Huxley views commercialised society as a deficiency to human creativity. In the novel, society changes human behaviour so that people will strive to consume goods and services as much as possible. This alteration in turn means that everyone who makes such goods or provides such services will be able to stay employed. Thus, the society's economy will remain stable.
However, such dependence upon commercialism also diminishes any endeavour at original thought. Consumption becomes so vital to the society that all of a person's energy and reason is put into activities of work that consume goods that in turn keep the economy running. This is, of course, important for maintaining the organized and controlled setting of Huxley's dystopia, but it also creates humans who merely do what they have been taught and have no reason to think on their own.
Brave New World mainly describes freedom using the structures that prevent freedom. Bernard experiences these limits most harshly, shown in chapter 6, when Bernard and Lenina have a discussion about freedom. Lenina maintains the view that everyone has a great quantity of freedom - the freedom ‘to have the most wonderful time.’ Soma portrays this type of freedom, as it puts people in a hypnotic state in which they no longer feel as though they should ask questions or defy the orders of society. Bernard insists that this is no freedom at all. Bernard claims that his model of freedom is the freedom to be an individual, set apart from the rest of society. Bernard desires to be free in his ‘own way...not in everybody else's way.’ Huxley argues that certain things in our own society today, works in the same way that drugs like soma work in this dystopia. Soma clouds the reality of the present and replaces them with joyful hallucinations, and is thus a instrument for promoting social stability.
Huxley regularly argues in opposition to the use of advertising exactly for the way that it hypnotized people into desiring and buying products. Such things suppress free thought, which ultimately limits freedom.
Huxley also suggests that human desires can both stabilize and destabilize society, as in the case of sexual activity. In Brave New World, the government encourages all humans to sleep with as many people as often as they can. In previous years, marriage has controlled these impulses.
By eliminating desires such as marriage and encouraging behaviour that society once considered immoral, the leaders of the new world have gotten rid of the characteristic dangers of these sexual urges. However, Huxley also proposes that the freedom of these impulses weakens humanity's creativity. Complete freedom to have pleasure has made each person like that of an infant, incapable of adult thought and creativity. For instance, Bernard wishes to have more control over his desires, but the sight of such control frightens others who have been educated to be free with their impulses.
The society in Brave New World can only survive because it has abolished any leftovers of human relationships and connections. The relationships of father and mother no longer exist because all human beings are born in a scientific lab. The relationship between husband and wife is no longer essential because society rejects marriage, and all men and women learn to portion each other equally.The price of such actions is that humans never can truly experience the emotions of love. However, Both John and Lenina begin to feel these deep emotions during the progression of the novel, but they cannot act on these emotions in a practical way because neither can understand how to have such a relationship in their society and upbringing.
Possible conclusion?
by
olivermcdowall (student)
