Brave New World

I wrote this paper in my english class after reading ‘A Brave New World’: On the very last page of Aldous Huxley’s book, A Brave New World, he describes John as swinging slowly in circles after hanging himself (Huxley 259). It’s believed that Huxley’s main point of this ending to his story was to tell his readers that after all John’s effort of trying to change the brave new world, it was profoundly hopeless and the only thing left to do was to give up. This image creates a belief that Huxley was trying to warn his readers that the future was going to hold a extreme amount of advance technology in science, that would eventually turn into a dystopian world. When Huxley stresses the high amount of sex/drug usage and conditioning in his book, it was to show that these are highly used to help people live in a better society. The scary part is that most of Aldous Huxley’s predictions on the future were closely factual.

Although Huxley wrote many forms of literature, they all held the common theme of “meaning and possibilities of human life and perception” (Huxley 260). After the disease Huxley received when he was 16 years old that ended his dream of becoming a doctor, he also remained essentially scientific in his literature. Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s brother, believed that “science and mysticism were overlapping and complementary realms in Aldous Huxley’s mind” (Huxley 262). This explains where Huxley came up with the idea of Hatcheries and Conditioning. Which was an excellent way he began his book in a utopian world.

The first chapter in A Brave New World starts out with the director and his assistant giving a tour to a group of boys of the Hatching and Conditioning Centre (Huxley 3). At the centre is where the boys learn all about the Bokanovsky process and how they’re conditioned into five different caste. The director then explains that this conditioning helps each person love what caste they are conditioned into, whether they become leaders or factory workers. Later, when Mustapha Mond and John Savage discuss the outcomes of conditioning, John expresses that he disagrees with it all. John explains how conditioning only manipulates peoples minds and how it takes away their right to make their own decisions ( Pradas par 11). In a way, Huxley speaks out a lot through John’s character in this chapter. Huxley almost knew the world was turning into a highly conditioned society and he wanted to warn his readers not to be manipulated by it.

When John Savage, moves to this “Utopian World” he is mostly appalled by the vast amount of drug usage and promiscuous sex he perceives. He finally learns that the reasoning is for the people to avoid their problems and not face them and that the promiscuous sex is supposed to enhance the societies happiness. John also learns that using soma helps people avoid having any negative feelings or confrontation and he is upset when his mother attends to them permanently ( Pradas par 17). John is mostly so appalled by all of this because it’s nothing like that in the savage world he lived in. In the savage world, everyone has parents and gets married. They also have the right to feel different feelings and to encounter their own problems, even though it could lead to unhappiness. John expresses that he rather be unhappy than live superficially (Pradas par 17). Huxley’s main point, when explaining John’s feelings, is that our society shouldn’t be manipulated into thinking that drugs and sex are the solution to a utopian world.

Huxley’s book is idealistic of a world that hopefully will never exist. Some of Huxley’s readers believe that it’s not really a story at all, but an endearing oratory on the dangers of social engineering through biological tampering and psychological conditioning (Brian par 2). Nevertheless, Huxley makes his readers think that soon our world could be controlled by technology, and there’s not much to do to stop it. A Brave New World is usually discussed in terms of ideas, rather its appeal to the imagination ( Murray par 1). In the end, this book defiantly forces it’s readers to appreciate the “savage” world we live in, because it could be worse, it could be utopia.