In Brave New
World, the
people are utterly happy. They have been conditioned
since before birth to love their jobs and their lives. They take soma to relieve any tension or emotional
distress. Furthermore, the people in Huxley's world are completely
ignorant of all the knowledge they could obtain. Mustapha Mond, the World
Controller, told John, the Savage, that people had no use for knowledge as it
only facilitates the destabilization of society. He stated that the
pursuit of knowledge only leads to unhappiness because it can cause anxiety,
confusion, and distress. As a result, literature, science, history, philosophy,
religion, and the arts must all be controlled so as to maintain social
stability. We may view this suppression of knowledge as asinine; however,
most of the people in Huxley's world are in a state of bliss, with the
exception of those few outsiders, like Marx and Helmholtz. Most are happy
with their current lives, ignorant of the vast amounts of knowledge that they
could obtain and learn from.
What are your thoughts? Do you believe that ignorance has served to
benefit the people of this brave, new world by keeping them happy, or has it
only harmed them by keeping them from learning and discovering new things? Both?
How does ignorance affect our society
today? For example, aren’t many people unaware of the
negative effects of technology?
Ignorance can both benefit and harm the citizens in Brave New World. It benefits them because they don’t have to worry about ever having problems in their world. They are conditioned to be pleased with their lives, and the use of soma keeps them from any kind of unhappiness. To us, the restraint of knowledge seems absurd and harmful because we were raised in a society where we had access to it all, but do the citizens of the World State need to know, or even care, about the information being kept from them? All of the knowledge being kept from them is unnecessary in their perfect world. Ignorance is only harmful to the few citizens who are considered outsiders, but even they are later sent to an island where they can live as they wish. I think that if the citizens were to gain access to the knowledge, it would only overwhelm them. In a world where the citizens are kept from the truth, I believe that their ignorance benefits them more than harms.
ReplyDeleteIn our society ignorance does not benefit us. We have access to the knowledge, but like you said we are still unaware of things, such as the negative effects of technology. Technology is becoming more and more advanced everyday, and it is such a big part of our lives that not many people know how to live without it. We are too busy enjoying the positive effects of technology to even recognize some of the negative ones, and this could harm us.
Ignorance in this case has benefited the citizens in Brave New World simply because they do not have to worry about anything outside of their personal lives. Its not so much as ignorance as it is the leaders of the society controlling the minds of every person. Ignorance has not harmed the society as of yet because there have not been many people who have gained knowledge and proved that with it they have a better life. If anything, the gain of knowledge has proven to the ignorant people that they should continue with their lives as normal because with knowledge comes problems. This causes myself to believe that this is a weak society because a majority of the citizens are to weak to come face to face with the problems that surround them and instead decide to find the easy way out, which in this novel is soma.
ReplyDeleteIgnorance in our own society changes through out our own lives. As a child ignorance is perceived as a good thing. The protection of innocence is even raised in our moral standards as parents when dealing with their own children. As in any society, getting older also means the lose of innocence. Especially in this day of age with technology at our finger tips wherever we go, there are many websites that challenge the very things that our parents try to protect us from as children. Not very many people understand the full potential technology that we have today, but as we grow to fully understand it we will see the negative effects that it will bring. For every kid using technology for educational purposes, there is just as many people using it for destruction, and this raises the question, Is there any way to control the spread of technology?
In Brave New World ignorance is bliss. The entire civilized population has been conditioned to live contently with what they were born/decanted with. They have no need of anything other than what they are given from the government. From our perspective we see that they are totally ignorant of even the smallest things outside of their lives.
ReplyDeleteThe novel (Brave New World) contains many profound elements on happiness and ignorance and we in our society can believe that ignorance is bliss. We see that in Brave New World that the people have no need of knowledge. They have no need of it in their daily lives and if they were to pursue knowledge then they would have to struggle to find it. Even in our society we desire to be happy but we cannot always chose to be ignorant. Here's an example. If we, as students, chose not to work on a English project then we should all be happy. Aren't we choosing to do what we want to do. However this isn't always true, we usually become anxious or distressed about the approaching due date. (Most of us) But suppose that we all didn't know that our project was due. Then the time we spent idly doing what we chose to do probably would have been more cheerful and happy. This experiment, has been done, and proves that our ignorance of what we don't know usually produces happiness because we aren't anxious of what to expect.
Since we know that bliss is ignorance isn't the better question to ask can bliss be ignorance? Can we be truly happy like the society in Brave New World, without ignorance. Isn't knowledge power? But how is it power if it can't even keep us happy. If the people in Brave New World experience carefree happiness in what they don't know, then is it possible in our world to find that same carefree happiness in what we don know? Can we have the hope to have more joy in something we do know over people who have no clue at all? Deep down we all know that ignorance is bliss but can we say that knowledge has enough power to make us happy or does ignorance win in the end?
Ignorance in Brave New World can be both blissful and non-beneficial in the sense that it would negatively affect the society. The society's civilization is conditioned to have a programmed mindset to think and act a certain way, thus the citizens have no desires, interests worth pursuing, or changes the government should make to better the society. Ignorance in Brave New World bliss because it shelters the people of the society from the dangers of reality and it prevents them from pursuing their desires, thus maintaining the society's stability.
DeleteLike Joe mentioned, the society in Brave New World works to the people's advantage because since they do not need to pursue any desires or knowledge, they do not need to deal with the struggles of failure. In our modern society, we cannot live a life without pursuing our desires, thus we cannot live lives in denial. Our society can experience bliss through the feeling of not being anxious of certain outcomes.
Aside from ignorance being blissful, it can be a disadvantage. In our modern society, ignorance puts people in the state of denial because they avoid the truth, which is usually unappealing. Without facing reality, people cannot know what their faults are, thus cannot better themselves by fixing those mistakes.