Friday, March 23, 2012
What has struck me the most interesting about Brave New World is how Aldous Huxley, in creating a Utopian society where people are regulated, does so not through despotic means but through strategical mazing of the human mind (Whether it's reverse psychology or not I'm not one-hundred percent). Endorsing people's natural urges to be sexually active at young ages disintegrates what we today, as a society, look down upon. Where we endorse limited sexual partners, Huxley's Utopia encourages unlimited promiscuity. The act of doing so degenerates love to a meer mockery, freedom an isolated figment of our imagination, and propagates stable efficiency as the metallic road of all truths.
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I don't entirely understand the intent behind having kids aware of their sexuality at such a young age. It seems to cheapen the way they view relationships as a whole. I found it shocking, and a bit disturbing that they regard intimate relations with the motto, "every one belongs to every one else, after all." They're all using each other, it's like they've all been unknowingly casted in the role of 'disposable possessions--use me to your pleasure's (no heart involved) content' and on to the next one, and the next. It's mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteThe morbid part about it is I think even in today's soceity on some level that mentality of 'use me to your pleasure's content' is still very much prevalent. I mean, we can't get through a show or magazine without it being saturated with some promiscuous storylne.
Exactly, the people have fallen to a system of sexual explicity! They know about their ancestry's ideals and practices, but the way they have been conditioned to believe them as sick and demoralizing acts, as evidenced by the D.H.C's negative connotations of them in chapters 1-3.
DeleteWhat is mind boggling to me, personally, is the fact that chapter one opens up with the World State's motto, "Community, Identity, Stability." If over sixteen thousand humans are produced at the same time, how can they each have their own "Identity?" Especially when, one goes through the bringing up as these Alpha, Beta, etc. go through?
ReplyDeleteThe reasoning behind these character's actions are just insignificant. Yet, I think Huxley wrote it that way to ensure his reader wouldn't be on Ford's side. (?)
Jordan I agree with you, the paper I wrote for the first opening chapters of the book was centered around the "Community, Identity, Stability" moto and how it's contradicting statement when put next to the society portrayed in the novel.
ReplyDelete-by: Mario Hernandez
I'm not completely sure that the motto "Community,Identity, Stability" is used as we would today. I think it resonates a sense of letting go of yourself. Find community, merge in one identity and be contained within that identity of community for stability's sake. If we interpret the motto through the eyes of the point of view of the institution upon which it is consecrated, then we can see that it's not about what the individual wants but how the indivdual mind can be obliterated so as to be efficient.
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