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The Social and Political Attitudes of Brave New World

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What if there was a place where you did not have to, or rather, you could not think for yourself? A place where one's happiness was controlled and rationed? How would you adapt with no freedom of thought, speech, or happiness in general? In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, there are many different attitudes portrayed with the purpose to make the reader think of the possible changes in our society and how they could affect its people. Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading Brave New World elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has …show more content…

True happiness is a consequence of freedom, not slavery. Another example is how Bernard suffers throughout the book, being caught between both worlds: a life of Soma or a life of free will. Although he has been conditioned to accept his servitude, he is constantly longing for freedom. He sees this freedom in the Savage, and envies him for possessing the inner happiness— genuine happiness— which Bernard's society outlaws. Huxley uses Bernard to exemplify this struggle between freedom and slavery. Huxley argues that a genuine, free life requires suffering and pain by creating the perfect scenario: leaving someone to choose how they want to live their life. Become an individual or conform. Men without anguish are men without souls. Huxley's future describes a world without pain and a world without soul. As perfect pleasure-drugs go, Soma under whelms. It's not really a utopian wonder drug at all. Soma does make one high. Yet Soma is more akin to a hangover-fewer tranquillizers or a psychic anaesthetizing like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoria. It gives rise to only a shallow, un-empathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma does not give Marx the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does Soma make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after

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