Brave New World And Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

To best answer the question of how Aldous Huxley would perceive our society today we must look to the past. Who was Aldous Huxley? Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England in 1894, to a well-established intellectual aristocratic family. He grew up far from poverty and much closer to riches than most at the end of the 1800s. He originally wanted to become a doctor, however due to juvenile sickness he lost his eye sight for two years and never fully recovered it. This caused Aldous Huxley to reimagine what he wanted in life since becoming a doctor was now out of the question. He began perusing literature. He started his career as a professional writer in 1920 and continued writing until his death in 1963. He was entranced by the human experience …show more content…
We are a society of structure, rules, and boundaries. Drugs are forbidden in most states and considered illegal. Social pressures are still just as high as they were in the 1900s. Money, power, and greed fuel this commerce society. In many ways it is very similar to the book Brave New World. Within the book the “advanced” society is based upon conditioning, genetic engineering, dictatorship, and drugs. They live in a world with a lack of intimacy, critical thinking, and individualization. Everyone is happy because everyone has been conditioned to desire their predestined positions in society. Look at our society, we are conditioned every time we turn on our television sets, listen to the radio, look at our social media feed, or even attempt to research anything on the internet. Articles, advertisements, videos are thrown at us in the attempts to show us what we are missing in our lives. It’s become so normal that no one even notices when they are being conditioned. I believe Aldous Huxley would see this immediately and would be disgusted in the way we allow it to happen. How we give ourselves over to the media and allow the politics to feed lies to us as …show more content…
It was clear in Brave New World that they were trying to remove the concept of jealousy and loss as problems within society and replace them with sexual experimentation and death conditioning. In our society we have removed intimacy as well. Our current society has replaced love with lust. Aldous Huxley believed in happiness and freedom from social pressures, however he was married twice and did believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe he would feel saddened by our current divorce rates and how our current society treats their elderly. As seen in Brave New World, John felt deeply distressed by the loss of his mother. The children under their death conditioning phase were fascinated by death and treated it as an exciting and regular even. They had no connection to what death meant when you have an intimate relationship with someone you love. It was apparent from the text that Aldous Huxley felt intimacy on a deeper level than just lust for someone was vital.
Our society which is very similar to Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World is one which is dependent on drugs to get through the day. Whether it be alcohol, weed, LSD, caffeine, or prescription drugs our society uses them all to suppress emotion and feelings. Brave New World used soma to do this very same thing. It does not create freedom in many regards it creates slavery. Slavery to the