Brave New World: The Price of Living in Utopia Essay

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Brave New World

Utopia. A utopia is a community or society possessing highly desirable or near perfect qualities. But what are desirable qualities, how do we achieve them? How can a society as one come together and form this near perfect world? Of course, there has to be losses with such a promising gain. Now the real question is, is this surreal world absent of struggle and problems, worth losing own identity, opinions, free will? Huxley proposes to the readers radical and for his time, unorthodox ideas that technological advances with help of powerful figure can easily be used to strictly control the thoughts, actions, feelings, and lives of people. Huxley saw technology , if in the hands of a powerful influential figure, as a problem, or disadvantage rather than something positive for the future. He was paranoid due to the control of his current totalitarian government. Communist government forcing down the throat of the people these obnoxious rules, regulations, in order to ‘make the world a better place’ or ‘rid it of impurities’. The government demanded citizens to think a certain way, have the same mind set as them, in order to have things running smoothly, and of course, they used harsh tactis, resulting in even death to those who had the courage to stand up for what they believed in . Advancement in war technology as well as this powerful control of government, sort of condition people into thinking and behaving a certain way, whether they liked it or not, for survival. Huxley wrote in Italy as an adult but soon was forced to flee to America to escape Hitler and the Nazis. As Huxley grew as an author, his writing became increasingly serious and his fears of society were reflected in his writing.( "Brave New World." 1996. Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H.) Beetz. Osperey, Fl: Beacham Publishing Corp, 1996. 495-98. Print) Huxley witnessed scientific progress and how people of his time reacted to it, with such 'blind faith', that and other facts such as war and gov, led him to believe that this trust would ultimately lead to ruin and without true freedom. In the novel, he expressed this opinion with a prediction of humans being empty minded slaves to technology and corrupt control. This was not only a prediction, but and observation of what he noticed was happening in his time, people rapt with new war technologies and science.(Themes and Construction: Brave New World." EXPLORING Novels. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.)
Huxley, being from London, chose his city to be the setting of Brave New World because he knew firsthand about everything going on, such as totalitarian control , forced obedience of citizens and positives like technological advances; these two reasons being why Huxley felt that he had a lack of identity. The paradox of this novel is how he decided to combine the positive with negative, making the future negatively controlled with use of super advanced and for his time, beyond comprehendible technology.Huxley has a intellectually successful family background. His father was very involved in the science world, and his mother had many literary influences. Grandfather was biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a great champion of theory of evolution. His mother was the niece of the poet and moralist Matthew Arnold and sister of the novelist Mrs.Humphry Ward. She herself was a teacher who founded a private school. Huxleys father was a schoolmaster and then editor of the literary Cornhill Magazine. Huxley grew up around both of these subjects, hence why his literature reflects scientific ideas. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Huxley accentuates the importance of technology and identity as themes. He uses numerous references to technology and lack of individual thought and opinion of humans throughout the novel. In the novel, Huxley used imagery to describe scientific advancement in the future, for example, when he explained Soma and its effects, he
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