The Reality Of A Brave New World

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world where everyone is happy? How great it would be to never have to worry about finding a job? Wouldn't it be nice to know that you are accepted? What if you never had to worry about asking someone out and being turned down?

When you really think about it all these things you might consider them assets for a utopian world. I mean who would not want to be happy with their lives and I really mean truly happy. Everyone would have a permanent job they loved, especially with how the economy is going right now.

Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World depicts a community with all these assets and a few more twists. This book not only portrays a world where everyone, or almost everyone is happy, it also portrays a world filled with sex games, immorality, corruption and perversion. Here the creation of human beings is as basic as the factory production of paperclips. Kids are conditioned to like and dislike certain activities and items. These conditions are set to fit the predetermined life of the people. Babies are taught to be promiscuous and as they grow older monogamy is shamed upon. Females are seductive and males give in to all of them. And by all I mean that a single man will sleep with hundreds of women.

I want to clarify that this book was not indented to be a utopia, in fact, it is truly a dystopia. My point in writing this blog is not to shun this novel but to compare it to the lives we live today.

To begin with, sex games are widely accepted in our society. It might seem ridiculous to some of us that are not in this promiscuous world but to others sex becomes their lives. It becomes not only their true pleasure but also their only escape to the hectic world we live in.

Our lives are not perfect. We definitely do not live in a utopia. Our world here on each in the year 2010 is filled with economic crisis, divorce, domestic violence, theft, murder, and more. All these social problems we face affect all of us in a different way, therefore those who are not as “strong’ as others take sex as their escape. Just look at all the famous people that have recently been discovered as unfaithful. Everyone blames them to be sex-addicts and yes that might be true but do we ever think about what caused them to choose that path?

In Brave New World the people cannot have babies. They cannot become parents. At that time parenthood is something that has been buried in history and something people are not aware of. So why would people in this book be encourage to engage in sex games. They encourage this behavior to eliminate feelings such as loneliness. “Everyone belongs to everyone else” is a quote repeatedly used in the book. Monogamy is becoming extinct in our society today and as ridiculous as it might seem this novel represents how future relationships, if it can even be called that, will be.

Now let’s talk about the self fulfilling prophecies we follow. Some believe that our destiny is set out already while many believe otherwise. I will not get deep into this because destiny is a completely distinct topic. What I do know is that kids tend to grow follow what they have seen or have been told. Also, a child who is reminded constantly how “useless and unworthy” he/she is will not be as successful as a child who is told daily that he/she will grow up to be anything they want. My point is that we are human and consciously or unconsciously we tend to listen to what people say to us. If we have something repeated over and over and over again we tend to end up believing it. That is the tactic that the controllers in the book use to make people believe certain thing.  “Everyone works for everyone else”, “everyone belongs to everyone else” these are some of the quotes repeated over and over to kids so they will believe it when they grow up. These sayings, believe it or not, are what keep the people working and engaging in promiscuous sex.

Perversion, this is a topic that most are afraid to address. Let’s take a moment to compare this topic in the book to what happens in real life. In the novel adults have babies run around naked and “play” with each other. We obviously don’t do that in real life but we do have perverts that make and watch child pornography, we also have sex offenders that abuse from children as young as 6 months of age.

These were just a couple of topics addressed in the book that may actually be foreseeing our down-falling future. And I’m sure these are topics to think about…So you decide. Are we headed towards a degree of corruption where it will no longer be wrong to do these things and instead it will be accepted? Will we one day stoop so low as to accept all these immoralities and forget about all things right?