Brave New World: A "Negative Utopia"
Brave New Word (1931) was written in a time in which 21st century was imagined as a strange distant world where people would commute to work by flying vehicles, food would come in pills and human beings would live surrounded by aliens. Inspired by those believes, Huxley pictured a world in which extraordinary, science fiction extremes took place. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia” inspired by H. G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel. Now, almost a century after its first edition, it can be affirmed that the new world he described is not as new or original as he pretended it to be. As established in the epigraph, "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?" Although the novel takes place 500 years from now, several of his predictions have already come true in a very similar fashion while others will undoubtedly occur.
The Loss of Happiness
One of the main concepts the book focuses on is happiness. In the book, it can be realized how much universal happiness is worth. It is suggested that in order to avoid suffering in life, people would have to sacrifice the most salient characteristics of human race: "motherhood," "home," "family," "freedom," and even "love": "An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world." As far as motherhood is concerned, nowadays, a great number of women prefer personal growth to procreating since they consider children a burden. Descendants are believed to be obstacles for building a career, meeting friends or enjoying life. If developed countries birth rates are analyzed, there will be no doubts that rates have fallen significantly during this century. Those couples who decide to procreate have only one child while others do not have any. Furthermore, the number of marriages celebrated is also declining year after year. Compromise is seen as a threaten to freedom, personal assets or personal growth. Thus, sex has turned out to be as described in the novel: "You have sex with any partner you want, who wants you- and sooner or later every partner will want you." Sex and promiscuity, both in the real world and in this utopian novel, are a primary source of happiness aimed at feeling satisfaction. People seek a quiet personal life, without engagements and financial loses but without thinking about the price to be paid. Individuals have become lonely souls incapable of sharing their life and success with others.
A Dictatorial Society
In the society Huxley created, as from the moment of conception, every aspect of life is determined by the state. It is a dictatorial society stratified by genetically predestined castes. Its inhabitants are laboratory-grown clones, bottled and standardized. Once born, they receive different condition processes. Babies from the lower orders are traumatized with electric shocks and loud noises. They begin to hear those noises as soon as they touch books which are placed in front of them. The aim of this therapy is to condition them against liking books. These brain-damaged people - namely, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons - are granted drudgeries while smart Alphas make up the highest caste. As regards this feature, they pretend to be an advanced and developed society when they are adopting the same system used in the Far East hundreds of years ago. It seems that regardless of how innovative societies may seem, they always stick to old-fashioned customs and are reluctant to abandon them.
The Pursuit of Synthetic Happiness
As far as happiness is concerned, it derives from the consumption of mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf, promiscuous sex and most famously of all, a pleasure-drug called Soma. Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "vacations", and was developed expressly for this purpose. Brave-new-wolders assure that his drug is better than promiscuous sex. Whenever they experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions they do not hesitate to take this pill which provides mindless, inauthentic happiness. Prozac and other similar drugs, known as "pills for happiness", appeared in the nineties and their production boomed since then: 20% of the US population admit that they frequently take them although they are not depressed. These pills are said to create self-confidence and patients feel more secure and happier.
The Suppression of Individuality
In such world people live there is not depth of feeling and no artistic creativity. Fortunately, the world we live in still resists to such loses. Despite technology domination, schools and other institutions continue encouraging students to learn disciplines in which they can develop artistic characteristics and develop a taste for some particular activities. In the book, individuality is suppressed. This suppression lies buried behind a conditioned, synthetic happiness. Inspired by Brave New World, Ayn Rand, author of Anthem (1937), illustrates society’s introduction to artificial happiness early in life. In the novel, the Council of Vocations assigns the protagonist and prophet Equality 7-2521 a profession, which he must carry through the remainder of his life to maintain personal order, in other worlds, social stability. In both novels, people are conditioned since they are born. In Brave New World, they are happy to know that in their world there is not poverty or violence, nobody gets old or fat and death is natural and pleasant. Whereas they are deceived and brainwashed by those controlling this made-up state, they are made to believe that they inhabit the best world that could ever have existed. Actually, they know nothing about the past, they are not free enough to choose what they want to do or read, and their feelings are suppressed from all aspects of their lives.
A Fatal Outcome
To conclude, nobody can experience real happiness if it is a narcotic what raises quite an impenetrable wall between the actual universe and our minds. A world in which all aspects of life are controlled since the early stages of life until death can only lead to frustrated, depressed, dependent individuals. Such extreme control can only deal to a fatal outcome. Let’s pray for these extreme utopias not to come true soon.
REFERENCES
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Brothers, 1932. Print.
Santino, Charles, Joe Staton, and Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand's Anthem: The Graphic Novel. New York, N.Y: New American Library, 2011. Print.
