Brave New World: Freedom
Narratives are popular when they make the audience to elude from reality even for a second. Fiction is unique; it can narrate a narrative whilst at the same time, making a point. In the Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, we have an entertaining narrative and also social commentary. The book’s significance underlies in its capability to explore various complex social in the conditioned society. The author uses real characters to warn the audience of the dangers of becoming people who acquiesce control to the government. One of the essential topics the author tackles in his novel is freedom. They have no control over their thoughts, feelings, and decision making. This paper aims at tackling the issue of freedom and how the author expressed it throughout his book.
In the novel, the citizens are held captive of their most fundamental right to freedom through social media, Soma and, hypnopedia. Where else John enjoys his freedom rights. He has full control of all his actions. The ruler enslaves the people; they devoid of all emotions except happiness. Citizens also lack the consciousness required to make their own decisions. All these actions create a society solely ruled by one process of thought.
Soma is used to controlling the emotion of the people so as to create and maintain stability. This type of control takes away the pleasure of having real emotions and corrupts one’s ability to react in the way they feel about a particular issue. People have the “freedom” to react as they want but with constant restrictions on which emotions are allowed to feel even that freedom has been robbed from them. “Now don’t like temper,” she said, “Remember one cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy centimeters.” (Huxley). Freedom reacts based on emotions that an individual has come up with. Moreover, these emotions have been drawn from a wide spectrum and are not carefully selected by their rules.
Another power strategy that the world state uses to control its citizens is through media. They came up with a culture that restricts citizens from the truth about what is really happening under the water. Citizens are unable to see what lies beneath the surface, thereby taking away the possibility of analytical or critical thinking. They are also not able to choose their destinies because their future is already laid before them.
The world of Brave New World is absolutely totalitarian. The government basically controls the whole world. It is under the supervision of only ten controllers who dominate almost the entire state. They control life, work, happiness, and even the right to have kids. The scary thing is that this new world does not allow children to be raised by their biological parents. The children are decanted conditioned in bottles, and they are later forced “to do the task imposed upon them by the cover.” There is absolutely no space for love and marriage. The dictatorial government has made the people become careless. It has come to a point where the citizens have become immoral; they do not care for one another. Their souls are controlled by machines. The author claims that technology leads to human enslavement. The author directly criticizes modernism embodied in the technological world.
The act of freedom raises numerous questions throughout the book. John is a character who passes the power of free will. He is capable feel his own emotions, think critically, and act accordingly. This is a precious gift that other members of society will dream of. They will never experience such another totalitarian government. When John is inflicted in a situation, he has no restrictions for his emotions. He falls in love with Lenina and was able to feel pain for being an outcast. Moreover, John is not only able to feel several emotions, but he can also think critically and makes less rational and logical decisions about the affairs of the state and his life. Because of this, John is able to perceive things for what they really are rather than a fake image created by the rulers.
The concept of freedom and enslavement is a very critical theme in the novel. Most characters in the Brave New World are enslaved. Only two of them could rebel against the policies of the society. Bernard Mark was the first character to rebel against the codes of society. He attempts to challenge the principles of the state. Bernard also argues with his friends on a revolt against society. Bernard wants his girlfriend Lenina to feel happy in her won way and not in the way society had planned. For her to achieve, he tries to convince her to have a child with her.
From the book, we can safely conclude that lack of freedom leads to the death of an individual. Citizens of this strange society lose their individuality. This is another concept that the author has deeply emphasized throughout the book. Huxley focused on the dignity of an individual. He shows the lack of freedom in the stare by comparing two contrasting societies; that is, the primitive society where citizens enjoy their individual freedom and the other societies where there is no freedom. He also shows that society sets happiness and material well being as its goals to achieve and ignores the importance of stab, which then cultivates mediocrity, ignorance, and intolerance.
Brave New World, also depicts a dystopia in which the government controls the actions and behaviors of its citizens in order to preserve its power and stability. They maintain their power through technology by coming up with inventions that start before birth and last until death. By this, they gain total control over people. The rules also retain their power by instilling happiness in people until they do not care about their personal freedom. The government shares ideas on the definition of happiness as “freedom” from sickness, ego, political upheavals, and emotional suffering. This made some characters differ in their understanding of the definition of happiness. Bernard claims that he wants the personal agency, but when he was granted individualism in Iceland, he is to stay in the World State because he chooses not to lose personal comfort for autonomy. Also, Helmholtz expresses through poetry that he can only achieve self-expression and happiness through suffering.
In conclusion, in the novel, Aldous Huxley warns us of self-satisfaction. He claims that if an individual becomes extremely happy and society completely efficient, then they would cease from being human, and this may become intolerable. This is why the novel utopian characters decided to rebel against the policies of the World State. The government uses this strategy to preserve and maintain total control over their subjects.
Work Cited
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Beck, Ulrich. The brave new world of work. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Phillips, Robert L. “Brave new world and the liberal concept of freedom.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 7.3 (1973): 198.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2007.