Dystopian Society In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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Dystopian novels that detail the decline of the human race due to some oppressive regime have never been scarce, but few have been as frighteningly accurate as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Neil Postman, a celebrated cultural critic and educator, noted that Brave New World’s World State uses pleasure instead of pain to suppress its citizens and was therefore a more realistic dystopia that had a greater chance of occurring. He later goes on to note that the World State’s attempts to create a trivial culture through technology and meaningless distractions were beginning to manifest itself in today’s current society. If one were to merely take a cursory glance at modern American society, they would realize that both men were correct. Aldous Huxley's world is no longer a mere dystopian work of fiction, as Neil Postman has correctly observed that American society is increasingly starting to resemble the World State.
Many dystopian societies control their populace through fear and pain. However, Neil Postman notes that in Brave New World: “[Members of the World State] are controlled by inflicting pleasure.” When one reads the Director of Hatcheries proudly …show more content…
Detractors often claim that our society only provides an environment of free choice, and that citizens merely choose pleasure rather than betterment. Though they fail to take into account that conditioning from an early age has taught Americans to value pleasure over all else. When the human brain has been trained from birth to always pick pleasure over anything else, choice merely becomes an illusion. So while free choice is provided, impartial education is not. This exact conundrum is even addressed by Huxley. Much like how the alphas of a Brave New World choose “to be infantile, even against their inclination.” (p.105), Americans also choose to be infantile. Their conditioning over rides their basic human instincts and forces them to act in a certain
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