Brave New World: Helplessness Essay -- Brave New World

Brave New World: Helplessness How can one distinguish happiness from unhappiness if unhappiness is never experienced? It's the bad that makes the good look good, but if you don't know the good from the bad, you'll settle for what you're given. Can people judge their feelings without a basis or underlying "rubric" to follow? Such rudimentary guidelines are established through the maturation process and continue to fluctuate as one grows wiser with a vaster array of experiences. Aldous Huxley creates a utopia filled with happiness, but this is merely a facade to a world which is incomplete and quite empty since the essential "experiences" are replaced with "conditioning." Perhaps this fantasy world was distinctly composed to be a harbinger of our future. An analysis of an "exclusive utopia" designed to heed the present world from becoming desensitized to freedom and individualism and to warn against the danger of an overly progressive scientific and technological society. Huxley commences his story at the source of such world control -- the hatchery. Governed by mottoes of "Community, Identity, and Stability," the "brave new world" he creates is "conditioned" from the start. The test tube babies undergo precise tests, dietary supplements, and encouragement to "produce" the defined castes of "individuals." The central action arises when Bernard Marx, an alpha plus psychologist, becomes continually irritated at the boredom and incompleteness of this highly regulated life. Through his independent thinking he becomes frustrated and feels alone. Such feelings Marx shares with his close friend Helmholtz Watson, who was advantageously decanted in his "test tubular stages" and therefore has an ... ...domination. the Bokanovsky Process, in which one egg is "budded" into hundreds and thousands making a shocking number of "twins" and then the decanting process, the actual birth form the test tube, and finally, the social conditioning processes in which people are "formed" by means of shocks, sirens, and other unpleasant devices to certain stimuli so that they will always evoke certain intrinsic feelings toward those stimuli. The idea of such a "precision-made" society to accomplish work and live in happiness and virtue leaves no room for "imperfection." Such imperfections as Marx, Watson, and the savage however are no threat to the society as apparent in the novel since they are swallowed by the system-- if nobody listens to their ideas, talking does no good. Such automatic suppression of the "rebels" leaves the reader with a frigid feeling of helplessness.