Aldous Huxley, „Brave New World“ ~ The message of the novel ~

 

 

Already half of the predictions Aldous Huxley made by writing his utopian novel “Barve New World” have come true. This is quite frightening. With all of those strange inventions, mentioned in the story, turning the human race into happy, but nevertheless enslaved beings,

Huxley wanted to show something, namely how the world could be like in some 100 years,

maybe even less. Only brainwashing can build up social and also global stability and it doesn’t really take a lot to make you feel happy for a lifetime. Brave New World is a dictatorship, but more perfect and better-organized than all the previous ones. The only difference is, that in this world, no violence and no punishment are used to make people believe in all kinds of things. The magical ingredient they use is called “happiness”. If you give people what they want, they’ll be ready to do about everything for you, without questioning. Thus is the principle of BNW. What the author tries to make clear is that if we separate us from each other, lose contact and the ability to communicate on a deeper level, not

a superficial one, we may turn into the same unthinking and unfeeling puppets like they are produced in bottles and test-tubes in the utopia of Aldous Huxley.

But our society really is becoming more and more superficial, only the surface of things is looked upon. Especially if you take the media nowadays : struggling to get the hottest information and the most exiting photographs, journalists sometimes even risking their own lives, hurry from one place to another to get a snapshot from a bloody battlefield or the latest scandal around some TV-star. The more shocking something turns out to be, the more attention and interest it gains from the audience. No matter if it’s the news on TV or some article in the daily newspaper. But we still are sensitive about, we still feel a lot of things, pleasant and unpleasant. We have real emotions and they are there, no matter how much our surroundings are eating away at them. We are free to decide. Looking at the simpleminded population in Brave New World almost makes this a privilege. For the leaders of this world freedom of the mind is automatically connected with chaos, with poverty and illnesses, with hatred, envy, violence and, as a result, unhappiness. Barve New World considers all these feelings as harmful for a completely happy, unstressed and, most important of all, stabile social system. And here one can ask the question : but hasn’t a human being the right to have free, individual thoughts and opinions? To decide for themselves what would be the best for them, never excluding the possibility of making mistakes? Individual ideas often get into disputes with other ones. This can cause some kind of chaos, this is quite obvious. But isn’t it a lot more interesting than having nothing to talk about, to just think of each other as some kind of object? Where is the point here?

I think that every single person should be able to go their own way and to be openminded.

Giving up that wonderful turmoil of all sorts of emotions and feelings, the large capacity of ones mind for something that is called “happiness”? I don’t think that living in a sterile, plastic like world, cleared from all the “unnecessary” thoughts, feelings and emotions will always and forever keep you happy. There is absolutely no meaning, in a life, where you always get what you think you need.

We should watch out and be careful, because there maybe is a chance for us to make something better out of our lives and the ones of the next generation. If half of the predictions

have already come true, what about the other one?

 

 

 

 

Maria, 7B