Sunday, September 14, 2014

Huxley suggests that in order for a totalitarian state to be successful everyone must love their servitude. How does Brave New World achieve this?

With the elimination of history and books as well as
genetic engineering and hypnopaedia and soma, the New World has,
for the most part, achieved its goal of manufacturing happiness in servitude, better
known in Brave New World as "stability."  For, as Huxley has also
written,



the
really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the
souls and flesh of human
beings.



After the artificial
creation of people in the Hatchery, the New World accomplishes its goal of servitude by
infant conditioning such as is exhibited in Chapter 3 in which the children run around
naked and are taught that "everyone belongs to everyone else."  With this conditioning,
sexual relations as adults will be meaningless and have no connection with love. Also,
the sexual freedom of people as adults compensates for the lack of polititcal and
economic freedom that they have. Then, with the caste system and their consequent sleep
conditioning, no one in the New World wants to be more that what he/she already is. (
That is, except for a few aberrations, such as Bernard Marx and Helmholtz.) With these
created differences in people, the government of the New World assigns the castes to
their appropriate places in the social and economic hierarchy.  The various castes do
not like each other, either, so there is no envy to disrupt order.  For instance, Lenina
sees the Gammas and tells her date, Henry Foster, she is so glad that she is not one of
them.


Even though the people of the New World have been
created to be content with their lives through eugenics, the New World recognizes that
reality may be a burden even to them, or they may yet have some misgivings about their
society.  So, in place of alcohol and other narcotics, soma has
been created and is dispersed at Solidarity Meetings or anytime people become
collectively agitated.  For instance, when the multitudes of Deltas become upset after
John the Savage becomes so angered by their presence near his dying mother, the police
spray soma to subdue them.  Thus, along with the freedom to escape
and daydream that soma provides, it reconciles the people of the
New World to their servitude.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the meaning of the 4th stanza of Eliot's Preludes, especially the lines "I am moved by fancies...Infinitely suffering thing".

A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces, The Love...