Bernard Marx – an Alpha plus male, is ostracised because of his inferior looks and his thoughts and ideas about the promiscuous sexual practices considered not only healthy but also mandatory. He does not belong.
One does not find fault with one’s world unless one’s world finds fault with one. Bernard had reason to find fault with the World State because he was ostracised, and therefore, unhappy. When he later had fame and popularity because of John, he forgot all that he had previously found so inadequate about his life.
“Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world, which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognised him as important, the order of things was good.” P.141
Helmholtz’s dilemma is different to Bernard’s. His sense of not belonging in Brave New World is because he feels that he is capable of achieving more than he will ever be permitted to. The World State is a barrier to him achieving his full potential, and escape from it would give him the freedom to pursue something that he has been denied all this life.
Meanwhile, John’s dissatisfaction with the World State, and with the civilised world is in part to do with the fact that he had not been conditioned to accept it. Hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, is an essential part of World State life. If it were not for hypnopaedia, the world would not have been as stable as it was. The countless lessons drummed into the citizen’s brains are the very reason for people believing what they do. In Brave New World, the belief that “repeating something several times does not make it true” is challenged. One is forced to consider the question – what is true? In the World State society at least the answer is clear. What Society deems as truth will be held as truth. John never had the repetitions, or the conditioning. His education had come from a society whose morals were completely different to those practiced in the World State, and because of that, not only did he feel out of place, but he regarded the Brave New World as more or less a living hell. The truth of the World State was not truth to John, but immorality.
The price that has been paid for the comfort and happiness in the World State was the death of science, of art, religion, freedom, and love.
“ ‘ One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr Watson – paying because you happen to be too interested in beauty. I was much too interested in truth; I paid too.’ ” P. 208. This price was not much to pay for some, but for Bernard, John and Helmholtz, it was.
While the rest of society chose to indulge in soma and live unquestionably, they did not. Their’s was the belief that it was truth, science, art, everything else that had been disposed of, and all the elements of life that went hand in with happiness, and it should not be forced on them through the consumption of a drug.
For the citizens of the World State, happiness meant that the truth would always remain obscured, but for John Bernard and Helmholtz, truth was maybe not what brought happiness, but an element of it, and society had denied them happiness.
“ ‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’
“ In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘Your claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’ ” P.219.
The only reason that there seems to be something wrong with the World State was the fact that it did not adhere to our own society’s morals. Yet it is each society’s beliefs that define right, and Brave New World is in every sense just like society of today. One is judged based on the discretion of one’s society. How then, can one deem the World State as wrong, when it is merely following the standards that its society has set?
In this world, perhaps there is no such thing as right or wrong, only human whim.
