Brave New World:Total Happiness Compenstation for Repression
Uploaded by xsparklyvix on Sep 06, 2005
“The promise of total happiness is a more than adequate compensation for the repression of the New World.”
To what extent do you agree with the statement.
“In order to have great happiness, you have to have great pain and unhappiness-otherwise how would you know when you're happy?” (Joseph Addison)
Aldous Huxley’s satirical novel Brave New World presents a government-controlled society that places restraints upon its citizens, resulting in a loss of social and mental freedom. These methods of limiting human behaviour are accomplished by social conditioning, the categorical division of society, and the censorship of art and religion. This dictatorial government suppresses difference and individuality, breeding a type of conformity, which is death in life rather than living. The inhabitants of this society avoid facing truth at all costs through the use of hallucinogenic drug ‘soma’. The consequence of this is a nation of deliriously happy individuals with no point to living.
The authoritarian government referred to as the ‘World State’ use the motto of ‘Community, Identity, Stability’ to create a society able to achieve solidarity and stability in the removal of individuality in citizens. Huxley creates criteria that must be met for the stability of the society to remain constant: the ostracism of art, science and religion. These cultural pursuits lead to emotional, physical and spiritual unrest potentially causing a threat to society. At the time of Huxley’s writing a powerful movement towards a welfare state was feared causing social instability. This fear in the possibility of radical change is mirrored in ‘Brave New World’. As quoted by Oscar Wilde "Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Individualism is restricted in the Brave New World as ‘everyone works for everyone else’. The elimination of literature and censorship of all cultural pursuits is relied upon to attain stability. Without any pain and suffering in the New World, Art is not an issue, ‘You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.’ In removing these cultures the possibility of knowledge of history is removed, ‘History is more or less bunk’. Without these ideas, there is no knowledge of an alternative life eliminating an uprising.
The removal of religion eradicates the problem with death and an afterlife, God ‘manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all’. By not allowing the ability to believe...