to avoid it or if we will willingly cry out to be saved from our freedom remains to be answered.
Source: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/brave-new-world-prediction-novel/
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