What Makes A Brave New World?

In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of . . .” The ending of this quote has become twisted through time and the usage of the document. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1932, is becoming a more accurate description of the future than one my wish to admit. The downfall of free will due to deleterious regulations pressed by civilization to maintain stability is drawing nearer as the world enters a downward spiral chasing shallow happiness. One must choose between stability and self-enlightenment, between union and
She notes, “Corporations and their marketing strategies are increasingly global,” McInnes goes on to visit some of the questionnaire advertisements that lure people into the legal world of drugs. “Lonely? Sad? Worried? In grief? Too happy? Do you FEEL?” (McInnes 162). Her own sarcasms are apparent towards the end of this quote as she addresses the folly of human endeavor and their need to, as in the New World, annihilate unwanted stimuli. Instead of learning and advancing, we take to the quick fix in order to meet demands and skip over hard work because who needs that right? “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 longsuffering” (Huxley 237-238). Once something is done, it takes quite a bit of undoing, as McInnes explains later in her article as she writes, “Re-emerging from the deadly fog of psychiatric drugs was a slow process” (McInnes 163). With this information, it burdens me to think that the amount of people in the world with the desire to change, to make a difference, to be the voice of change is quite small and quite silent. In today’s society, the new part of the New World is already
The world will always have war; therefore stability is a statistical impossibility. It is human nature to unintentionally pursue the seven deadly sins as sited by John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost. The seven deadly sins are as follows: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. The human race has eaten off the tree of knowledge in the hopes of Satan’s promise, “your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Milton Book VII). In the New World where man makes men and Henry Ford has taken the place of God, Mankind is dead except in the reservations where the uncivilized savages, naturally born people, reside. According to Leon Kass, a bioethicist with degrees in both biochemistry and medicine, “the nightmare of contentment presented in the novel results from tampering with nature . . . ‘creating and manipulating life in the laboratory is the gateway to a Brave New World, not only in fiction but also in fact’” (Morgan/Shanahan/Welsh 131). Because of “tampering with nature,” natural law is therefore unreliable and holds no ground in debate. Some may think this as good and that it indicates real stability because of the impossible becoming possible through enlightenment and the elimination of natural law. Be that as it may, as stated previously, stability is only a mere illusion presented through pharmaceuticals and the pursuit