Truth and happinesstwo things everybody wants. In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents an interesting view on these two components.

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Qing

Jennifer Qing

Mr. Atchison

English B30

December 20, 2011

Brave New World Research Essay – Truth and Happiness

Truth and happiness—two things everybody wants. In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents an interesting view on these two components. Huxley creates a society where all the citizens are created through cloning, and the World State controls every aspect of their lives to eliminate any obstacle to happiness. In contrast, John knows truth from the savage reservation and suffers unhappiness as a result. In a world where happiness and truth do no coexist, the citizens of the World State are happy with their artificial lives because they do not know what truth is. Although happiness seems ideal, Huxley’s dystopia discusses the consequences of happiness in Brave New World and makes readers realize the importance of truth over happiness.

Brave New World is a dystopia, even though citizens of the society are happy. The World State engineered happiness by “getting rid of everything unpleasant” (Huxley, 238) or anything causing individual instability. This includes love, science and religion, all of which were eliminated through the power of conditioning. People base their morals and beliefs off hypnopaedic phrases such as “history is bunk” (Huxley, 34), “a gramme in time saves nine” (Huxley, 89), and “everybody’s happy nowadays” (Huxley, 91). They learn to “like their unescapable social destiny” (Huxley,16), which is the “the secret of happiness and virtue” (Huxley, 16) according to the Director, and “they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get” (Huxley, 220). However, as a result of their intensive conditioning, people of the World State are incapable of thinking beyond the realm of what they have been conditioned to think, “enslaved by [their] conditioning” (Huxley, 91). Their own beliefs and morals are limited, which is apparent in Lenina’s character, who commonly resorts to her library of hypnopaedic phrases in emotional conversations. The citizens of the World State are only capable of mimicking like infants when it comes to emotions. As Bernard put it, they are “‘adults intellectually and during working hours… infants where feeling and desire are concerned’” (Huxley, 94). They are happy because, like children, they are innocent to the passion and hardships of life. In order to maintain the happiness, the people of the World State strictly think with their minds and not their hearts. They utilize their ego, but they are naïve to the passions of life that have been sacrificed for the sake of happiness. According to the Controller, “ ‘that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art’” (Huxley, 220). The citizens of the World State are like the men in the cave in Plato’s cave allegory. Similar to how in Plato’s cave allegory, “truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato), the citizens of the World State are still happy in their “cave” because their world is the only truth they know.  As a price of their happiness, citizens of the world state are shrewdly conditioned to only use their ego, remaining childishly innocent in regards to their emotions and the true nature of the world.

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In place of passion, citizens of the World State receive instant gratification through scientific creations such as feelies, Violent Passion Surrogate and soma. Soma is a pill that makes the user euphoric—like alcohol without the side effects. The happiness and success of the World State depends heavily on soma because as the Controller says, “‘…If anything should go wrong, there’s soma’” (Huxley, 220). To prevent unhappiness or instability, people rely on soma to provide to escape from any uncomfortable situation rather than deal with their own emotions. The Controller explains, “ ‘there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you ...

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