Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may seem like a dystopia
to some and eutopia to the others. It seems the futuristic Fordian society has
both positives and negatives associated with it.
Benefits
The ultimate goal of the
World State is to ensure stability.
Stability is facilitated by the maintenance of happiness and contentment
of its citizens. In this sense, the
definite positive of the World State is that everyone is happy. After all, how often you do hear the adage
“just be happy” in our own world.
This perpetual state of
bliss is maintained by the conditioning of citizens to enjoy low commitment,
short-term activities which provide instant gratification. The plethora of Rube Goldberg-esq sports:
electro-magnetic golf and elevator squash, in addition to sense stimulating
forms of entertainment: feelies (movies involving the sense of touch) and scent
organs, provide citizens of the World State an never-ending supply of
entertainment.
Furthermore when negative
emotions that threaten happiness arise, the miracle drug “soma” provides a
categorical solution. Soma, described as
the “best of alcohol and religion with none of the side affects”, is the chief
recreational substance taken in the world state. It leads the taker into a “soma holiday”
where one experiences a idyllic peacefulness.
The state of the world in
the World State is peaceful and stable.
Global unity has been achieved with power vested in ten world
controllers whom chief objective in the maintenance of citizen’s
happiness. There is no inter-national
conflict, at its worst nationalism manifests itself in friendly competitions
between hatcheries to see who has more efficient techniques.
The World State also
benefits from remarkable economic stability as a result of its perfect consumer
market. Its customer base possesses a
seemingly bottomless appetite for goods and as a result of hyponpaedic wisdom,
sees no use in mending broken object thus continuously buy new goods. The economic stability is also contributed to
by the non-existence of unemployment as all citizens are assigned jobs
pre-decantation (birth from bottle).
The stability of the world is
further contributed by the absence of disease and aging from the world. Hygiene is a principle tenet hypnopaedically
drilled into citizens to resulting in almost elimination of illness. Furthermore citizens are kept youthful via
medical procedures involving blood transfusions and metabolism stimulation.
The regime of the World
State is neither oppressive. Rather rule
is maintained through peaceful method as evidenced by riot police using
temporary (and rather blissful) sedation via soma vapour rather than brute force
and violence to enforce order. Those
whom become self-aware to the point of dissenting against the World State are
not systematically eliminated in a repressive fashion. They are sent to Islands of the world we they
spend the rest of their lives with like-minded people; a reward, not a
punishment in the eyes of World Controller Mustapha Mond. This benevolence is further shown by the
allowance of dissenters to chose what island they would like to serve out their
exile on.
Negatives
The majority of the World
State’s citizens do not see anything negative with their world due to their
hypnopaedia conditioning to make them content with their lot in life. John the Savage in the story manifests an
outside-in view of the world, an almost choric figure that exemplifies our
reaction to the World State. It is
through his, albeit extreme, views that we sympathy and see negatives of the
World State.
Perhaps the most prominent
aspect of the World State is the absence of individuality. In the lower castes this is physically
embodied by the factory-churned batches of identical twins from the Bokanovsky
Process. In the upper caste, this lack
of individuality is more mental as sociality is seen as a necessity to good
health and solidarity is feared. This
creates an almost eusocial society where humans are dehumanised to the point
where they are more like robots on an assembly line going through the motions,
a reflection of the Fordian motif occurring throughout the book.
The absence of strong
emotional feeling is another major negative of the World State. For the sakes of global stability, the
traditional bonds of familial and romantic love have been conditioned out of
the human consciousness, with it the accompanying negative emotions such as grief
and despair. There is only now happiness. A dialectical issue arises however with the
quality of this happiness. How can a
citizen claim to be happy without experiencing sadness? Emotion occurs across a spectrum not on fixed
points. The happiness the citizens of
the World State experience is artificial, a negative happiness. The elimination of individuality and the
emptiness of the citizens of the World State lead to a poignant loss of
humanity.
The moral wrongs of the
process that occurs within Hatcheries provides further point for contention
vis-á-vis the World State. The
deliberate stunting of embryos is a form of structural violence committed
against them, a denial between what they are and what they could have
been. In contemporary society, we
already frown upon those parents whom determine their child’s path in life, a
refusal to acknowledge the child’s own freedom of choice. The World State takes this determinism and
extrapolates it to pre-decantation a societal-level scale.
Innovation in the World
State has also become stagnant. This is
not for a lack of innovation but the deliberate suppression of innovation. The fear of innovation is that it will lead
to rational thinking, followed by free will and by consequence of free will;
the society of the World State will unravel should people think for
themselves. Thus the truth in the eyes
of World Controller Mustapha Mond is irreconcilable with the cardinal aim of
happiness.
The overall concern that all
these points address leads to the key point that the World State represents the
end of human growth. We as a species
have plateaued, there is nowhere to go from here. Despite the World State’s
depiction of a Utopia, it is still rife with flaws. This is what I believe Huxley’s portrayal of
the World State is satirical; contenting utopia is an unachievable chimera.
