FREE ESSAY ON BRAVE NEW WORLD

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The Loss of Individuality
The peak of a writer's career should exhibit their most profound works of literature. In
the case of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World is by far his most renowned novel. Aldous
Huxley is a European-born writer who, in the midst of his career, moved to the United
States and settled in California. While in California, he began to have visions aided by
his usage of hallucinatory drugs. His visions were of a utopian society surviving here on
earth. In his literature, Huxley wanted to make this utopian society as much a reality as
possible. "In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid
impossibilities." This quote, written by Aristotle, perfectly describes Huxley's attitude
towards the creation of his imaginary utopia. His only problem was establishing a value
system that would not seem too unattainable. Huxley has two novels that have the theme of
utopia, Brave New World and Island. Brave New World , which was written before Island ,
has ideas that are quite far-fetched, but in Huxley's eyes, still close to reality. 
Huxley's first portrait of utopia involves having a controlled society of people all
being alike. The year is A.F. 632 (After Ford; Ford is the equivalent to God in Brave New
World ) and with the available technology, citizens are mass produced. Island is a
product of the rethinking of Huxley's utopia. The ideas are a lot more real because the
people are just ordinary human beings. Both of these novels have an underlying theme in
common. The stability of Huxley's utopian societies are centered around the loss of
individualism.
Individuals are considered a threat in Huxley's utopian novels. In the novel Island, the
utopian society is on a small island, named Pala. The leader of the utopian society,
Murugan, is an individual apart from the community. His plans are to modernize and charge
the way the people of Pala live. The reason he has thoughts that are different from the
rest of the community is that he was raised outside of Pala. He grew up in Switzerland
and the neighboring island Rendag, both of which have been modernized and corrupted by
the outside world. Therefore, Murugan's mind has been corrupted by his staying in those
two places. "Pala is thus threatened by the outside world," explains critic Frank Magill,
because Murugan is introducing the modern way of life to this small island and it is
damaging the stability of the community. Rendag was once the same as Pala but since it
has ports for ships to embark, it was exposed to the outside world much more quickly.
Pala has no ports so it was safe from the invasions of the Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch and
English, which Pendag fell victim to.
There are five times types of people made in Brave New World. Alphas, Betas, Deltas,
Gamma, and Epsilons. Bernard Marx, the main character of Brave New World is an Alpha.
Alphas are supposed to be the smartest, most well-built, most intellectual, and
well-conditioned of all the five of the groups made. Yet Bernard speaks with
individualistic ideas that are unheard of in this society molded around the loss of being
a unique person. Bernard's friend, Helmholtz Watson is also one who threatens the utopia
of Brave New World. Huxley explains the friendship of the two men: "What the two men
shared was the knowledge that they were individuals." They are the only characters which
openly discuss their personal ideas. Ideas that in a sense are considered sinful in their
society. In the end Bernard and Helmholtz are ejected from society by being shipped off
to some foreign island so that they will finally be free to expose their individualism.
Through mass production of people, individualism is lost. In Brave New World, all of the
people are products of mass production. "Racks upon racks of numbered test tubes.#", [p.
5] is the only way to describe them before their actual birth. They have no family to
give them a background different from anyone else's. They all come from the same green
bottles. Even when they are born, all they are given is a name chosen out of a small
group of common names. In our world, having a name is one of the millions of ways we use
to tell people apart and give them a feature unique to themselves. The frequency of
having the same name with so many other people, takes away from a person's individuality.
Sometimes, "ninety-six identical twins" [p. 7] are produced. Having ninety-six people
looking exactly the same has the same effect as having the same name, but to a much
greater extent. In Island, the babies are born the natural way, but the children do not
have a single set of parents, they have an "unpredestined and voluntary family", meaning
that they are free to roam from family to family. They are urged to pick up the cultures
of every family in the town by and by. Individuality is lost in this because one aspect
of individualism is the influence of family on a person. If everyone has the same
relatives, they are likely to all begin thinking alike. The loss of individualism in
Island is not as extreme as in Brave New World, but it is prevalent.
The ideas that Huxley presents to replace religion in both novels cause loss of
individualism. In Brave New World, as children, the people go through what they call
"hypnopaedic conditioning". This is a process in which a phrase of moral value is
repeated over and over in their sleep until they live by it. This is their form of
religion because this conditioning instills the people's values. They are taught phrases
such as, "...when the individual feels, the community reels" [p. 70]. The individuals are
taught to believe that they community is more important than the individual. One critic
explains, "They are trained to live in total identification with society and to shun all
activities that threaten the stability of the community." A second example of how
"hypnopaedic conditioning" shows loss of individualism is that if a person belongs to
everyone else, then he is not able to make the choice of belonging. Making one's own
choices is part of being an individual. In the novel Island, the people follow a mixture
of religions that contain a lot of eastern philosophy. Their religious books have phrases
such as "I'm a crowd," and "....thou art that, also him." Both of these phrases preach
conformity of people. The more people become alike, the less individuality they have.
The idea of a utopian society in today's world would seem impossible. It would probably
be destroyed just as the island of Pala was because keeping unity of thought amongst
billions of free-thinking people is too far-fetched to consider probable or plausible.
However, a future utopian society as in Brave New World just might be possible. With the
speed of advancing technology, the biological tools needed to mass produce human beings
have been made and experimented on as we speak. Scientists can already clone DNA and make
an artificial person or animal. The novel wasn't written to talk about scientific
advancements. It was written to depict how the scientific advancements would effect the
individual. A utopian society might work in less extremes than in either of the two
books. The only thing in the way, is that everyone in today's world thinks that their
views are the "right way of thinking," and are rarely open to other viewpoints, at least
not to the point of being willing to have their "being" dictated by someone else.