Revisiting Again: Brave New World

Revisiting Again: Brave New World

Reading Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, is a chilling adventure through his prophetic dream of western democracies.   Since its publication in 1932, it has been somewhat blotted out by 1984, George Orwell’s dystopia about the future of Marxist despotism; however, in America at least, the present much more closely resembles what Huxley wrote about. Huxley sets his cautionary novel 600 years in the future, but experts agree that it is approaching years ahead of that estimate.   Brave New World uses the year 1914 AD, the year in which Henry Ford installed the first conveyor-belt assembly line, as the primordial year After Ford, or A.F. 0, in the new timeline.   In the fictitious present, 632 A.F, or 2546 AD “industrial civilization is only possible when there [is] no self-denial...Otherwise the wheels stop turning” (Huxley, Brave New World 243).   Therefore, the idea of instant gratification is key in the world of this horrific time.   The World Controllers use this motivation to keep control through destroying identity followed by hypnop?dic conditioning and then the drug soma to ensure tranquillity.   In short, the overwhelming and instant self-indulgence of people in the Society of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World qualifies this dystopian novel as a warning for what may be right around the figurative corner.
The idea of the individual as opposed to the mass is of paramount importance to a proper understanding of the novel.   It is precisely this idea that the brave new world cannot tolerate.   “To be extraordinary or to be individual is to be criminal; thinking or feeling deeply are punishable offenses” (Firchow 266).   In Brave New World, leaders achieved control by making people isolated integers with essentially a single homogenous personality.   The individual has no family since life begins as an egg fertilized on a petrie dish and is then transferred into a bottle where the living human remains until ripe for decanting.   Nature “has been...