Today we live in a world full of options; at least this much can be said for those living in the modern American society. This being said, I had a difficult time imagining the living conditions set up in Brave New World, where people are hopelessly locked into a life in which they have no options. Although the people are able to live their lives without fear of physical imprisonment, their entire lives are in fact a prison. From their creation, the people of this society are set on a permanent track from which there is no escape, as they are placed into a predetermined caste, and then genetically altered to perform an occupation which again has already been chosen for them.
My first impression was that people must be desperate to escape this terribly dystopia. I thought that it was impossible for a society to exist in which the people do not enjoy having freedom. As I read on, I began to question my first impression. There are numerous cases in our society where someone makes poor life choices and thus suffers a difficult and tedious life; whereas, in Huxley’s society, this would not happen. Everybody would be happy with their lives, whether they had options or not. Was this trade off of hapiness for freedom possibly the better? I began to wonder if it was possible that one day our society would end up as Huxley had predicted.
We are given the right to the pursuit of happiness. In our pursuit, will a future generation of Americans, as a nation born from the ideas of freedom and democracy, give up our freedom for something more convenient?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIf I was asked this question many years ago, I probably would have said that most of the world would rather choose freedom, free thinking, and pursuit of happiness rather than a ready-made life for them. However, as I began to learn and see more of the world, I began to doubt myself. If the current generation is already suffering so much from economic recessions, environmental issues, over-population in developing countries, and huge population declines in places such as Japan or Russia, then future generations will face these situations worse than us when looking at how it only seems to be going downhill. Due to all these current and predicted events, people might get desperate enough for a Utopian world that Huxley portrayed rather than knowing the feeling of pain and suffering. While reading Brave New World, I wondered that if I were a peasant living in a third world country and barely making a living, I would gladly give up the ideas of freedom and democracy for a world that would feel perfect to me. The feelings of a normal human would not be prevalent while living in a Utopian world, and I would not realize that I was being just like a robot. This idea convinced me when I remembered my trip to a few Bangladeshi villages and seeing their worn-out faces and attire. Though not everyone in the world is currently living in such a lowly-state, there still is a significant number of them, especially when so many of the countries with huge populations also have large amounts of people with peasant-like lifestyles, such as many rural Chinese and Indian people.
ReplyDelete