Blissful Ignorance and the Power of Knowledge Your heart starts racing as your eyes flutter open. It is the day you have been waiting for. Looking at the clock you know six o’clock is too early to wake your parents up, but you are so excited that Santa came; you cannot wait! This is an example of a moment of blissful ignorance. Most people can look back on their childhood and remember several occurrences of blissful ignorance. They can do so because their parents made the conscious decision that it was necessary to shield them from the facts of life to keep them happy. However, the truth always comes out, and in the wake of truth there is displeasure of the ignorance you once had. Along with that truth there is also power in the newfound knowledge.…show more content… Ignorance leads to happiness whereas knowledge may give us power but ultimately leads us towards despair. In Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” the protagonist, Macbeth, gained knowledge which ultimately led him to commit many fateful acts. Knowledge may give us power, however, true blissfulness comes from total ignorance. Lenina, like many other characters living within the brave new world, has succumbed to ignorance through being decanted and then conditioned. Within the society the leaders believe that breeding babies within bottles is the perfect way to maintain a functioning utopia. Within the bottles the babies are conditioned chemically and physically, once they are born the psychological conditioning begins. The individuals who make up this society are obliviously happy and unaware of of their own ignorance. The conditioning allows each and…show more content… All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (Huxley 12) The emphasis on got exemplifies how the society has accepted this ignorant lifestyle which lacks of freedom in order to have happiness. They are required to fill the role that they were conditioned to do. Their whole lives were created for them with no freedom of choice or knowledge and yet they are still happy. If you do not know what wrong is well, nothing can be wrong. By using the phrase “unescapable social destiny” (Huxley 12), the Director of the conditioning is strengthening the idea of lack of choice. People are conditioned not to want more than what they know because they have no knowledge of what is past their abilities. There are five levels within the society and each is conditioned to only appreciate the life they have. Even the lowest level, the Epsilons, believe that their live is blissfully ideal because they do not have to think as hard. They are all given a reason in which their life is perfect but never
