When I first started to read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, I was confused about what was happening. I thought that for sure we would never actually be reading a book like that, but we were. What really helped me understand the book was when we reflected on it in class and from their lots of my questions were answered. The book made me reflect on our world and the similarities and differences between them. Although sometimes I was surprised to see what I was reading, I am still happy to have read this book and had a chance to look at another world, the main similarities that I found were firstly addiction in the book you can see that when anyone felt pain or just wanted to have fun they would take a drug called soma similar to this world, when people want to get rid of sadness or pain, and also just want to have fun they take drugs such as Alcohol. Another thing that is similar is social isolation, social isolation is when people feel loneliness and isolation and it happens a lot in our world. Just like in our world people feel lonely even though they have social media and technology in the book for example john, in the book you can see that he is hoping to find a connection with a real human and not with people that are programmed he also struggled lots to fit in with the society because he was different. In conclusion, I was glad to have read this book and I am glad that I was able to reflect on it.

The book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley introduced me to the concept of utopia or dystopia. Despite my expectations, I found the book to be enjoyable. I was initially apprehensive about it since the plot was futuristic and dealt with stuff similar to the Hunger Games, so i thought it might be mind-bending. In some cases, I found it manageable to read. Occasionally, I had difficulty following the plot, but most of the time, I was able to do so. It was an uncomfortable and psychedelic experience for me as a reader to sometimes comprehend this book. It was evident that some aspects of Huxley’s writing were too familiar with the way people are acting today in terms of their behaviour. This was the most impressive part of the experience for me. The explanation was a little dramatic in nature, even though it was a simple one. There was a sense of realism in the book and, therefore, the book was creepier because of it. Additionally, i was irritated by the mindlessness and repetition of phrases that are only attributed to civilized people, as well as the constant repetition of their own phrases. It is, however, something we do as well, and we do it in a similar manner. People are always repeating the same things over and over again. It is the combination of what you have learned, heard, or have been taught that forms all of it. In the present, we live. It is the way the world works today and we are used to living in a world like that. It is possible that civilization is not at all bad in the long run. I dont think they had any reason to question the validity of your explanation if you weren’t too smart. We are also not subjected to any questions regarding the knowledge, schools, or parents that we have. This is not to say that we are bad people. It is just a matter of how we see the world in which they live in compared with the modern civilization described in the book from our perspective.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a very fascinating book about categories in humanity by genetics and making everybody in levels and you could never been the highest level and not because you aren’t good enough but because you were just in that category and there was  nothing you could do about it. The books left me with a lot of questions and doubts  like in a future this could be my world in some ways this Is like the world im living in now and is really scary because if you think about it 50 years ago divorce or cheating wasn’t acceptable but now 60% of marriage end in divorce and at lest in Mexico I don’t know if here but im Mexico we do have categories id different like with money or you’re families last name but still and that when you know the world is changing a lot scince 1932.

I think a lot of  people now more than before fell more like Bernard  because he doesn’t  fit and I think all of us sometimes don’t fit at all and feel a little like Bernard and more if you see other people fitting in.

Something I really didn’t like was the ending it wasted that understandable  and you need some guidance in all the book for me there were a lot of words  that I didn’t understand and had to ask for them.

After all I would totally recommend this book because it makes you think about you’re like and how you can wat you’re time in so little time we have and Aldo about the future how is it going to change we don’t know.

While I was reading the book Brave New World I felt that it connected to our society and that It really shows the path that things can go down by showing us how a futuristic society is like. In this society thye mass produce humans in labs and they make them play sex games. All this is a sort of reflection of our own society because people just take drugs when they feel sad. The plot of this book is how Bernard feels different in this society and how he feels sometimes left out because of his different way of thinking and because of his height. This really connects to our own world because some people are left in th emargin because of some reasons such as race or something similar. As stated before the drugs are a big part of this futuristic society but in our society it isnt all that different. When somme people are in the margin of society they feel abandoned by this society and they start hating this society that left them out. When all this energy is concentrated it results in characters such as Bernard or John the Savage. In this society they have castes which is basically the equivalent of social classes and it defines what your job is or what you can or can not do.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is told in a third person view. The characters in the novel never talk to us but to eachother and the narrator explains details of the characters and what they are doing. We also learn that most of the characters are sex. Most of the characters introduced into the story are high on a drug called soma, and since most of them are addicted to it they are always happy and sex-driven. All the characters that were made in the labratory are programmed like robots to act a certain way. So, when asked what personalities the characters have, the best way to describe them is by their categories of, Alpha, Beta, Gammies and Delta’s because this is how they were programmed. In the Dystopia, all languages have been rid of in the main society expect one (English), because all other languages are considered dead languages and are not used. Though all the characters are human its easy to agree that they are brain washed in a similar way that we are. Society in our world indulge ourselves in entertainment and yummy foods while the Brave New World’s version of this is to indulge themselves in soma.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, was my first book about Utopia/Dystopia. And to my surprise, I enjoyed the book. At first, I thought it would be confusing with all the scientific descriptions and futuristic stuff, but it was relatively easy to read and if I dare say, manageable to understand. It was not always easy to follow, but yes, most of the time. The book itself made me feel uncomfortable and strange. Some things Huxley wrote about were too close to how people are acting nowadays. Just a little more dramatically described. It made the book feel more natural and, therefore more spooky. I also felt irritated over the civilized people’s actions, mindlessness, and always-repeating phrases. But that is also something we do as well. People are repeating the same things all the time. The things you were taught, the things you learned, things you heard. Who can tell what is right and what is wrong? We live now. We are used to the world working this way as it is now. Maybe there is nothing wrong with civilization. There was no reason for them to question it (well, if you weren’t too bright). We also don’t question schools, parents, and our knowledge. I’m not saying there is something wrong with us. It is just the perspective we have on the Modern civilization in the book and them on their world.

The novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley was easily one of the most thought-provoking activities I ever had, and honestly, it has left me quite angry at its world. This is likely because Brave New World is not like any dystopian novel I have ever read. In many dystopian novels, the people living in those worlds have their rights and freedoms taken away from them. What makes Brave New World different is that nothing is taken from them, it is traded. They have traded their identity and freedom for unwavering happiness. I find this infuriating. The happiness the citizens of the Brave New World have acquired is completely worthless. Real happiness is not something that can be gained, it must be earned. The easier something is to get, the less it is worth. That is why the happiness of the people in Brave New World is not worth anything.

Adding to that, it disturbs me even more how dedicated the government of that world is to maintaining this fake happiness. Babies are manufactured like machines. People are dependent on drugs when facing adversity. Things like monogamy, individuality, and solitude are basically outlawed. This society can not be seen as human. People in this world have been reduced to numbers on spreadsheets, without any need or purpose other than those given to them by the World Government. All of this made me angry, but by the last few chapters of the novel, the feeling of anger I felt eventually turned into pity.

I could not help but feel sad for the people in that world. People were brought into the world without affection or any type of connection. Parents are the most important things in a person’s life, they are the ones who should always accept you for who you are. To have parents degraded to being vulgar concepts is nothing short of despicable. I can only feel sad for people of the Brave New World, who have never felt the loving embrace of a parent.

While the book was very thought-provoking, the anger and sorrow I felt while reading is what truly overwhelmed me. Maybe it was Huxley’s intention to make readers feel like this in order to avoid that future. Reading this book was truly a unique experience, and I am glad to have felt all these emotions Huxley experienced while writing.

In a nutshell, Brave New World is a book…a book people might call horrifying or magnificent, but in reality, it is more than a book. It is an experience. Despite my best efforts, I will never be able to fully understand this experience. A book that I hated so much has never connected with me so deeply. It’s strange to feel so many emotions at once, but that’s what brave new world provides a rollercoaster of emotions.

  As much as I felt so many different emotions while reading this book, I felt hatred the most. I hated the fact that the book made me recognize something I have been ignoring for a long time. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that our society is just as horrible as the brave new world society. As a society, we treat our women as though they are objects and have never reached the true equality we hoped for. As a result, we exclude the people who act differently, speak differently, or look different from us. In order to relieve our pain, we drug ourselves.

In spite of that, we judge this novel as if this society is incapable. The idea of a society filled with sex and drugs is grotesque. However, is this not the way our society is now? Despite the fact that this may not have been my favorite book, I do appreciate what it taught me and I hope that one day we can be the kind of society that grows and learns and develops as we go along.

Brave New World is a dystopian novel written in 1932 by Aldous Huxley, a British writer and philosopher.
This story takes place in 632 AF (After Ford), throughout the novel there is a lot of reflection. As a main theme he often uses the future, but also about Huxley’s society in the 32s. Almost all things have evolved over time, from our society today to that of 1932. It is for this and other aspects that I think this novel is a good example of comparison of how the future was seen before and how it is now.

As for the novel, it got a little boring for me after a certain point. But one of the things that brought it back to life was the entrance of a character named John. This kid was what we would call “normal”, but to them this kid was an indomitable and a savage. Another character that stands out a lot and I quite like is Bernard himself, this character was also different from the others because he had his own thoughts and views on the world and didn’t just follow the hypnopedia that everyone else followed in an infinite loop. However, these two perosnages were not the same, as on the one hand John would take Soma as soon as one thing overtook him. Slow novels bore me, and luckily the speed at which events unfolded was a very good pace. The plot itself I also liked as far as I could tell.

One of the things that strikes me the most is to see the way people perceive all the things that in this supposed “perfect society” are normalized. Things such as the sexual freedom that everyone has, including small children, as well as the fact of creating human beings at will and likeness in laboratories. Because really, nowadays there are similar things in the world we live in.

After reading this novel I have started to ask myself a lot of questions about things in our society today. The reasons why we do such things in such a way, etc…. It has changed my perspective on the differences between dystopia and utopia as I progressed through the book “The Brave New World”.

This book “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley made me change my opinion about the definition of utopia. My own definition of utopia was the world that everyone was satisfied with. However, though everyone in this book is happy and they believe the brave new world is the way as utopia because they don’t even know another world that has families, religions, arts, and so on, I cannot say that the brave new world is how utopia is supposed to be. “One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for” (p.201). These words meant to a lot me. In the brave new world, they sacrificed families, religions, and so on. They don’t know the importance of being loved, and respected as a unique person. We probably must pay something or give something up to get happiness. We cannot have everything we want at the same time. However, I assume it should be our own decision what we give up and what we get instead. They shouldn’t also be taught to prioritize pleasure, consumption, and instant gratification over deeper human values such as love, family, and creativity. They should consider their own value individually. Their opinions should be respected with fairness. The people in the brave new world never had an opportunity to realize the danger of sacrificing individuality and authentic human connections in pursuit of efficiency, pleasure, and control until John (the savage) came. What if they knew what it’s like to have a family?. There’s something that you can find after you know about the other aspect. I could be aware of some good points about the world we live in by understanding the brave new world, which is a bleak and oppressive vision of society. We never know until we start to doubt the present situation. It starts with finding mistakes. And keep chasing what we truly want.

Brave New World left me severely uncomfortable.

Huxley’s methods of instilling discomfort within his readers left me astonished, and frankly not wanting to continue.  Since its release, the book was under constant controversy for its apparent use of drugs and the shameless sexual promiscuity. Although nearly one hundred years have passed since the book’s initial release in 1932, there are numerous instances where I felt dumbstruck at the book and its contents.

The story is centered around a seemingly utopic society, where citizens are encouraged to take recreational anti-depressants, to remain in a constant state of polygamy, and go through heavy brain “conditioning” since birth. Citizens no longer have family, emotion, imagination, religion, or any sort of individuality. Why would they? They already have soma- induced “happiness”, constant sex and orgies, and Sunday Solidarity Service!

As a teenage girl, the instances throughout the book involving the degradation, and sometimes violence against women, incited some uneasiness. I found irony in the fact that in this “Brave New World” with a supposed better quality of life, the normalization of the objectification and sexualization of women still stands. The encouragement of these things is also worth noting. For example, in Chapter III, one of the main characters, Lenina, comments on how her current sexual partner Henry Foster, patted her behind. One of her few female friends Fanny, responds triumphantly, “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.” (pg. 35). I do no believe Huxley did this with the intention of commenting on women’s rights, more so alluding towards the casual polygamy and sex throughout the story.

The story becomes all the more disturbing when some horrible details are realized within our society.

I found ways to enjoy the book and its sterile language, and political implications. Moreover, there were multiple instances while reading where I questioned: Why do I need to read this? I’m just a fifteen year old girl! Why am I reading about fake drugs and sex for a tenth grade novel study? I am still questioning some of these, but I learned that I do not always have to enjoy what I am reading. I find myself wanting to live in a sort of ignorant bliss. I have also learned to become grateful for the things that Lenina and John came close to, but do not have. These being emotion, free will, and the ability to choose the colour of my clothes.

 

 

Brave new world by alders Huxley. This book was a lot better to read that all quiet in the western front. The first chapters I didn’t understand that much about it, but as I read through I enjoyed the book. What I understood about thins book is that they tried to make a perfect society in which everyone is happy. They use science to create people and to do whatever they want but they take away freedom, so the hole book stated a question . Is it better to be happy or to be free. Everyone has a role in this futurist society. Mustafa is a top controller of the world and he told them how it was before when women gave birth. everyone was very disgusted by this idea. The major characters in this book is Lenina and Bernard. Bernard is a psychologist and even though he is high in society he feels like an outsider because he doesn’t t fit in and he has a different perspective of society, Bernard likes Lenina but it bothers to him that she is like everyone else. Soma is a very important drug in this society because it makes you fell happy and to forget their problems. I think in our world we all have our soma but in this world is alcohol or drugs.

In this society sex is also very common, everyone has sex with everyone and that seems normal to them. Having a close relationship isn’t normal and that is what Bernard wants with Lenina. You can learn about the characters by how they act, what they say and how they speak. He uses a lot of irony through the book. His main points is the big government, labor movements, meterialism etc. In brave new world there are different society: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilons. I think with this he wants to show that in our world there are also different societies that differences us. In conclusion I enjoyed this book because I think it shows problems that the have in our world but we don’t see them or put more attention and responding the question of being happy or being free I prefer being free because when you live happy but you don’t have freedom you don’t have to opportunity to make your choices and when you go out of this happiness you realize that you have lived a fraud and yes everyone is happy there is no deaths it seems perfect so what is it dystopia or utopia.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a book based on an ideal society, where the social normality’s are based on the ideology of science instead of normal human relationships, creation, and behaviors. At first I didn’t understand nor like this book, I thought it was weird and a bit disturbing, but as I kept reading I realized that there are a lot of similarities between this Brave New World and the world we live in now. A similarity in the book that stood out profoundly was the usage of the drug soma. Soma presumably makes everyone in the society diminish the pain in their life, ultimately making them happy, this reminds me of present day where people take prescription drugs such as anti-depressants to get the same affects and result as soma.

And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.” (pp. 209-210)

I like this passage because it explains that once you take soma you go into some sort of a trance called a “soma-holiday” which means it takes you away from the real world and into a world without sadness, much like what common drugs can do to you in our society. In the end, I found this book to be very interesting although I still think some parts were confusing and gory, I believe that is what makes it such an intriguing book to read especially because there are specific aspects that we can relate to our world.

 

In the book Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley conjures a world in which society is controlled through technology and science promoting order and stability while forfeiting liberty. After reading this book it fills sadness because of the similarities it shares with our world. The world we live in grows increasingly similar with new technology and social changes. Huxley’s fictional society has several differences than our own, but similarities can be portrayed.

A major feature in Huxley’s society is the technology used to control freedom and induce happiness. This is similar to our worlds technology constantly showering us with unreliable propaganda leading to expanded consumerism and desire. I can relate to this through social media. It takes my time away from being productive and motivates me to keep up with trends that do not benefit my well being. However, in Huxley’s world these traits are taught at birth through conditioning. For example, hypnopaedia and soma are designed to create contentment for the people.

Huxley’s world also shares similar values to ours by promoting economic growth and productivity over the well being of most of society. In our world, countries want people to work extra long hours for low wages, furthering their economy. Careers are prioritized over personal lives. My parents experienced this when I was younger. Living in Vancouver my parents worked until 7pm every night while I would be stuck in day care without them. Once we moved to Victoria they were able to find different jobs resulting in a more balanced and happy life. Instead of individuals working this hard for so little, without enjoying it, in Huxley’s society each person is designed to fill their role and value conventionality and stability naturally.

To conclude, our world shares some similarities to the one described by Huxley, although society is not as advanced and controlled. Technology is speeding up at a rapid pace, to the point that we could be controlled by it further. In the future we need to be careful and not let technology take away from our freedom.

 

While reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley my view and opinion of the book changed quite a lot throughout it. The first chapter or two I was rather confused on what was happening. With children being mass produced in labs and by how the characters behaved, I honestly found the book to be quite disturbing at points even. Throughout the course of the book, I began to make some connections between this made-up world and our own. As the book progressed even further, I didn’t find this book so disturbing as before. Or at least not in the same way as before. At first it was simply because of all the weird things, like manufacturing humans in mass, or the fact that everyone belonged to everyone. But now after reading it and reflecting on it I think I am more disturbed by the connections between this world and our own and how the bad side of emotions are basically gone. I can honestly say that by reading this novel, it wasn’t only an eye-opening experience, but also quite a swarm of different emotions.

When reading this novel, I noticed how all the aspects of negative emotions were erased. or at least taken away by soma. By doing this, they erased the contrast effect. The effect that bad emotions have on good ones. If someone never experiences something like loss, then how can they really understand the feeling of gaining something? If no one ever feels sadness, how can they really know what happiness is? Going through the book, i learned that to them, stability is happiness. But if stability is happiness, then there would, as I said before, be no contrast effect which would mean that the people of this world, though they may belive they are happy, they are only getting to experience a muted sense of happiness. Going back to the soma, and I will use Lenina as an example, every time she felt sad, she simply took a couple grammies of soma and poof! Just like that she was feeling happy! But if she never allowed those emotions to surface, never experienced anger, or sadness then how could she be sure that the world she was in was actually “happy world.”

Related to this, everyone has a role in society, they work, and they don’t complain about it. But with no problems if everything bad has been taken away then why are people working? It also leads to monotony – every day is the same. For example, in this world you do your job, take some soma, “have” whoever you want and then repeat. When you think of it, our world is slowly progressing to be like this. Not exactly, but for example in school we wake up early five days a week, go to school, learn, eat, learn some more, maybe do some activities or sports and then go home. Obviously, this isn’t complete the same but, in a way, it is sort of similar and I wonder if one day our world will follow some form of cycle. We wake up, go about our day, and then go to bed only to repeat ourselves, or do something similar the next day.

Finally, in this brave new world, anything that somone could desire has been made so they could have it. If they wanted somone, they could have them. Diseases have been eradicated as well. With everyone not having any needs, society will not progress. Inventions are borne out of solving problems people face but if people don’t face problems, then how can they create any solutions. One might argue that in this story there are no problems, so no solutions are needed but sometimes solutions for one issue create benefits in other areas.

 

 

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is a dystopian novel that paints a society where science and technology plays a major role in human life, while religions, families, and sadness are eliminated. One key technology that sets Brave New World apart from other dystopian novels is hypnopaedia, a form of conditioning. Hypnopaedia plays an important role in this society as it conditions young children to society’s ideas as truths in their sleep. Hypnopaedia, as seen earlier in the novel, is used to establish prejudice formed for each caste of the World. This raises the question: how different is hypnopaedia from ways we learn ideas from our parents and school?

In the real world, the knowledge and beliefs we gain is through personal experience, education, and interaction with others. We learn that our actions have consequences not because we are fed this information in our sleep, but from first-hand experiences. Such as breaking your mother’s vase by accident, or not studying for an exam only to get poor marks. Additionally, education offers perspective for our beliefs through studying the past, present, and theoretical ideas from fiction and non-fiction works. Moreover, human interaction teaches us about morals: what to do, and what not to do in certain situations. Through these experiences, we are able to learn about how the world works. 

In contrast, learning in Brave New World is controlled. The government selects what children can learn about and how the information is given, “The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!….Suggestions from the State” (p. 23-24). The suggestions, however, are taught to be perceived as truths. Furthermore, what children learn is directly affected by their caste and what the State believes is necessary for them to know for the sake of social stability. As seen in the second chapter, a group of Beta children are in their Elementary Class Consciousness, a sleep teaching class.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able… (p. 22-23) .

However, in both the real world and Brave New World, prejudice is taught. In the real world, prejudice against people of other races, nationalities, or gender, etc. is “learned values and beliefs from their family, peers, teachers, the media, and others around them. In other words, children learn prejudice through socialisation.”(How We Learn Prejudice, 2023) One slight difference is that in the real world, prejudice is taught consciously, which leaves people to add their perspectives onto the beliefs, while in Brave New World, prejudice is subconsciously fed into children’s minds to reason their role and others in social stability.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World made me view our society in a different way, consisting of mass production, corporateness, and broken relationships. There are a lot of people in my class who had immediately jumped to conclusions upon reading the first chapter as it was pretty unsettling, not saying that All Quiet on The Western Front wasn’t, but this book was unsettling in a different way, a dark and disturbing way. The first chapter went over the influence of mass production in this ‘brave new world’ which has led to technological advances such as meeting the demand of customers at a faster rate by producing multiple products at a time, or in this case, the mass production of humans in a way that would force them to work endlessly to boost the economy. Upon reading the chapter, it took me a while to understand what I have just read here. Not only does it imply that people’s futures were already decided upon fertilization, but also the fact that they were happy about it? The first chapter introduces us to the social classes among humans, which were created to determine what type of jobs they would have, and whether they were going to have a successful life. The social classes ranged from the Greek letters of alpha to epsilon where alpha (the top) would receive the most benefits and the be provided with the highest level of education, and the lower classes (specifically gamma and below) would be limited in their amount of knowledge by being limited in what they were allowed to do. The reason behind this was to accustom the lower classes to the lower paying jobs that they would be working in their futures. The type of social class would also determine the amount of oxygen they would receive as embryos as a way to control their amount of intelligence, the type of education that they would receive, and whether they were going to undergo Bokanovsky’s process where the ovula would be multiplied hundreds of times using a series of X-Rays. This was all concluded at the end of the first chapter which was originally a lot of information to take in for myself and would make anyone feel more or less confused on how to make the connections with the information that we were provided with the actual events of the story, but I didn’t let that discourage me from seeing the whole picture, I knew that there was a certain degree of meaning behind this nonsense; what was Huxley trying to communicate to us, the audience? How would the society of a world like this look like? I decided to dig in deeper.

I knew that there was some sort of hidden message inside this book, perhaps something that Huxley wanted to warn us about, so once I dug deeper inside this book, it all started to come together. First of all, mass production: During Huxley’s era, mass production was starting to become a major aspect of American society as it did help companies meet the demand of their customers at a faster rate, where the goods made by smaller businesses would start to seem irrelevant. Secondly, the social classes: for many years, society has always had some sort of gap between social classes where people could be treated differently depending on how much they make. Although it is not as commonly seen today as it was back then, it is still an important issue that should be addressed so these differences wouldn’t restrict what people would be able to do in their daily lives, the unacceptance of contradicting or ‘controversial’ opinions as seen in the various chapters where Bernard Marx is seen as an outsider as he does not agree with the common belief and is outcast as a result, and the abuse of drugs which is viewed to be a suitable alternative to therapy by getting rid of all negative emotions. Once I have realized all these things, I have noticed that we are in fact heading towards that direction. Although our society hasn’t gotten to the point where Huxley imagined it to be, I do have reason to believe that we are heading towards that direction, or if not, already living in that society. Nowadays, we start to see cases of smaller businesses collapsing due to the expansion of major corporations, people being treated differently depending on where they live or how they live their life, people being neglected, ignored, bullied, or in more severe cases arrested because of how they think or believe in, and the legalization of certain drugs as a way to ‘boost’ the economy while placing our modern day youth in a position where drugs are easily accessible to them are prime examples of how we are already living in the ‘brave new world.’ As human beings, we tend to laugh when our enemies fall, involve ourselves into modern-day situations and dislike one another for thinking differently if it means following a different religion or having a different political view, and hold grudges against other people because they may have done something wrong to you as a result of something you did to them or something that happened to them, where have we gone wrong? Even though we strive to be open minded towards other people, even if it means accepting other views and opinions, we tend to resort back to our humanly nature of attacking other people. This is what I believe Bernard is a victim of, being different from the others for sticking to his own ideals, and for that, I do admire him despite his flaws. Overall, this book has made me reflect on the many things that have been going around the world in a different way now that I have seen the way our society could look like if we continue to live our lives in this certain way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopian book, in which technology has progressed to the point that human beings are manufactured instead of raised, emotion is willingly suppressed with a drug, god is non-existent in culture, scientific progress is blocked by the current powers, and anyone outside of the norm is banished to islands with others like them. This was Huxley’s horrid prediction for the future. Even back in the 1930s Huxley saw unsettling trends towards dependency on things we don’t have an understanding of. These days, most of us couldn’t get by without our cellphones; we use them for everything from communication to schedules to games. However, if you walked up to the average person and asked them to describe how their phone works, they couldn’t tell you. I believe that one of Huxley’s true worries when writing Brave New World was that in the future humankind would lose their inquisitive nature, and submit to the forces above us.

I think that Huxley was right, and that we as a race are losing our sense of curiosity. Often when someone says something online no one fact checks it, and just accept it as fact. We don’t even have the base sense of “hey I wonder where that thing comes from” anymore, we just accept it. Obviously there are outliers to this, there are outliers to all things. So many people on earth just accept whatever they are told, and Brave New World just exasperates that fact. I think that is really sad, and if we continue with the same attitude as we have right now, and don’t keep pushing boundaries we will fall into a similar trap as Brave New World did; living in a homogenous society that has stagnated.

Brave new world by Aldous Huxley. This book was much more enjoyable to read than all quiet on the western front because brave new world was more of a fiction book rather than all quiet on the western front which was based on actual events. One of the characters that made this book more interesting was bernard because he was showing strange ideas and opinions and that made the controllers of this perfect society mad and threatened to banish him to a remote place where he could not “disturb the peace.” Another character that I liked is John or the “savage” I like john because he was like a complete outcast and thought that the society that these people were living in was terrible and he was very unimpressed by it all these two characters definitely made the book more interesting because they weren’t following what the others thought they had their own ideas and their own opinions and were not scared to share them even if there were consequences. The plot of this story was very slow in the beginning I thought and honestly was a good thing because it made me want to keep reading the book and trying to figure out what was going to happen next. The imagery in this book was also excellent just like in all quiet on the western front except this one was a little more relatable. When I was reading this book it gave a very strong image in my head like when the babies were being made in the factory I sort of imagined it like that scene from the matrix when they are next to thousands of unborn people being conditioned to whatever the people wanted them to do. The setting that this book is in is quite similar to our society maybe not yet but possibly in the future, I think that in the near future, we will have a drug similar to soma, and most people will take it and get stuck into this constant loop of relying on this drug to support their life. I also believe that we will factory create babies and I don’t mean like create them I mean alter their DNA code to possibly cure diseases that this baby may possibly get. In the end, if you like reading fiction books I would honestly recommend this book.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian novel that was written in 1932. As the story takes place in 632 AF, (After Ford), some parts of the novel reflect on not only the intended future but also Huxley’s society. (1932). As time has passed, and where we are heading towards the future, a lot of things have been altered in society from the one back in 1932. I believe this book can be a good reference point for comparing the intended future people nearly a hundred years ago predicted and the one we live in now. 

The story takes place in London, U.K. In this “Brave New World”, humans are rather artificially manufactured than done biologically through natural reproduction. People are born in a hatchery, where multiple gametes are put into one egg, creating multiple sets of identical twins. This process is called Bokanovsky’s Process, and the fewer times an egg is divided and multiplied, the higher social rank is given to the “offspring”. The society runs on a hierarchy, with the Alphas being at the top and the Epsilons at the other end. The Alphas are responsible for doing the important work, whereas the Epsilons are responsible for doing the unimportant, dirty work. The people in this society go through a process called hypnopedia, (aka. Sleep-learning), which teaches people about their social rankings and is commonly used as a method for brainwashing. The Alphas are taught prejudice; whereas the Epsilons are taught to be thankful for what they already have. This is closely related to our society we live in – as these topics – such as prejudice, are taught by parents and kids tend to be “brainwashed” by them. The following proves to the readers that Huxley has intended to criticize the problems in parenting.

As the story proceeds and more and more details are revealed, the true main character of the story, John “the savage” gets introduced, who is from the isolated society in what the brave new world calls the “savage reservation”. When he has been brought to the Brave New World, he is shocked by how the society functions; he eventually leaves the Society with despair and agony, by ending his own life. 

The novel Brave New World closely reflects and is related to the society we live in now – and criticizes the flaws in our world, such as parenting, drug abuse and social/racial prejudices. This novel was a good stop-point for me to step back and view the society I live in from a different perspective and aspect.

Brave new world by Aldous Huxley was written in 1931 and published in 1932. It presents a futuristic dystopian world, where pain and sadness have been eradicated but at the price of freedom. There is no real human connections. Marriage, family, and procreation have all been eliminated, babies are genetically engineered and grown in hatcheries, anything to avoid the probability of feeling unhappy. They condition each human for a particular caste, programmed to be productive and complaisant through a combination of biological manipulation and psychological conditioning. There was no other option for them, even lower castes who worked as garbage man and all those jobs no one really wants to do were programmed to enjoy their jobs as it was their only purpose. They use electroshock to condition children to hate flowers and books. It feels obvious for them, just mass produce and condition everyone to do a specific part to contribute to the whole sistem, if you were programmed to work just happily work and if you were from a higher cast just enjoy that. Everyone grows up like this, it almost feels like everyone is just a robot. Until you start seeing the human and real aspect of it all. Through the entirety of the book everyone is extremely judging, there is no individuality and anyone who is slightly different is excluded, seen as a joke. You have to dress the same, think the same, act the same but everyone is happy this way. Woman are seen as a prize and its all they have ever known since they were girls at the hatchery. With this and more aspects, I think you can notice how it isn’t that different from our reality today.

When I first started reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, I thought that it was pretty interesting and was intrigued by the idea of people being manufactured in factories instead of being born out of their mothers. halfway through the book it got sort of boring and I enjoyed it less and less. When John was introduced, however, it got interesting again and I started to want to actually read it on my own. I liked John because he was “normal” to us, but to the other people in the book he was the savage. I also like Bernard because he had his own thoughts and views on the world and was not just following the hypnopaedia that everyone else was following in a blind trance. He also was not completely like John because he would take Soma if things got too much for him to handle which is more relatable than always takign Soma or never taking Soma. The plot of the book was good and I like the pacing of how fast the story progressed. It started with me thinking Bernard was the main character but ended with me thinking it was John. Maybe it was both I am still pondering that thought. The language used in the book was old-fashioned which made it seem weird because it was written in the 20th century and that was the kidn of language used while the story takes place in the future. The imagery in this novel was pretty easy to picture inside of my own imagination. I could imagine the reservation where John was born and raised and I could imagine the lighthouse that John died in. I could also picture the room in which John, Bernard and the writer guy talked with the Controller. The setting is very different from the one I live in, people have families, people are not created inside of factories, and people are not set to have certain levels of intelligence. The tone that Aldous Huxley seemed to have was that he was poking fun of how he saw the people around him act and how degenerate modern western society is starting to become. Overall it was a nice read and I would reccommend it to other people if they asked for a dystopian novel recommendation.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, this book caught my attention in too many ways. Since the first chapter, a lot has been going on. The author shows us his idea of a perfect society in the future, but he doesn’t forget about the cost humanity has to pay. as you go reading, he leaves you with questions about the world we live in now. Reading this book made me realize many things about the world we live in now and all the development in technology and sciences. It made me realize that we are not that far away from that imaginary society he tells us about. It is interesting to look at how people react to all the things that are normalized in that so-called “perfect society,” like giving sexual liberty to small children or creating humans in laboratories. When there are somewhat similar things nowadays in our society. Because in a certain way is disturbing the way they live in that society. Still, at the same time, it is even more disturbing to look around the world right now and notice that that imaginary society is becoming a reality little by little. For example, we have “In vitro fertilization,” to mention one aspect that I noticed in my surroundings. This book left many questions in my head and made me more curious about the different ideas of utopias and dystopias people have. Because If we think about it, our society could have been someone’s dystopia turn reality.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley tells the story of a dystopian futuristic society and how many weird things that we dont have in our society like using drugs to be happy, reproductive technology, human cultives, and more, are completely normal things in their day to day lifes. At the start I was really confused, I didnt know what was going on or where it was going, but after a while I got the hang of it. Some thing that really got me thinking is how they outcast others just because of their different preferences, for example Bernard didnt like always having sex with anyone or taking soma at the start of the series, and people didnt like him, we do the same thing in todays society, even if we dont notice it, Brave New World is kinda similar to our own world in different ways. Overall this book really gets you thinking of where you are right now, living in the “perfect society” we are in today, isnt much that different from the one mentioned in the book.

The novel “Brave New World” from Aldous Huxley written in 1930 almost 100 years ago, shows a new and really messed up world. Brave New world tells a really strange story and interesting few on another world. I never read a book about a dystopia so I found the book very fascinating but complicated to read. For me it was also this kind of book that left me thinking for hours. Aldous Huxley made the book really interesting by showing us this new world and I really found myself in a completely different world because of all the new words and complicated words. Although in the beginning I had a few problems in understanding all the concept of this “Brave New World”, it was also a difficult English for me to read and I had to research and reread lot of parts in the book. But in the course of reading the book it all came together. It gave me a lot of scenes that left me thinking, especially the end left me really surprised and thinking for hours. I did not expected such a cruel end and still have lots of questions. For us this “Brave new World” Aldous Huxley describes sound awful and abnormal but for the people living in it, it was the normal world even a beautiful world that no one dared to question. The book also left me question about my “perfect world” and how I would see the future. By the end to say about the Book is that it was all over a really messed up story, it was very interesting to read and to imagine how Huxleys mind works. I did learn new things and enjoyed the Book when I found myself into this “Brave new world”.

There are two most famous dystopian novels known. One is “Brave New World’, which we read in class, and the other is “1984” by George Orwell. Both books have main characters who disagree with the idea and policy of the dystopian government. They both are in society from the far future, where everything is different from now. However, how each writer thinks about what a dystopian society will look like and how people will react to it is different.

In “1984”, society suppresses people with fear and violence. The ones who tried to raise their voices against Big Brother-the leader of the society, ‘double-plus-good person’-are tortured and restricted. Citizens there are more likely to be aware of what is wrong with the current government. Also, through the context that’s about how the main character gets tortured and his complaints removed, Orwell directly shows the book is about dystopia. Readers can easily see the citizens suffering and they will be happier if they are free from Big Brother.

“Brave New World” by Huxley has a different approach to telling the audience this is about dystopia. It almost seems that Huxley is promoting the idea that Brave New World is good. In the class, many students were concerned that Huxley was trying to do that. Citizens in the New World are so happy. They are absolutely satisfied with their jobs. The economy is perfect. They are never concerned or depressed. Sentences they are taught during sleep teaching solve every problem. Furthermore, one gram of soma, a pill that magically works in your brain to make you feel absolute euphoria is there for everyone. Everyone belongs to everyone, so no one cries over lover problems, and children are guaranteed to be raised in trained nurses’ hands. This is somehow eutopia, and overall, this book is very confusing. The readers are not sure if they should criticize or defend the New World from Mr. Savage who is bullying poor gammas by taking their soma away.

The idea of Huxley about the future of society was very different from Orwell’s. Orwell thought violence and restriction were needed to control citizens. He believed that people will raise their voices and they will notice easily if something is taking their freedom away. Huxley thought lesser than that was needed to control citizens. That they will not even realize they lost their freedom as long as they are amused. That they are easily deceived if they get what they want and stay in the position where they seem superior to others.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

(A Quote from Amusing Ourselves to Death, n.d.)

The caste system, soma, and all the other entertainments block people to notice something is wrong with their lives. They are taught to be satisfied and feel superior to the lower castes. Soma and feelies, electronic golf, and promiscuous relationship replace Shakespeare. People don’t need “Othello.”

So what did Huxley try to say through this book? Should we follow the Controller and give up our freedom to take soma and be happy forever? For this question, Huxley clarifies that this book is criticizing the New World in the later chapters.

…Those human maggots swarming round Linda’s bed of death, the endlessly repeated face of his assailants.

…’But how useful!’

(l.195 of Brave New World)

The Controller, in fact, doesn’t care about the wellness of the citizens. He only cares about how “effectively” everything will go. The wellness of the citizens is only taken care of if it’s related to the entire economy. Babies are tortured to hate nature and books. They are happy with countryside sports, but this is not for their own kind, it is to force them to consume transportation. In fact, even this effectiveness is not perfect. Human beings naturally have something that doesn’t work with the Controller’s policy. There are a lot of “errors.” Bernard and Henry Foster are dissatisfied with their jobs. Lenina falls for John and gets obsessed with him, it almost seems like a committed relationship.

At the end of “1984,” the main character gives up the social movement as soon as he gets tortured and is brainwashed. Orwell seemed like he believes in human kinds and the fact they will raise their voices. But in the end, he makes sure that even those cannot survive the violence and will eventually surrender. On the other hand, Huxley’s belief even defends human beings.

John the Savage hangs himself at the very end. He disappears, yet doesn’t get brainwashed and follows the Controller. Some outcasts will be motivated and quote his voice. There still will be “errors,” and they will have an example of how the New World is not for everyone and forced someone to death. It will take a long time for the citizens in the New World to realize something, but John has left something for Lenina and Henry Foster. The movement in “1984” has ended, but the change in “Brave New World” has just started.

He confuses the readers the whole time throughout the book. But the message he is trying to tell us is that despite of how it looks like a eutopia, it can be a trick to deceive you. Just like what he did in the book. Huxley argues that even though we are easily deceived by amusement, there must be errors with the system and it will leave us with something that’s strange. Something strange enough to let us step out of the dystopia.

 

A couple pages into reading this book I knew it was going to be like something I have never read before. As strange things kept making their way into the chapters, I continued to wonder how these certain topics would make sense in on coming pages. It soon would make sense the more I read, but at the same time it is completely ridiculous. Topics jump back and forth, and things that you wouldn’t think are possible, are. Finishing this book it brought me to the idea on how different our society could really be and the different possibilities of dynamics.

To start, the setting Brave New World focuses on the idea of being a futuristic and idealistic society. As the author focused on the book being a dystopia, the setting had many twists that may or not be possible for the future. As the whole story setting is based off the idea of people being created in labs, with thousands of people looking the same, it carries and effects the whole setting of the book. Through chapters, it continues to mention how there are not to be mothers or fathers, and is frowned upon. Anyone who had become a mother or father on accident in the “normal world”, are sent to a small society fenced off from the world. These fenced off society’s, known as savage reservations, there are normal people, people like us today. People in these reservations get sent there due to punishment, or people grow up there and believe that is the proper way to live.

Lastly, criticism played a very strong role towards all characters throughout this book. There were musts, and if you do not participate in those, then you are off to a savage reservation because you would be counted as “different”. There was a continuous amount of drug usage to contain sexual behavior, as well as an every citizen not being able to choose their own life. It was normal to interact with people in sexual games at a very young age, infants are taught to not like certain things, like flowers for example, just because that is what you must do to keep society straight. There were such drugs known as soma, soma is what people would take to feel happy, and to a certain amount taken, they would have the feelies. Soma would have people ignore the society around them and not notice how terrible it really was, they would feel brainwashed in a way to continue living “happy”.

Overall, this novel has given me an idea how no matter what our society looks like, it is never going to be perfect, because it’s impossible. Nothing is perfect, not even humans, there is always going to be someone to be against any choice made. People are going to be doing other things like soma, to distract themselves to that they can’t pay attention to how awful the real world is.

 

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is not like other books or stories. It shows us the history and the prediction of the future that is controlled by new technology and by the government. This book taught me so many things, made me ask myself new questions, and made me doubt if a dystopia as shown in the book would be the perfect place to live or the worst idea ever. It made me feel sometimes shocked about all the things that were happening, as well as intrigued, and at the same time also confused, most of the time I got confused but then I tried to understand I get it, as well sometimes it was easy to imagine the things and the event that were happening in my head.

I know that maybe for some people this society or world would be a great idea and would love to live in a place like this, but for me, it’s not the best idea. First of all, I don’t like the idea of the government controlling us, and telling us what to do, what emotions we can feel, how to act, everything. I’m like in between liking or not liking the idea of not having to worry about getting a job or food, literally you are just worried about being happy and taking soma. I did like all the points and important things the story tells, also how Huxley tells the story, in a way that everything is understood and well explained. The story leaves us with many things to think about, like if technology is good for society and to what point we as humans can go. In the end, we realized that this society is not so different from how we live today. Brave New World talks about some problems and these same problems we can see them in our modern society as well, such as the use of medicine and drugs, woman and gender equality, and the bigger problem in the book which is traditional marriage.

I didn’t think that the book would end that way, I thought about many ways but not this one. John felt that he has betrayed everything that he believes, all the good things that he thought were right are now wrong, he feels disgusted for acting as he acted, forgetting about his personal beliefs, taking soma, participating in bad activities, etc… he even got to the point of feeling disgusted for himself and maybe this is the reason he suicide, this is sad because this also happens in the real world, people end up with their lives for many reasons and some of there reason may include the same as John’s. As the book kept going we didn’t really see sad or depressing emotions, until the end of John’s situation, we could finally see all the emotions that the society had classified as human fragilities.

 

Often, features inside fictional dystopian worlds are criticisms on the conditions of the author’s surroundings. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World was written in the 1930s, making it nearly a century old, and our world has changed vastly since then. When reading this novel, we meet a variety of characters within a society which seems not only intensely different from the one we live in today, but also irrational and unethical. Though when diving deeper into some of the details of Huxley’s fictional world, we notice that there are aspects that aren’t too different from the reality we live in today.

To begin, aspects of inequality and discrimination due to race, tradition/religion, appearance, opinions and gender are still very prominent in the story. Racism and shame towards other traditions and religions is seen when Lenina visits the Savage Reservation. She finds their customs and appearances to be unusual, which she voices in a negative emotion. Lower castes are also discriminated against, not only for their place in society, but also their height (which is mentioned several times throughout the novel). Bernard is a main example of someone being shoved away from society due to different values and opinions, one of them tying to another problem in this world of women being viewed as lesser than men as Bernard is disappointed that Lenina views herself as a “piece of meat”. Each of these criticisms are still seen very commonly in today’s world, and while they are not always displayed to the same extent as in Brave New World, they are issues we continue to face in our society today.

Next, possibly the largest criticism of the world Huxley was living in was the more flamboyant and uncivilized part of society. This includes the use of drugs and ostentatious sexual behaviors, as well as the consumer lifestyle. These aspects can be seen throughout the book, such as in the important role of soma, as well as attending the solidarity services and feelies. The encouragement of sexual activity in younger ages is also a major aspect that we find rather obscene, but the average age that someone is involved in sexual activity is significantly lower today than during Huxley’s years. And while it is not to the same extent described in Brave New World, it is following this critiqued trend created by Huxley. Another element to this is the normalization of seeing multiple people at once. In the 1930s, to even think of such thing was extremely unsophisticated and looked down upon, and while that is still mostly true today, it is far more accepted when compared to the opinions of that time. Lastly, the presence of high consumption is not directly censured, but nevertheless an aspect of this fictional society, Huxley’s society and ours today that he continues to criticize.

So while Brave New World may seem vastly different from the world we live in today, some of its major features that contribute to its dystopian appearance exist in the society that we claim to be immensely better than this fictional one.

Nyah Sharratt – 03/12

Before we started reading this book my brother warned me it was a strange story. After finishing it I understand what he was telling me. This book had many things That were messed up in it. From the time when scientists were conditioning the children to hate flowers and books, to the time when John Savage started whipping himself and a woman. There were many times that this book made me question what I was reading and why I was reading it. Even though this book had many… strange events it also had some interesting things as well. My favourite part in this book was when the three men; Bernard, Helmholtz, and John the savage all were together talking to the controller Mustapha Mond. I liked this part in the book because after questioning why all of these rules were put in place in this society, we finally got some answers. One specific part in this book really stuck to me, when Mond was talking with John and Helmholtz about love stories. John and Helmholtz wanted stories and movies to be more passionate like Othello, but Mond persisted saying:

“Our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel-and you can’t make tragedies without social instability; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; there safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they are blissfully, ignorant of passion and old age; there plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers, to feel strongly about; there so condition that they practically can’t help behaving as they are to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.” (p. 193-194)

After reading this I realized why the world in this book was the way it was, Mond made me realize that even thought this sounds like a horrible place to us from the outside, from the inside it might be better than we think. Even though the citizens don’t get to experience things that give us pleasure like passion and love they do have something that we do not, they never have to worry about anything really, all of their problems have been solved, and they just live their life. After reading thing book, I am questioning what a perfect world would be like; a world with equip ups and downs or a world with no passion and choice.

 

“People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about . . .”

                ~Mustapha Mond, Brave New World

One emotion. Happiness. At all costs. Would you forfeit your human rights, your free will, your creativity if you could feel happy all the time? How far would you go in the pursuit of constant happiness?

What stuck me the most about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is the concept of a society whose main goal is maintaining happiness. They believe happiness equals stability. And the World State takes furious measures to stay happy. Growing babies in hatcheries? Sure! Mass state-sanctioned drug use and recreational sex? Why not! Constant brainwashing propaganda? Definitely! Anything to avoid feeling.

When my grandfather died, I had never felt such extreme sadness in my entire life. I felt it in my whole body. It was horrible. Absolute despair, and pain I thought would never go away. Yet, even in the worst moments of grief, there is no way I would trade any of it away, if it meant not having had that connection with my grandad.

In contrast, citizens in Huxley’s World State don’t know love. Or connection. Or art. They know soma. They know feelies. And they know hypnopaedia. They use tools to avoid grief, jealousy, and sorrow. While their society might be stable, it is dull and artificial.

One emotion. Only happiness. Like painting in only one colour, or composing a song using only one chord, forever. That is definitely not for me. To me, it is the range of highs and lows, of shadows and highlights, and of all the notes in between, that make up a human experience worth living. 

Responding to Huxley’s Brave New World, life in Mustapha Mond’s artificial society “blissfully ignorant of passion”, sounds to me like plodding through a monotonous desensitized existence in a beige version of hell.

Reading the novel Brave New World by Aldus Huxley was… an experience. I didn’t know how to feel about it when I first started reading it, but by the end, I was grateful to have read this strange, confusing, and eye-opening novel. After finishing the last chapter, I reflected on the novel, and I became sad; I realized how similar this Brave New World is to our current world. You wouldn’t think our world has anything in common with this Brave New World, but unfortunately it does.

Keeping up with the latest trends is a huge part of our society. If you don’t have the coolest clothes, newest iPhone and know all the latest slang; it’s hard to be popular or connect with your peers. This was also something I noticed in Brave New World, how the scientists were so eager to mass produce children and move on from the “traditional” ways of reproducing. When I read how they “reproduce”, I was in shock and immediately thought of my opinion; it is unethical. They probably didn’t think of or care about how ethical it was, they were just so excited to use the new, “shiny” technology. Similarly, to how on our social media there are trends that are either unkind or even dangerous.

You would think that in a Brave New World, everyone would be treated equally, there would be gender equality, and equal opportunity for all. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Just like our society, they have social classes/castes. Women were talked about as if they were a prize, and even though the lower casts (Epsilons) were trained to enjoy their jobs such as a garbage man or toilet cleaner, they are still treated as less. I even connected it to how we’ve become almost immune to the fact that there are still people with no food, clean water, and no roof over their heads. It was eye opening and an unfortunate reminder of so.

Lastly, due to the fact that they were all twins and thought to think a certain way, there was no individuality. For example, Bernard, he was different, he was shorter and less attractive than other Alphas. He was made fun of for it too; people even made jokes about how he was poisoned with alcohol as a fetus. Following that passage, I made a connection to our society; due to social media, tv shows and movies, we are taught to act, dress and think a certain way, which also creates no individuality. If we are less attractive, too smart, or slightly overweight, we also get made fun of.

I was saddened by all the similarities our world had to the Brave New World. Of course, we haven’t started mass producing children in factories, who all act and look the same, but we don’t have to; social media is doing that for us. It was shocking to reflect on the similarities but I’m glad I’ve read this novel. It gave me a chance to reflect on what part I play in our society and how I want to change it, for the better.

It’s been quite a ride reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think I can confidently say that I went through the 5 stages of grief while reading this terribly eye-opening novel. I grieved for Bernard, for his feelings of being an outsider just for speaking his truth and being himself, I grieved for John, for losing his mother and being unable to connect with anyone else, both in the Reservation and in the Brave New World, and I grieved for the helpless people in a civilization that may be more accurate to my own than I originally thought.

Stage 1: Denial. I hated this book when I first started reading it. I found this world that Huxley created to be horrifying. How could someone write about a society where children molest each other, where monogamy is not only no longer the social norm but is not even socially accepted, where people take drugs so much they essentially live off of them, where individuals are made in a lab and are so similar that they can barely even be classified as unique anymore, where people have cult orgies, and where no one has a single independent thought?

Stage 2: Anger. How dare Mr. MacKnight make us read such a sickening book! How dare he think that our world today is anything like Huxley’s “utopia”! This book is terrible! They BRAINWASH and TORTURE children! They manufacture SLAVES (Epsilons) to do their dirty work! They restrict science, truth, spirituality, religion, diversity, and independence to create a society run by stupid IDIOTS who can’t help but do as their told; who can’t help but CONSUME to keep civilization running without needing to change or improve anything.

Stage 3: Bargaining. If only I had gone to GNS, I wouldn’t have had to read this book. If only I had learnt about this book sooner, maybe I could’ve convinced Mr. MacKnight to let us read something else. If only I had been better, maybe karma would’ve been kinder on me and wouldn’t have forced me to be in this school, in this English class, reading this book.

Stage 4: Depression. For a while I completely gave up. I stopped taking notes, I stopped participating in class, and I stopped trying. I still read the chapters as they were assigned, but reading wasn’t the same anymore. I was reading the words, but not absorbing them. It’s like a mental wall was blocking my optic nerve, keeping the words from travelling from my eyes to my brain so I could understand them. I just wanted it to be over. Once it was over, I could move on with my life and forget that this book ever even existed.

Stage 5: Acceptance. There are 171,146 words in the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), and yet none of them in no particular order can express how Brave New World in its entirety makes me feel. What I can express, though, is how I felt about its ending. I feel absolutely heartbroken that John’s final days were spent surrounded by people he hated, who laughed, mocked, and made a spectacle out of his suffering. Of course, they meant no harm to him—that’s just how they’re programmed, to laugh at the people from before, who were unhappy, religious, self-disciplined, and independent. That’s just how people are; they’re taught to act and think certain ways to be accepted into society, because if they don’t follow the rules, they’ll be ostracized. Yet, in a society that relies way too heavily on rules and too lightly on acceptance, not being or feeling ostracized is nearly impossible, both in Brave New World and in our society today.

BraveNew World opens In the year 632 AF ; that’s the era after Ford. At the time, Henry Foster was director of the Central London Hatchery. he lead a tour  of the male students to the Hatchery , a biological assembly line where the world´s population is artificially produced and socially conditioned. Henry Foster explained what happened in the fertilization and boiling rooms. After that, he takes the men to the social presentation and most females are mode free steril each fertilized egg produce 8 to 96 buds that becomes identical beings. there are different categories.

Alfa /Beta/ Gemma / Delta / Epsilon

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.”

In Brave New World, a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley technology has advanced so much that people are being made instead of being birthed like how they are in real life. Even though the technology has advanced this far, the students touring the factory are still writing on a notebook with pencils.

yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to under go Bokanovsky’s Process             ‘Bokanovsky’s Process,’ repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little note-books. (p. 3)

I think that they are using note-books instead of some sort of futuristic technological device to take notes because the time when Aldous Huxley was writing the book, note-books were the only thing thought of. nobody at that time even thought about something other than note-books. This stands out to me because of how furturistic everything else is compared to the note-books.

 

In utopias, there exists an imaginary or idealized society that is free from social, economic, and political problems. Each and every individual has the right to be happy, to be treated equally, and to be fulfilled. It can be viewed as a place where poverty, hunger, and violence don’t exist, and people live together harmoniously and in harmony with the environment and with one another. There is a general belief that utopias are unattainable in reality, despite the fact that many works of literature and philosophy have been written about them.

Utopia is an imagined perfect society or community, often pictured in literature or philosophy, where everyone lives in deal conditiones with no poverty, inequality, or others socials problems. It is an ideal or perfect state of society, where all the needs and wants of the citizens  are met, and  everyone lives in harmony and happiness. The concept of utopia has been explored by many thinkers throughout history, and there have been various ideas and visiones of what a utopian society could look like.However, it is generally accepted that a truly perfect society  may be impossible to achieve due to the complexities and imperfections of human nature and society.

In the book “Brave New World” By Aldous Huxley a dystopian novel where everything is supposedly “perfect” with no poverty suicide or anything like that ow they do this is they take this drug called soma which basically makes them happy when they aren’t supposed to and they take this drug when they start feeling any sort of drought throughout the day. At the beginning of the book, we are shown the “Bokanovskys process”

Bokanovskys process repeated the director and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks. One egg, one embryo, one adult – normality. But a bokanovsified egg will bud will proliferate, will divide from eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making  96 human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress (p. 4).

This quote shows the Progress of this perfect world and the crazy population production can get in this world and it will only get crazier as time goes on. Even though they say that this world is perfect it’s not and will never be because something can always be produced faster better stronger etc…  This proves that no matter how hard you try nothing can be truly “perfect.”

In “A Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley they think that monogamy romance is terrible and socially unacceptable. They believe that having multiple relationships without feeling of love and having a family is a better way to live life.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness. Everywhere a focusing of interest, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy. ‘but everyone belongs to everyone else,’ he concluded citing the hypnopaedic proverb. The student nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement  which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic self-evident, utterly disputable. (p. 34)

In this passage it shows that monogamy, the feeling of love and being loved, romance is wrong and that “everyone belongs to everyone else”. He says this to a group of students which are easily influenced with this high figure of a man. He is building a social norm for the next generations to basically dimmish all feelings of romance.

 

Write an “IRJE”-style paragraph based on a passage from Brave New World.

• • Choose any passage from Chapters 1, 2, and 3 that is at least 40 words long.
  • Use the SQCE method: Set up the quotation by explaining the situation that precedes it; then Quote the passage, setting it off as a block quotation; be sure to Cite the page number(s); and then finish your paragraph by Explaining why the passage is significant.
  • Check your first sentence: does it make a clear, specific assertion that is supported by the quoted passage?
  • Publish your paragraph on the class blog. Category: Utopias & Dystopias.

page 35

Im finding Brave New World boring, its not my type of book but its whatever, the book is about a modern society where technology is really important and ideologies are really different from ours. In that place there is a factory where they produce humans, clones, all are the same and divided into different “classes”, Alpha’s, Beta’s, etc. But these clones are taught differently then what you would think, they are taught that having sex with everyone is ok, they are taught that nature isnt good, they are taught that falling in love isnt accepted in their society, and so on. For example, this quote really stuck with me.

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.

Here it’s said that flowers and landscapes and nature itself should be abolished, it isnt ok, and that’s whats taught, that nature isnt ok and they shouldnt like it, I wonder in the end what it will lead to and what the final outcome of this book will be.

« Brave new World » is a book written by Aldous Huxley it shows a really neutral world where marriage and family don’t exist and babies are grown and made in factory’s. In the beginning of the book the director gives students a tour where we learn about the factory and how everything works in this « New World ». Citizens are programmed and dont experience free will or happiness even if there’s no wars, poverty or diseases all humans dont really experience the feeling of real joy.
« A love of nature keeps no factories busy »
I think this quote of the book is significant because it shows that the directors are making people afraid of nature because they can’t profit from it.

Brave new world tells us the story of a civilization where marriage, family, and procreation have been eliminated, and babies are genetically engineered and grown in factories. The story opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in the year 732 a.f ( 632 years after ford) . In the first charapters, the director is giving some students a tour around the place, in which us too are able to learn about this world. The Hatchery conditions each fetus for a particular caste in the World State. Citizens are programmed to be productive and complaisant through a combination of biological manipulation, psychological conditioning, and a drug called soma. In this world, poverty, disease and wars are all gone. But it all prevents humans from achieving meaningful happiness or free will.

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” P.10

I think this passage of the book is significant because it is one of the real introductions we have to this new way of thinking. It leads us to understand how he really thinks this way and what is expected for people to believe.

We are going to talk about a book called “BRAVE NEW WORLD”, written by Aldous Huxley. This book talks about a world in the future that is based on a system that produces artificial human beings, each belonging to one of five castes. Although the theme of this world is a utopia, with time we can realize that this is different.

A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Director.

“What’s the lesson this afternoon?” he asked.

“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,’ she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementery Class Consciousness.”

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots.

Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing.

The reason I think this reference is important is because it reflects that in this society people are more concerned about being entertained by wasting time with their favorite activities than doing practical and useful things for themselves. It is seen how the higher ups use the distraction of useless and empty sex as a method to entertain the new specimens. Since sex in this world is a very important pastime.

Society is something that us in the real world have and so as in a place were they want to have everything under control. Brave new world by Aldous Huxley talks about the dystopia and how can we be a perfect society. Since they are made they al ready have a plan or a role to follow. The higher the role the more value has the person. Has it says on this paragraph.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.” (chapter2)

This quote talks about that the alpha work a lot harder than the beta. This is a clear example on how they are divided into society’s. This shows that the Deltas and Epsilons are lower than the beta. He makes it sound like he is in the middle and he is proud of being a beta.

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, this dystopia is considered to be a utopia. The human population is produced in hatcheries. They are carefully modified, each with a scientific process just right for whatever their role in society may be and which also produces a number of around 96 embryos, all of which are genetically the same. This is the Bokanovsky’s process which the director explains to the students as they tour the hatchery.

On Rack 10 rows of next generation’s chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundredth metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. ‘To improve their sense of balance,’ Mr Foster explained. ‘Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job. (P. 13)

Each batch of humans produced are modified to have the necessary skills and qualities needed for the role they are meant to do when they are created. They come out looking just like one another, and lack the ability to really have an identity even though at the beginning of the book it said the motto was community, identity and stability. Huxley does a fantastic job of showing how important identity is, and how taking that away from someone before they even get a chance to express themselves, can lead to a world very similar to the society of Brave New World.

In the dystopian novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, the setting of the story takes place in a futuristic society; where everything is to be “perfect” – keeping everyone “happy” and eliminating the problems of society such as poverty, the increase in suicide rates, underpopulation and overpopulation. All of these factors are to be controlled and monitored by the government – which controls all of the nations in the world. People are being “manufactured” out of assembly lines, and they take soma, a type of drug to keep themselves happy. At the beginning of the book, the Director of the hatchery explains Bokanovsky’s process, in which many embryos fit into a single egg:

‘Bokenovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability! 

Major instruments of social stability.

Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single Bokanovskified egg. 

‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.’ (p. 5) 

This quote shows the intended purpose of the process of bokanovsky, which is to promote “social stability”. The social stability explained in this book is where everyone is happy with their social position – whether you are a worker at a factory or a general who takes care of the society. They brainwash and educate the epsilons – those who are at a lower social hierarchy into thinking that they are “lucky enough to not to hard work”, and the same is done to the higher positioned people – promoting prejudice against the lower ones. This book shows the brutal reality of a “perfect society” – and it reflects on the society we live in to a certain extent. This further proves that a “perfect society” cannot exist, as nothing can be “perfect.”

 

The book “BRAVE NEW WORLD” by Aldous Huxley is about a future world with a system producing humans artificially, with each of them belonging to one of five castes. Though they call the world utopia, we can find out it’s not like that as we read on. The quotation that I gave below is when the director is explaining the processes of a plant and a human fetus.

Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgement of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat,’ concluded Mr. Foster. Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.

“And that,’ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.’

That is the secret of happiness and virtue. Is that? The sentence gives us time to come to our senses. Something feels off with this society. I wonder if forcing you to accept the destiny you were given is the path to true happiness and virtue. It might be easy to only follow your destiny and do what you were given, but the question is, “ Does it lead people to true utopia?” This makes me consider the definition of it deeper and deeper.

In the book brave new world by Aldous Huxley, the book begins with the Director of Hatcheries giving a tour to some students of the factory and the way it produces the humans and how it sets them up for their roles in that world. The world in the book is called the world state and it is highly advanced in technology and is very futuristic but very different from our world today. Also In the world state men were the only ones in charge and women could not say anything to anyone, unlike the world, we live in today.

“one could see that for all lupus and purple eyes she was uncommonly pretty. Henry! Her smile flashed readily at him—a row of coral teeth. Charming, charming murmured the director, and, giving her two or three little pats, receiving in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself”

When reading this part of the book I noticed how only the men could do anything they wanted as shown when it talks about how he gave her three little pats, this made me reflect on the world we live in today and how if someone did that in my world the consequences would be a savior and they could be charged with sexual harassment and end up in jail.

So far I find Brave New World a very interesting and intriguing book. As much as it is a fiction novel, it is relevant to today’s society. For example, the hookup culture we have nowadays is somewhat like the view on sex in Brave New World.  For example in chapter 3 they say,

Do you mean to tell me you’er still going out with Henry Foster    (P. 33)

But everyone belongs to everyone else (p. 34)

By saying that he was saying it is strange to be committed to someone and not just hook up. The outlook Brave New World has on sex is not identical to our society but very similar.

 

The one thing that specifically stuck out to me was the way they talk about drugs they say,

He dose look glum (p. 45)

Take it insisted Henry Foster take take it (p. 46)

He was looking sad so what did they do to help they offered him drugs. That stuck out to me because in today’s society, when someone is sad they go to a doctor and what do they get to make them feel better pills. Not always do these need the pills, sometimes they just need someone to comfort them. Most of the time they will get drugs whether they need them or not. Overall I am interested to find out more about the society in Brave New World and see how it compares to our world today.