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But, as Brave New World points it, conformity is sick.I did, however, feel the book had some weaknesses. I'm not saying this would have been easy to write, especially 80 years ago, but I felt the Savage was the book's main weakness. The pressure to conform is massive. And considering the horrors we are wreaking on our planet and on children, a positive vision needs to be ultra-explicit.
He was not the visionary I would have liked as a foil. Had this book been written this year I would have been blown away by it, but that it was written 80 years makes it all the more shocking. I felt Huxley found it much easier to criticize society and humanity's sickness that to create a positive vision. I also found it profound that this book gave me an opportunity to self-reflect the ways in which I compromise truth in order to follow the herd. Well, I finally read it (bought it used for 48 cents), and wow--it really got me. I don't know much about Aldous Huxley, but he really nailed it with this one. It's so hard to be different from one's peers and to forge a new way. I felt the parts with the Savage were rather tiresome at points, and that his character became dull for me after a certain point.
The positive vision in this book was implicit and rather hidden. I've been hearing people talk about this book for years, and frankly, having not read it, I underestimated it. What affected me most of all while reading this book was absorbing the realization that the dystopia Huxley creates on paper is so incredibly parallel to the world we live in now: a world of comfort-seeking, sex-seeking, medicated, thrill-seeking blindness, where truth takes a profound backseat to following the herd and keeping in line at all costs. He was presented as a foil for the mindless dystopian world of drugs and sex and conformity, but I felt he was also lost in so many ways as well---desperate for romance, hyper-attached to his disturbed, abusive mother in an immature way, and self-abusive.
He also uses soma much less frequently. In a nutshell, he acts on his unhappiness, goes to New Mexico, brings back a savage, makes his boss resign, and lives the high life until John and subsequently society reject him for the corrupt, repulsive fellow he is. He doesn't spend every minute of the day in a group of people, and he doesn't sleep with every woman in town. I cannot think of when I have disliked the overall story and ending of a book more.
But what else does he do. The only ones who live outside the control of the World State are groups of 'savages', living in reservation areas like Mexico- or New Mexico, whatever- and the Falkland Islands. What kind of hero is that.Fahrenheit 451, a much better book with a similar featured government and main character, ends with the main character, Guy Montag, escaping the city he lives in and joining a group of people who have entire books memorized, keeping those books safe until the extremely anti-intellectual government is overthrown, and seeing it attacked and destroyed by foreign aircraft with nuclear weapons. The man was ignorant and probably egotistical in some ways, but few men have ever been so madly obsessed with power and their own ego as to seek to replace God with their own name. It focuses on a discontent man, Bernard Marx, in a world where everyone is content, a man who asks questions and does things that are not socially acceptable, yet in the end, he does nothing.In Brave New World, set in the year 632 After Ford (2540 in our world) almost all of the human population of Earth lives under a system known as the world state, which uses a tightly controlled caste system, predestination for each individual, and brings up children in ways that can only be described as brainwashing. I started to hate this book and the society it contains in a scene early in the book, in which infants are presented with books and flowers, and are given non-lethal but nonetheless very painful doses of electricity when they take a positive interest in them.This book presents us with a world that makes me cringe with horror every time I turn a page. It may not have even been Ford's idea, but he still served as an inspiration to the wrong kind of people.But back to our, um, hero, Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is not as happy with the current system as everyone else. He even goes to a village in New Mexico to see the so-called 'savages' himself, bringing back John the Savage, son of his boss, the Director of Hatcheries, causing him to resign out of shame and humiliation.
Guy Montag, in short, does exactly what Bernard Marx should have done but did not and could not, and the government in Fahrenheit 451 meets the very end that the World State in Brave New World deserved to.But no.The book ends with John the Savage hanging himself after whipping himself and the woman he has become attracted to, and the people of London and myself were briefly united in standing there at the end, wondering just what the point was and why any of it mattered. Before I begin- there are some epically epic spoilers up in this ****, so do not read it without taking due notice of what it contains.Brave New World is a dreary, pessimistic, disappointing book. A drug called soma takes you on a mental vacation, making you happy- why bother fixing your problems when you can just get high.- people are born in hatcheries, mother and father are dirty words, Sigmund Freud is Jesus, and Henry Ford is God.I seriously doubt that Henry Ford had ever intended for the world to look like this. I would not call Bernard Marx a hero- he has some of the makings of a hero in the story, especially in a work of dystopian fiction; he feels out of place, asks questions, and God or, um, Ford forbid, he even *thinks*.
The totalitarianism in BNW is as thorough as that depicted in Orwell's 1984, but of a softer variety. The key to preventing a Brave New World does not lay in halting the progress of science or industry; it lies in prizing the one thing missing from Huxley's nightmare state: civil liberties There is more carrot than stick, but the Brave New World is a hellish nightmere nevertheless. It represents a worldview where social order is based on a sort of biologic caste system- not due to breeding or genetic manipulation (this book predates the discovery of DNA), but due to postnatal treatments designed to dumb people down to the level appropriate for their preordained station in life. But the idea that technology will be the root of our problems is as flawed as looking to technology to save all our problems.
It is hard to know whether Brave New World (BNW) is cautionary, or a piece of predictive programming. It is perhaps one of the most frighting ideas of all time that technology could become a tool of subjugation, pushing the world into a neo-feudal prison instead of elevating us on a pathway to collective self-actualization. Where Orwell employs a paramilitary police force to enforce Big Brother's oppressive rule, Huxley's society secures obedience through drugs, slicker, more corporate-looking propaganda, social controls, and economic incentives. Social problems need to be solved (or averted, I hope) by changing attitudes. Aldous Huxley was the brother of Julian Huxley, a fervant eugenicist and darling of the robberbaron banker Elites.
Naturally, the "Brave New World" has a pyramidal structure, with Elites at the top, and a much broader base of "Deltas" in the slave caste. As technology marches forward, gaining momentum as it goes, one wonders whether some of these developments might be inevitable.
He is one of the higher level individuals but he doesn't fit in. The Savage is completely different from these people, which creates some very interesting scenarios.Brave New World is expertly written. Epsilons are the sewage workers, foundry workers, etc.Brave New World starts by following Bernard who is a high level Alpha-plus. Brave New World is a very fun read that never seems to have a dull moment.
The Savage is from an Indian pueblo in New Mexico. In Brave New World society is being controlled by brainwashing people, drugs (soma) and a form of entertainment called "Feelies" which like a motion picture that provides touch sensations as well as sight and sound. Huxley's prose is exciting and very creative. The castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon (in that order). Yes, there are many great dystopian novels out there but George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World always seem to grab the most attention. People don't have mothers and fathers in this society; everybody is engineered in a lab. Alphas are the highest level - they are world controllers, psychiatrists and the like. He is noticeably small compared to other people in his caste, he seems to be looked down on, and even by those who is below his caste level.
There are some very interesting plot developments, especially towards the latter half of the book when the Savage is brought into the negative-utopian society.Check this book out - I highly recommend it. Brave New World is one of the three biggies in utopian/dystopian literature. There are various castes that people are born into. There are rumors that alcohol was accidentally administered while he was incubated.Later on in the book somebody from outside of the society comes into the picture, he is known as the Savage.
When people are pacified in ways they find enjoyable, few will be aware they are being oppressed, and even fewer would consider revolution. Historically, control by fear has not lasted - such control leads people to feel oppressed in an escapable way and thus leads to revolution. I can't help but compare Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty Four as I read it immediately prior, and by comparison, BNW is a superior book. I realize that they were written in different historical contexts (BNW after WWI and 1984 during Stalin's reign), but I still find BNW's dystopian vision much more compelling.The fundamental difference between the two is that Huxley envisions a world in which people are controlled by their desires whereas Orwell sees people being controlled by fear. The velvet fist of control by desire, however, seems to be happening even now.
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