There are many parallels drawn between our present day society and the society portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The World State is portrayed as being extremely organized and structured due to the way that the government regulates and controls every aspect of it. However, their society is completely centered around efficiency of production and the consumption of the services being provided. In Neil Postman’s article, he states that our society has a striking similarity to that of The World State, and he makes this point through a multitude of assertions. There are some truths and some false hoods to the statements that Postman proposed. The first point that Neil Postman makes is that people will start to like their lack of freedom
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In other words, Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. In Huxley’s novel people are controlled through conditioning and soma. This is evident when we find out about a drug called soma. Soma is a drug that causes people to have a happiness high without any of the downsides of doing drugs. In other words, in The World State people are distracted by getting what they “want” and by being sedated all the time to the point that they are not even cognizant of their surroundings anymore. Huxley illustrates this fear by depicting every character in Brave New World as a soma addict, and this is evident when Bernard overhears a worker spewing hypnopaedic propaganda, where one such line states that "..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..." (pg. 56). In our present day society, we have no such drug that everyone is “addicted” to. However, we do have technology, such as our phones, that give off similar dopamine responses that drugs simulate. On the other hand, the reality that Huxley portrays is far from our reality for one simple fact, our government doesn’t mandate consumerism at all. In the World State, there …show more content…
In Brave New World, this is carried out in two way, the first being that they are conditioned not to think on their own and the second way being that all information is censored and filtered by the government. We can observe this happening within the first few chapters of the book, in which the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning states that the babies will “grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives”(pg. 22). In our present day society, we don’t exactly shock kids in order to condition them, but we do feed them certain lies throughout their education. We feed them only certain parts of our countries history, and we filter websites up until college so we “stay on task” however, some of the websites that are blocked are reliable sources that even professors use that could help us with our work. However, the World State is different from us in the fact that our government officials do not keep historical books locked up in a “large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves” within their offices (pg. 256) . In other words, our government doesn’t completely delete our history and hide whatever remnants that they can find, instead
In other words, Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. In Huxley’s novel people are controlled through conditioning and soma. This is evident when we find out about a drug called soma. Soma is a drug that causes people to have a happiness high without any of the downsides of doing drugs. In other words, in The World State people are distracted by getting what they “want” and by being sedated all the time to the point that they are not even cognizant of their surroundings anymore. Huxley illustrates this fear by depicting every character in Brave New World as a soma addict, and this is evident when Bernard overhears a worker spewing hypnopaedic propaganda, where one such line states that "..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..." (pg. 56). In our present day society, we have no such drug that everyone is “addicted” to. However, we do have technology, such as our phones, that give off similar dopamine responses that drugs simulate. On the other hand, the reality that Huxley portrays is far from our reality for one simple fact, our government doesn’t mandate consumerism at all. In the World State, there …show more content…
In Brave New World, this is carried out in two way, the first being that they are conditioned not to think on their own and the second way being that all information is censored and filtered by the government. We can observe this happening within the first few chapters of the book, in which the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning states that the babies will “grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives”(pg. 22). In our present day society, we don’t exactly shock kids in order to condition them, but we do feed them certain lies throughout their education. We feed them only certain parts of our countries history, and we filter websites up until college so we “stay on task” however, some of the websites that are blocked are reliable sources that even professors use that could help us with our work. However, the World State is different from us in the fact that our government officials do not keep historical books locked up in a “large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves” within their offices (pg. 256) . In other words, our government doesn’t completely delete our history and hide whatever remnants that they can find, instead