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 world. Even in protest, Thoreau still showed respect for others, adopting a strategy of passive resistance, while remaining true to his convictions"(Henry David Thoreau," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia, 2007). Upon seeing Huxley's world, Thoreau would no doubt immediately leave and begin a new Walden-like homestead in isolation, on the outskirts of John's remote reservation. Thoreau, as evidenced in his pacifism and social conscience, would agree with Socrates and the scientists of Brave New World that to be happy, an individual must take into consideration the...
But he would deny that harmony should be the goal of society, if the result is societal injustice. He would be particularly angry at the idea that a world of conformity and social inequality could make people happy. To Thoreau, such a claim would look suspiciously like defenses of slavery in the South, where every person fulfilled their 'natural' role, where people were 'bred' for certain characteristics, conditioned to see themselves as inferior, and denied an education. Socrates, perhaps on seeing an interpretation of his position on the benefits of social inequality, might be converted to Thoreau's moral stance, upon gazing at the lack of real intellectual and philosophical discussion in the pre-determined social organization of Brave New World.
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
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.
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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