Honors Novel #1

A world without souls is not a world at all. This sentiment is one that many people agree with and strive to avoid in our coming age of convenience. Yet, there are those who are quite happy with the thought of devolving into completely soulless beings, living simply for no other reason than to live. These people do absolutely nothing. They feed off of society, parasites who expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. Freeloaders who simply consume consume consume without ever repaying their massive debts to those of the working world. This description of lazy, pleasure-seeking individuals is a description of the World State in a nutshell.

Aldous Huxley gives us a terrible glimpse into a future that may be nothing more than what I have just described. In his novel, Brave New World, the humans that inhabit Earth in the time after their “God”, Ford, they are bred to consume, to seek superficial fulfillment and to discriminate more harshly than ever once experienced in reality. However, as our society gets bigger and bigger and the emphasis is placed more and more on making oneself feel good, Huxley’s grim depiction of the future doesn’t seem too far off.

Many parallels can be drawn between the characters of Huxley’s World State and the people of today’s Earth. In the first chapter, the novel depicts the entire process of “decantation”, which is the new process that has replaced birthing and is essentially the creation of humans from scratch. The created humans are “conditioned” to like certain things and are even divided into five castes that set in stone the way their futures will play out. These humans are trained since their fetal days to remain unquestioning of their caste, and are expected to simply uncaringly consume. While Earth humans of today aren’t decanted, and aren’t required by law to use up every resource provided for them, they are certainly pressured into it by television ads and the government.

Many American citizens are leaning towards the new, more comfortable country that is slowly coming to fruition. Everywhere you look there’s something out there to increase the amount of comfort in your life. Be it a chair that moves for you so that your precious legs don’t get (god forbid) exercised, or a really nice car that allows you to get from point A to point B with a twentieth of the effort it takes to walk, comfort is invading every aspect of the American culture. This idea is taken to new extremes in Brave New World. In the novel, World State citizens are required to take part in the comfort of the new era, and even participate in drug use to facilitate it.

Huxley uses a lot of satire to get his point across. Obviously, it is incredibly unlikely that the government would provide drugs for its inhabitants to use on a regular basis, but the point Huxley makes is that if we continue down this path of follower thinking and never branch out from the crowd, the whole world could turn into a homogenized mass of flesh—a homogenized mass that barely even constitutes a country (or planet as the case may be). This novel is the embodiment of what every nation should strive not to be, but strikingly resembles what the world is becoming. Aldous Huxley paints a grotesque and amazing picture in his novel—one that certainly won’t leave my mind for a while.