Does Huxley Create A Dystopian Society Essay

When one imagines a dystopian society, one may envision a ruthless dictatorship in which the masses are kept in line by fear, shock, and awe. Individuality has been all but completely extirpated. The populace has been completely stripped of all things that make them human: love, sadness, intimacy, art, and ambition are typically outlawed in some form in order to condition the populace into being homogenous bees all contributing a single task to the hive. In Brave New World, however, Huxley creates a dystopia that is an effective antithesis to this concept. Instead of a world in which the populace is quelled by fear, the populace is kept under control through pleasure, while the powers that be still censor things such as art, truth, and emotion;

Huxley chose this model to draw parallels between Brave New World and society itself. The novel is itself a manifestation of what Huxley believes is the future of humanity. Examples of pleasure-based conditioning are ubiquitous throughout the novel: people are encouraged to have constant promiscuous sex, they take hallucinogenic drugs to escape truth, and people are encouraged to think their role in society the most important one. From all of these examples, one common theme can be derived: instant gratification. Huxley utilizes this theme to tether the novel to modern society by making the point that as society’s level of advancement waxes, the human attention span wanes; so too does humanity’s sense for what is important. As humanity gets lazier, it begins to favor comfort over art, the beauty of thought; and above all, freedom of both mind and person. Huxley seeks to warn that if humanity becomes to accustomed to comfort and becomes to lazy, a homogenous society dominated by ignorance is an inevitability. A human race that prioritizes comfort over truth and individuality is doomed to be dominated by something like soma. Mustapha Mond, a character within the novel, directly explains the true purpose of