¶ … living in the kind of horrific society that Aldous Huxley warned about almost a century ago. In Brave New World, Huxley wrote about a world where people are only concerned with satisfaction of desires. They are constantly entertained through visual and tactile means in addition to being constantly drugged. Although we have not yet reached a pointer where we are artificially reproducing, there are still far too many similarities. Decades ago, Huxley was concerned that society was denigrating into a condition where people are obsessed with consumption and with feeling satiated to the point where they no longer question their government or the motivations of other people. He was fearful of people becoming so complacent as to allow themselves to be dominated by a dictator. The subject matter he writes about might not be pleasant, but it is necessary. The closer our society comes to reflecting the one he imagined, the more we need to read Brave New World. By reading about the hollowness of a world without the love of families, with constant consumption...
Children are artificially produced via machinery (Huxley 26). Most are limited in their intelligence or physical strength so as to function as lesser members of society. Sexual interactions are not for procreation because children are not born naturally anymore. Instead frequent promiscuous sex is to be had simply as a means of entertainment. There is no emotional intimacy related with these occasions of physical intimacy. There are no mothers and no fathers. In this society, the family unit is quickly being destroyed. More and more people are having children out of wedlock and then the father and/or mother abandons the child to the care of another family member. A man or a woman will have multiple children all with different people. Young people are losing their virginities before they leave elementary school. We are witnessing the destruction…
Brave New World and the Island The Need for a "Way Out" in Brave New World and the Island The future looks grim for mankind in the dystopian novel Brave New World and the film The Island. In both works, a terrible dependency upon technology and "science" has caused mankind to lose its "soul" and forget the transcendental values that make life worth living. Both works are effective in displaying the negative
There will always be savages, and the attraction of savagery. Huxley wrote Brave New World as a warning. Today, in the age of test-tube pregnancy, genetic manipulation, powerful drugs and the mass media, it appears that his warning has gone unheeded and that America is on the road to the scientific utopia he describes. Certainly the world of the savages has been left behind, and for good reason. Modern Americans
Brave New World: Oh Wonder! That Has Such Similar People (to us) in it! Aldous Huxley is often cited as an architect of a society that is eerily prescient of our own future. "In a number of specifics Huxley's prophecies are tellingly accurate," writes literary critic Kirkpatrick Sale, such as "the ubiquity of sports, television in hotel and hospital rooms, a general ignorance of history," and "psychology and chemistry as important change
Brave New World Largely, the World State is able to control society through technology in this fiction, set in the year 2540, or for 632 years after the creation of the first Model T. car by American industrialist Henry Ford. This is the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, a savage reservation in New Mexico, a Utopia, where no family life has existed for more than six centuries. Human life is
He went to jail for refusing to pay taxes, to protest America's involvement in the Mexican War"(Henry David Thoreau," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia, 2007). While it could be argued that refusing to pay taxes hurt Americans who had nothing to do with the government's decision, Thoreau would counter that if no one obeyed their conscience, and everyone simply conformed to societal dictates, positive change would be impossible in the
John the Savage manifests the kind of high, independent spirituality spoken of in "Beyond Good and Evil." However, while John seeks a more conventional, common good Nietzsche spurns any predetermined moral systems at all, and advocates an independent, emotional, and irrational wilfulness. Nietzsche's system, unlike Epictetus, is not based upon acceptance of the limits of the human condition, but seeks deeper happiness (not pleasure) in resistance. But both Epictetus and
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