by Nicholas Cockayne

Created on: March 03, 2007   Last Updated: November 02, 2011

The dystopia future that Huxley depicts in 'Brave New World' is one marked by the degeneration of the individual within the social whole, the reduction of the individual to that unit of the economic: the consumer. Physiological and mental conditioning reduce the characters to mere cells of the social organism; programmed with impulses that perpetuate the system. Communication between most characters is restricted to the language of consumerism, the discussion of the latest material product available; which is ultimately devoid of meaning and no form of communication at all. The drug soma provides any required escapism. The society of BNW is one where "everyone belongs to everyone" sexually, promiscuity is used to subdue the sexual impulse and to harness it to the social cause. Huxley's use of language, using the word "pneumatic" to describe Lenina's sexuality, shows the reduction of the individual's physical impulses to terms of industrial economics.

Ignorance in BNW is equated with happiness, and contrasted to the idea of freedom in the character of John the Savage. John advocates the freedom to be unhappy, to love, to be hurt, in the search for true happiness, in contrast to the conditioned and controlled happiness of the citizens of the Brave New World. It is in this juxtaposition of ideologies that the issue of social demise is truly explored.

While the individualistic ideology of freedom that John proposes as having more intrinsic worth than the conditioned happiness of the state initially appeals to the modern reader as the more worthy cause, Huxley does not moralise so simplistically. Although John's individualistic ideology may sound more genuine, it is ultimately flawed. The freedom to seek happiness and be hurt in the process incorporates its own defeat; to be hurt is not happiness, but it is freedom. Happiness is then sought but unachieved; freedom is an unhappy state of being. In contrast, while demeaning to John's idea of the individual, the citizens of culture of BNW know happiness by their own definition. That it is a limited form of happiness does not matter, because through conditioning they are made unaware of any other possible way of seeing the world. Those that do somehow slip through the system are still part of it, they may be unhappy with the social system, but they are bound to it. Ultimately those opposed to the system are still incorporated into it by being shipped off to islands where they will not trouble the social whole.

Huxley

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