Brave New Essay

It is construed that human conditioning confines peoples’ thinking, leaving them unaware and lacking consciousness. Within it lies the power of the mass, the lack of humanity, and the blurring lines between a clouded vision of happiness and the awareness that lies heavy on the minds of others. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World blurs the lines between the artificial and the natural, the same way it has blended pleasure and pain to be one of the same. But within the confusion that lies within a world that struggles to see the truth beyond their conditioning, houses the few that have inwardly questioned their sight, struggling endlessly to make sense of the truth that lies under the murky spells that have blinded society. Through characterization and dichotomy, it is clear that Bernard Marx is one that struggles with the weight of knowledge and confusion that has opened him to the skewness that society has relied upon.

Contrary to its given name, the world within the novel lacks the ideals of a brave society. The people opt instead to the clutches of artificially induced happiness, parting awareness from the body. The society, clinging on to “caution” instead of “action,” has ultimately sacrificed humanity for the “better good of the mass.” The masses snuffed out the individual and the humanity, putting in its place instead the idea of progression through chemicals. Without their humanity, society conditioned them to believe “fertility is a nuisance.” They continuously refer to the idea of a natural birthing experience as below par with the society they are living in. It is “progress” and “process” that they thrive off of. Instead, they mass produced the people through the Bokanovsky’s Process, conditioning them young and old, and supplying them with the promises of soma, a drug that numbed them of feeling. The society cultivated them to think of chemistry as an account to emotion, a cocktail with a concoction of emotion. Through the use of rhetoric, pathos to evoke certain emotions from the audience, the audience continuously sees over and over the loss of humanity.

“There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance (pg 21).”